Free The Birthdays by Heidi Pitlor

undercooked.”
    “You’re serious.”
    “I am.” She smiled.
    “You know I wouldn’t send anything back at a sultan’s palace. I promise.”
    “I know,” she said, but he wondered whether she did know this. And he wondered whether, in fact, he wouldn’t.
    A traffic jam appeared in the distance and soon they were surrounded by cars. “Shit,” he said. “If we miss this ferry, the next one isn’t for hours.”
    They slowed to a halt. She drew in a breath and pushed it out of her chest with force. “We’ll make it,” she said absently.
    Daniel fanned out his hands on his lap and glanced down at his ragged fingernails—he’d chewed his thumbnails to the quick. He looked ahead at the cars beginning to edge forward, then stop.
    “I miss sex,” he said. “You know, the way it used to be.”
    She nodded once.
    “I miss just jumping into bed with you and pulling off your shirt. I miss popping off your bra, that little tug of the clasp and then the release of your chest into my hands. There aren’t many things as great in a guy’s life.”
    “You can still do that.”
    “It’s not the same—there’s this closed door in my head now. Nothing can be spontaneous. Nothing feels exactly right anymore.”
    “That lady is on top of me,” Brenda said, glancing in the rearview mirror. “She’s going to hit me.”
    “I miss feeling the blood in my legs. Feeling horny in my feet. Did you know you could get turned on in your toes? Sometimes I actually used to feel this tingle down there when I took off your bra.”
    “Where do you want me to go?” she yelled at the rearview mirror. “You want me to sprout wings and fly?”
    Daniel turned around.
    “Don’t look,” she said.
    He saw a tiny person, barely visible above the steering wheel of a broad sedan. She could have been a teenager, possibly not even old enough to be driving. The girl looked at him with something he couldn’t quite place—anger? He shrugged at her apologetically.
    “What are you doing?” Brenda said.
    “Nothing.”
    “You’re commiserating with her.”
    “I’m not.” He turned back around.
    “You were. You just shrugged.”
    “She’s not going to hit you. For Christ’s sake, love, we’re stopped.”
    The traffic edged forward and halted again.
    “She is crawling right on top of me. Right. Up. My. Butt.”
    “Just ignore her,” he snapped.
    Brenda inched forward and stopped again. Daniel kept his focus on the back of the car in front of them, a beat-up Chevy with a license plate that read 349 BIG . He forced himself not to turn around again for the duration of the drive.
    His turned his thoughts to the baby, and he began to wonder whether it would resemble Brenda. Maybe it would lookcompletely unlike her, strange and unrecognizable. And what if it didn’t take to Daniel? It already seemed to be sensing he wasn’t its real father. Maybe it would recognize those non-father hands when it was out of the womb.
    At her insistence, they had attended a workshop for parents of artificially conceived babies. In an enormous room lit by a ceiling of fluorescent bulbs, the couple seated beside them clasped each other’s hands so tightly their knuckles went yellow. Another man laughed nervously at everything the workshop leader said. Ron, a bald, middle-aged psychotherapist wearing a green turtleneck, spoke in a monotone of readying one’s inner and outer houses for a new member of the family, finding oneself in one’s child, informing the child of its origins when the time came.
    Daniel had raised his hand and asked when, usually, did a child become aware that it had come from “artificial means”?
    Ron cocked his head and said, “It varies. A child might begin questioning anytime from when she’s four years old to eight or nine. And of course in different ways later on.” He stopped and adjusted the pen behind his ear, clearly taking note of the wheelchair and trying to think of a tactful way to adjust his answer.
    “Did you