Free Younger by Pamela Redmond Satran

closet.”
    â€œRight. But I cleared it out and ran a cord under the door so you could have a little light.”
    For Maggie, this was huge , not only inviting me to move in with her, but making me my very own space. Once she’d fought her way out of her overcrowded childhood home, she’d never seemed willing to let anyone invade her hard-won privacy. But now she seemed to be welcoming me in. I just had to be sure she was doing it with a full heart.
    â€œMaggie,” I said, sitting on the bed and bouncing a little. “Are you sure you really want me here? I’m afraid I’m going to cramp your style.”
    â€œI want you,” she said firmly. “Plus now that you’re in the red tent, it should be easier to stay out of each other’s way at night. I’m really on a roll with this new work.”
    â€œYou still haven’t told me what’s with the concrete,” I said. The block she’d been working on when I came in wasn’t really a block yet, just a basketball-sized lump that she would add on to until it was the size of a washing machine.
    â€œI’m experimenting,” she said.
    â€œWith what?” I insisted.
    She let out a big sigh and looked toward the roof of the tent. “Cow hearts,” she said finally.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œI was afraid you’d be grossed out. The idea is to encase a cow heart in concrete, and then to build this block around it, which of course just looks like a block, but contains this secret—this heart, literally. You know, like Chopin’s heart is entombed in that pillar in Warsaw.”
    â€œI didn’t know that.”
    â€œOf course, Chopin’s heart isn’t secret,” Maggie went on, caught up now in talking about her art. “But the notion here is that my concrete blocks will emanate this power. You might not know what it’s from, but that organic matter hidden inside will give the block this mysterious aura of life.”
    I must have looked as clueless as I felt, because Maggie finally looked at me and said, “It’s about pregnancy. About how a woman can have a new life growing invisibly inside her, and how that will change her ineffably.”
    I was the English major, so I wasn’t going to admit I wasn’t totally sure what ineffably meant. But suddenly I thought Maggie might be talking about herself.
    â€œAre you telling me,” I said, my heart starting to beat faster, “that you—”
    â€œNo no,” she said, her face turning even redder than it already looked thanks to the light shining through the fabric of the tent. “No no no no no no no. But that reminds me of something I need you to do for me. I’m going for my first insemination this week, and I need you to be my partner.”
    â€œYou mean you told your doctor,” I said, “that I was your—”
    â€œNo,” she said. “No no no. It’s just that my doctor believes insemination has a better chance of taking if you have a loved one with you to, like, commune with in a soothing way afterward. And right now, you’re the closest thing I have to a loved one.”
    â€œOh,” I said, picturing us sipping champagne and laughing—gently, of course—in a dimly lit examining room. “Okay, sure. When is it?”
    â€œTen on Tuesday morning.”
    â€œTuesday morning! That’s my second day at work. Teri Jordan wouldn’t let me take off if it was my own insemination. Can’t we do it in the evening? Or at lunch hour, even?”
    â€œI don’t schedule it, my body does,” Maggie said. “That’s what my doctor says. It’s got to be the morning.”
    â€œOh, Maggie,” I said, taking her hand in my sweaty one. The mere idea of telling Teri Jordan I needed a morning off summoned a vision of her looming over me, wielding a whip. Or more likely, coolly firing me as she had done to so many before.