Free I'm So Happy for You by Lucinda Rosenfeld Page B

her a husband. It gave her too much power; it made Wendy feel indebted.…
    “Daphne Uberoff.” It was Jonathan, calling from the back of the cab.
    “Well, I better run.” Daphne threw her arms around Wendy. “Thank you so much for organizing this. It was
beyond
great to see you guys.”
    “It
was
great,” said Wendy.
    “I’ll call you tomorrow. Mwuh.” Daphne blew a kiss in Wendy and Adam’s general direction. Then she, too, disappeared into
     the cab.
    As Daphne and Jonathan’s taxi sped off, Adam turned to Wendy, and said, “It’s official. He’s the worst person on earth.”
    “What about that serial killer guy, Jeffrey Dahmer?” Wendy said, laughing, as they crossed Lafayette.
    “He’s dead,” said Adam.
    “He is?” said Wendy.
    “He got bludgeoned in the men’s room, like, his first day in jail.”
    “Bummer…”
    They decided to walk home. Or, really, Wendy made the decision for them. The dinner had cost more than she’d anticipated,
     and a car service home was likely to add another ten or fifteen bucks to the evening’s bill. Plus, it was a beautiful, crisp
     autumn night, the kind of night that, as a child, Wendy had associated with the knowledge that the holidays were all fast
     approaching, each—in theory, at least—with its own storehouse of treats. (In practice, holidays at Wendy’s mother’s apartment
     on the Upper West Side had mostly been dreary potluck affairs populated by a random assortment of neighbors, cat-sitters,
     and visiting professors at Lehman College in the Bronx, where Judy Murman taught in the women’s studies program.)
    “Anyway, serial killers don’t count,” Adam went on.
    “Bin Laden?” suggested Wendy.
    “I guess you have to give Sonnenberg credit for not incinerating thousands of innocent people in an office tower. Still, could
     you believe that line about the Palestinians? What an A-hole.”
    “At least he’s not married, like Mitchell.”
    “He will be soon.”
    Wendy gasped. “Oh, god, you don’t think—”
    “I think indeed,” said Adam as they headed east on South Portland. “The guy isn’t exactly a bohemian type. And he’s probably
     getting close to forty.”
    “I think he’s thirty-seven.”
    “Well, then, he’s probably anxious to populate his own land—you know, raise some nice Zionist children to populate Israel
     before those nomadic Arabs multiply the place into extinction.”
    “Stop, you’re hurting me!” Wendy covered her ears. But her discomfort had found a new source: Adam himself. She couldn’t help
     but wonder why her husband, essentially the same age as Jonathan, wasn’t more anxious about repopulating his own land. At
     the beginning of the year, he’d finally agreed to go along with her plan to get pregnant—as far as Wendy could tell, only
     because she’d drilled into him the idea that time was running out. (Maybe it already had.)
    Wendy spent the rest of the walk home pretending not to be upset. “What do you mean?” she’d say when Adam asked her why she’d
     fallen silent.
    Forty minutes later, they turned onto Thirteenth Street in Park Slope. Exhausted, Wendy broke her rule about makeup removal
     and collapsed into bed. Shortly afterward, Adam joined her under the covers. She was just drifting off to sleep at twelve
     twenty, when the phone rang.
    Her first thought was Mitchell Kroker. He still wasn’t committing. He was never going to commit. Was Daphne ever going to
     move on? Returning to full consciousness, Wendy recalled that Mitch was now history and that Daphne was happily paired with
     Jonathan. So why was she calling so late? Had they already broken up? It seemed unlikely. Just an hour or two earlier, they’d
     been eating off each other’s forks.
    This time, the ringing seemed to be coming from Adam’s dresser. Wendy stumbled out of bed and thrust her hand in the direction
     of the receiver. Adam was snoring lightly. He could sleep through anything.…
    It was Adam’s mother,