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She was laughing, then. Cackling. “It was, wasn’t it?”
    Magda sputtered like a car that had run out of gas. Her mind had gone blank. There wasn’t one word in it for her mouth to serve up.
    “Oh, Magda,” Macy said, still chuckling. “Well, I actually should get going. You take care.”
    After a spell, the dial tone jolted Magda from the trance of staring at the sparkling white tile under her feet. She was surprised to find the picture of two nameless, smiling babies still clutched tight against her breast.
    Upstairs, in her sewing room, Magda surveyed the shelf that ran along three walls and held framed pictures of every shape and size that had only two common threads: each was of a baby Magda had never met and would never know, and each had been left behind. Discarded. Unwanted.
    She placed the picture of the two smiling babies she had bought that afternoon at the estate sale between one of an African-American toddler with wispy pigtails in her curly hair secured by purple bows, and another black-and-white photo from the early 1900s of a wide-eyed, wide-smiling androgynous baby in a lacy smock and posed on a chair. Jack had once called the collection of photographs “creepy,” so Magda tended to keep the door to her sewing room closed. But it comforted her to see them, to sit surrounded by them as she worked to the steady hum of her sewing machine. It gave her a sense of pride and satisfaction to give them each a place of honor. Some of the babies in the pictures had long ago passed on. Others might still be very much alive. Regardless, there in Magda Allen’s little sewing room, they would have a place. They would be remembered.
     
    Magda stared at the cluster of moles on Jack’s back, illuminated by a faint light that filtered in from the street lamps. A small spattering just under his right shoulder blade looked, to her, like the constellation of Ursa Major. She had taken an astronomy course a few years back at the college, just for fun—something to take up a little free time. It turned out to be anything but fun. All the math and formulas and scientific figuring were way more than she had bargained for, but she stuck it out because she would have received only a seventy percent refund by the time she was in over her head. In the end, though, the only thing she took away from the course was the odd ability to pick out the Ursas—and only the Ursas—from a canopy of stars. The Dippers, Big and Little, Orion’s Belt—all the easy ones were lost on her.
    Jack’s mini Ursa comforted her, though. It made her feel secure. She knew that if he were ever burned beyond recognition or maimed, and she had to identify his body, they wouldn’t even need to match his dental records. “Just flip him over,” she would tell the coroner, and she’d look for the unique little cluster of brown dots on his upper midback, a little right of center. Her knowledge of them was intimacy that went beyond sex or the twining of psyches. It was primitive, basic, true. The fact that she knew his back so well meant that she had spent years studying Jack as he slept, always turned away from her.
    Magda had slowly learned that Jack’s feelings toward her had absolutely nothing to do with his sleeping position, and everything to do with the simple, thoughtful things he did: buying Weidner Center tickets when she had mentioned only in passing a show she wanted to see, even though he would rather sit through an entire evening of infomercials; coming home after a long day at work and mowing the lawn in the growing dark because he knew they were having guests that weekend and Magda wanted things to look nice for them; or making her favorite dinner—rib eye with butter-soaked mushrooms and twice-baked potatoes—at even the inkling of a bad day, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all.
    He was a good husband. Great, even. Definitely the best husband out of any of their friends. He had never stayed out all night, had never been a