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Mother. I'm only a little bit pregnant’?”
    I gave a short laugh. “Yes, I remember it. So what?”
    “Well,” Ruby went on, “that's the way it is with me.”
    It took me a half second to catch on, and for another brief moment there was shock. But that only lasted another second, and then I was on my knees in front of her. It was a surprising reaction on my part. We'd quarreled over this once. I was dead set against having children. I hated families. I'd been miserable in one for a good part of my life. It had been a family of bickering and poverty and no father to speak of, and I had made it clear to Ruby that I would never have a family of my own.
    But in this moment all that had vanished, and I was on my knees in front of her and holding her hands and telling her how wonderful it was.
    She was not sure about me, though. She looked at me anxiously and said, “Are you sure you don't mind?”
    “No, of course not,” I said. “This is great, really great. I do mean it.”
    I did, without any doubt. And there was something else that had happened once to contradict my feelings about families. It was when I was ten years old. Until then I had been the youngest, the baby in the family. Then I woke up one morning to hear a baby crying in the next room, where my parents slept. My two brothers, who shared the bed with me, woke up too, and they laughed when I asked where the baby had come from.
    “He doesn't know anything yet,” Saul had sneered.
    “He'll find out one day,” Joe had added.
    Of course I hadn't known. I hadn't noticed my mother getting larger and larger, as they had, knowing what it meant. I went into her bedroom later that day and saw her lying there with the baby at her side, and she motioned to me and said, “Come and see your little brother.”
    When I looked at the little wrinkled face wrapped in blankets beside her, I'd felt an overwhelming happiness that blotted out all the poisonous feelings I might have had toward this new addition to the family. And it was that same kind of happiness that rose in me to greet the news Ruby brought me that day.

Chapter Four
2001
    I T WAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, THE DOCTOR ASSURED US, JUST A common nosebleed, but our daughter, Adraenne, was not satisfied. She was a nurse practitioner and knowledgeable about medicine, and she knew who were the best doctors. She chose one in New York and made an appointment for Ruby.
    It turned out Ruby was suffering from anemia, but one that could be controlled with a weekly injection of a medication called Procrit.
    Since Adraenne was unable to make the trip to New Jersey from Brooklyn, where she lived, to give Ruby the weekly injection, we turned to our next-door neighbor for help. Blake had been a medic in the army before he retired, and was well trained in giving injections. He was only too glad to oblige, and every Sunday morning he would be at our door, often bringing a cake that his wife, Hildegarde,had baked for us, or perhaps a pot of her delightful chicken soup. Those Sunday mornings became a social event, with sometimes Hildegarde accompanying her husband.
    Eventually, I learned to give the injections myself, and they seemed to be working. Blood tests showed that the hemoglobin count was rising, and bit by bit it reached a normal level. The danger had passed. The anemia was not developing into the unmentionable leukemia, as in many cases it did. We were all happy, Ruby especially.
    “Now,” she said to me when the normal level was reached, “you can take me to the prom.”
    The Senior Prom was a new innovation in town. All seniors had been invited. It was to be held at the newly opened Cultural Arts Center. High school students were to be the hosts and hostesses. A dinner would be served. There would be a live band for dancing. It had been prominently advertised in the local paper, and Ruby had wanted to go, but I had held back. It seemed just a bit too silly to try to recover the high school days, and I wasn't keen