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other bakers. The one exception he made was for our birthdays, when he’d get up extra early to bake and frost our cakes. They were beautiful, those cakes. One year I’d asked for the Little Mermaid, and my father had covered my cake in an ocean of turquoise-blue icing that peaked in tiny white-capped waves, tumbling toward a golden shore upon which a topless mermaid with tiny pink-tipped boobies lounged underneath a green gum-drop palm tree.
    “It’s just strange,” said Nancy . . . and she sounded truly confused. I hadn’t heard that tone much since she’d gotten skinny and gotten married and gotten the idea that she knew everything there was to know about everything. “I saw a TV special about these women in India. Women in America hire women there to carry their babies—mostly because they can’t have kids of their own, but sometimes just because they don’t want to. They don’t want to gain weight or have stretch marks or be inconvenienced. It just seemed wrong. Women shouldn’t use each other that way.”
    “Well, I’m not being used, and I won’t be having a baby for someone who just doesn’t want to be inconvenienced,” I said, even though I wasn’t completely sure if this was true. The clinic’sliterature said I’d be helping an infertile couple— fertility was, of course, right there in the place’s name—but I could imagine some rich woman saying she was infertile and getting a surrogate just because she wanted to wear a bikini that summer, or didn’t want to miss out on a wine tasting or a ski vacation. Or, I thought meanly, a squash trip. “I’m going to be helping someone.”
    There was a wooden bowl full of apples next to the salt and pepper shakers. My mother took one and started peeling it with a silver fruit knife with a mother-of-pearl handle that she’d ordered from QVC, a channel she affectionately called “the Q.” Only your mother, Frank had said, has pet names for her favorite stations. “Do you think you can do that? Have a baby and then just hand it over?”
    I looked past her into the living room. The boys were on the couch, their crumb-laden napkins on the coffee table. Frank Junior was holding Spencer’s hand, the way he did when his little brother got scared at the movies. My boys. I thought about the bicycle Frank Junior wanted, a red Huffy in the window of the shop downtown that he would visit every time I took him on my errands with me. I thought about being able to sign Spencer up for sports readiness at the Little Gym, where classes cost four hundred dollars a semester. I thought about buying new winter coats and boots, instead of scouring the cardboard boxes at the church’s winter swap for hand-me-downs, and not worrying if they lost a mitten or if Frank Junior tore the sleeve of a sweater that I’d been planning to pass down to his brother. “I think I’ll be sad. But it won’t be my baby. It’ll be theirs. The intended parents.” Intended parents was a term I’d learned from the surrogacy websites. “As long as I can remember that, I should be fine.”
    “And Frank?” My sister, I’d thought more than once, was like a woman on a long car trip with her finger pressed againstthe stereo’s “search” button, scanning up and down the dial, looking not for music but for trouble. “Have you talked to him about this?”
    “We’ve discussed it.” In my head. In fact, this discussion was my rehearsal, my trial run for how I’d tell my husband what I’d done.
    “I think it’s great,” my mother said.
    “I think it’s crazy,” said Nancy.
    “You’re entitled to your opinion,” I said stiffly, and got up from the table. But Fancy Nancy wasn’t done yet.
    “I know you,” Nancy said. “You’re tenderhearted.” The way she said it— tenderhearted —it was like she was telling me I had bad breath, or hepatitis C. “They’re going to give you that baby to hold and you won’t want to let her go.”
    “Why do you think it’ll be a