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“Pregnant women are loose cannons,” the other man said with warning in his voice. “We need to watch her.”

“We need to be kind to her,” North said firmly. “She’s not just an obstacle or something to be dealt with. She’s a pregnant widow who has done nothing wrong.”

For as much anger as Maxine had felt towards NASA and at the whole situation, respect welled up in her then for Arvin North and she looked up and down the hallway for the women’s restroom sign. Her bladder was actually screaming at her, and before she thought any further about signing paperwork, she needed to relieve herself.

“Well,” the other man said. “Let’s just hope she takes the money and signs the papers. It’s not that I have no feelings, Arvin, and it’s certainly not like I have no sympathy for a woman and her young children, but I have a job to do here, and that job is to protect the program. At all costs.”

The door, which had been opened just a crack at that point, started to inch open further. Maxine decided to go to the right, and she rushed down the hallway and ducked into the ladies’ room before anyone stepped out into the hallway.

She flipped on the light and locked the door, looking at herself in the mirror over the sink. They wanted her to sign off on Derek’s death, and apparently Bill Booker had put up some sort of a fit about the shuttle on launch day. She wasn’t sure what he’d been worried about, but it was clear to Maxine that there was more to this tragedy than a simple accident that couldn’t have been avoided.

There was more to the way the men in charge were handling the disaster, and more to the way they were handling her.

And she didn’t like any of it.

Thinking of it now, on Valentine’s Day morning, Maxine feels a rush of discomfort. She’s been putting off signing the papers—in fact, she’d taken them home the day of the meeting, telling Arvin North and his cronies that she wanted to have a lawyer look everything over—and now she’s feeling more sure than ever that the right thing to do is not to sign the paper, but to dig deeper.

“Check your air, ma’am?” a young man in coveralls asks, leaning into Maxine’s window at the service station. “You’re looking a bit low on the front right side.”

Maxine’s mind is somewhere else entirely, but she drags her eyes over to the boy, who is all of about nineteen, and gives a distracted smile. “That would be great,” she says. “Yes, please.”

As soon as she’s paid up, Maxine rolls out of the lot and onto the main street that passes in front of Cape Kennedy. There, as they are every day, are the protestors. A woman in an orange shirt lifts her sign by its stick, bouncing it in the air as she shouts something at Maxine, who is staring as she waits at a red light.

Maxine rolls down her window.

“NASA doesn’t care about how much money it takes from this country!” the woman in orange shouts, cupping her mouth with one hand. She stares at Maxine intently after the words are out. “They’re taking from education, and from social services. They’re taking money from your pocketbook!”

The light turns green and Maxine rolls forward, but slowly. Almost on a whim, she pulls into the next parking lot, turns off her car, and gets out. Before she knows what she’s doing, she’s wandered down the sidewalk towards the knot of protestors, and she stops in front of the lady in orange.

The woman looks back at her as she lowers her sign, her eyes going from Maxine’s face, down to her overly large belly, and back up to her face. It takes a moment before recognition dawns. “You’re the lady from the car,” the woman motions at the street. “You just passed by.”

“I did,” Maxine says, putting her hand to her stomach. She rubs it and looks at the other protestors, who are still chanting and waving signs. Most are ignoring Maxine altogether. “You looked right at me.”

The woman lifts her chin defiantly. “I look at everyone. I want the word to get out: NASA is taking money from other deserving programs and using it for disastrous missions that are getting us nowhere closer to being on the moon. And why the hell do we want to be on the moon anyway?”

Maxine bites her bottom lip; Derek had a million reasons why he thought man should walk on the moon, and his love of space has infused most of her adult life. Keeping her mouth shut is hard, but Maxine does it. She nods to let the woman know she’s listening.

“The Gemini orbital mission that caught fire in December was a travesty,” the woman goes on. “And can you imagine how many millions of dollars it’s going to cost taxpayers? Not just the loss of equipment and the payouts to the astronauts’ families, but in the investigation that’s sure to follow?”

One car passes by beeping its horn cheerfully in agreement with the signs, and right after, another passes by blaring the horn with a middle finger thrown out the window. Stardust Beach is mostly made up of astronauts and astronauts’ families, so Maxine feels fairly certain that this group of sign holders sees more birds flying through the air than it sees friendly waves. The cars drive on.

“Of course. Space travel is expensive,”

“But are you prepared, as a taxpayer, to eat the cost of that mission?” the woman asks, her eyes burning as she searches Maxine’s gaze. “Do you think that’s the right way for the government to be spending its money?”

As cars whiz by and people shout their sayings and objections to NASA into the wind, Maxine stands there, thinking about this question. For as many years as she’d supported Derek’s desire to go to the moon and the fact that space travel is, in fact, inevitable and exciting, she is suddenly left to wonder whether these people might be right: maybe sinking all this effort into missions that leave women without their husbands and children without their fathersisa travesty. Maybe it allisa waste of time, money, and energy.

And, in her heart, she knows what she heard that day in the hallway when Arvin North had mentioned Bill Booker needing to keep quiet. She knows that something went catastrophically wrong and resulted in the death of her husband, and she knows that whatever that was, Bill Booker has something to do with it.

“You should come to our next meeting,” the woman says, walking towards a chair that has a pile of mimeographed papers on it. There is a big rock resting on top of the papers to keep the wind and the breeze from the passing cars from picking up the pages and sending them flying. She takes a paper and thrusts it at Maxine, glancing at Maxine’s stomach again as she does. “We meet on Thursday evenings, and we’d love to have your participation.” Again, her eyes fall on Maxine’s huge belly. “As long as you’re able to, anyway.”

Maxine takes the paper and skims it quickly. All the details are there. She folds the paper and tucks it into her purse, nodding her thanks before she turns to walk away.

“Hey,” the woman in orange calls after her. Maxine pauses. “Why did you pull off the road and walk all the way over here? What sparked your interest? I’m just curious. Is your husband opposed to the space program?”

It’s a fair question, given that most women she knows do vote and choose their stances based on their husbands’ feelings on the issues at hand, but Maxine lets the question sit for a minute before answering. “My husband,” she says. “My husband was definitelynotopposed to the space program.” She feels the tears coming on and wants to get away from the protestors before they start. “He believed in it wholeheartedly. In fact, he died for it.”

Maxine doesn’t wait for realization to register on the woman’s face before she turns to go, walking back to her car hurriedly with one hand cradling the squirming baby inside of her.