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“Dr. Sawyer did all he could,” said Mrs. Demmings. Claude nodded along with his mother.

Adele’s father couldn’t speak Pauline’s name at all. He seemed suddenly old, so much smaller than he’d been only a year before. John ran the ranch now. Adele was relieved when Penny, John’s wife, delivered a healthy girl and sprang back to her sturdy farm-girl feet within a week.

As her own time approached, Adele grew huge and clumsy.

Her mother stopped in daily, bringing her broths and marrows to strengthen her blood.

Adele, who once would have darted out the back door to avoid her, was too slow and ponderous to escape.

Her thoughts were jumbled and contradictory.

She dreaded her mother’s visits but she also dreaded the prospect of an afternoon passing without her mother stopping by.

She dreaded the baby staying inside her too long, growing larger and more difficult to expel.

But she dreaded the day the baby decided to enter the world.

What if the child lived and she died? How would Charles manage it? Adele couldn’t see any way but to let her own mother raise the child. This thought was sufficiently terrifying that she drank the broths and ate the marrows. She had to make sure her blood was strong.

Her mother was there, watching as Adele dutifully sipped her latest concoction, when she winced at the first pain.

Mrs. Clemson sprang up, alert. “It’s nothing,” said Adele.

“Just a twinge.” She’d had these occasionally—a feeling that the muscles deep within her were stretched to capacity and wanted to snap back to their customary places.

She kept sipping, had almost finished the bowl—an accomplishment, as there wasn’t nearly enough salt in the broth—when she felt her insides twist and clench.

She dropped the spoon and clutched her belly.

Mrs. Clemson ordered the cook to fetch Dr. Sawyer.

“Get Charles,” said Adele as her mother helped her up the stairs.

“Don’t worry, dear. We’ll get him when it’s time. Doctor first.”

“I want him now,” said Adele, sharply, because the pain had struck again.

“Plenty of time, plenty of time. Don’t worry, dear.

You sit here while I fix the bed.” Her mother led her to a chair.

Adele suffered the next pains in silence as her mother stripped the bed and remade it with older sheets.

Her water broke as her mother helped her stand.

Mrs. Clemson squeezed her hand and said, “Good girl!” because she hadn’t ruined the sheets?

Because she was following instructions? Adele suspected it might be both.

When Dr. Sawyer arrived, Adele flashed back to him thwapping her on the thigh.

He leaned over her, probing her belly, his breath smelling strongly of peppermint, and, beneath that, juniper from the gin.

His hands moved downward, beneath her nightgown, probing, probing.

Her mother politely turned away and looked out the window.

Adele, trying to ignore the doctor’s fingers, cast around the room for something else to focus on.

Dr. Sawyer’s battered leather bag sat at the foot of the bed, partially open, revealing the tongs of an enormous set of forceps.

Had he used those on her sister? Had he pushed them inside Pauline and torn her apart with them?

“I want Charles!”

The doctor removed his fingers just as Charles burst through the door. Warm tears of relief slid down her cheeks. “I’m here,” he said. “I’m here.” He rushed to her side and took her face in his hands. “I’m here,” he whispered.

“Get him out,” Adele whispered back. As the doctor was the only other man in the room, there was no mistaking whom she meant.

“Adele, you need—”

“He killed Pauline! Get him out!”

Dr. Sawyer drew himself up and opened his mouth to protest, but Charles stopped him with a look, then turned back to her. “Adele, you shouldn’t say such things.”

Why not? She was sure it was true. But she could see from their appalled expressions that they wouldn’t listen to her.

No, they would treat her like a child, certain they knew best. They would ignore anything she said today, and maybe for the rest of her life.

She sobbed. The pain struck again, and she doubled up and wailed.

“I want him out! I want Mrs. Maggs! Not him! Not him!”

Charles’s eyes had the panicked look of a steer realizing what the gun was for. He turned to Adele’s mother and said, “Who on earth is Mrs. Maggs?”

Dr. Sawyer fished in his bag. Charles caught sight of the forceps, and his eyes widened further. “Mrs. Clemson, who is Mrs. Maggs?”

“The old widow down by the lake. She delivered Pauline’s third.”

“A fraud is what Mrs. Maggs is,” said Dr. Sawyer.

“No medical training.” He found what he was looking for and extracted it from the bag—a dark-brown glass bottle.

Adele pressed her lips tightly together—she wouldn’t take any of his medicine, not willingly anyway.

But he tipped the bottle toward his own lips.

Seeing the disapproval in Mrs. Clemson’s eyes, the doctor said, “Purely medicinal. Steadies the hands.”

“Get out,” ordered Charles.

“Under the circumstances—” Dr. Sawyer began.

“Oh, Charles, you mustn’t—” said Mrs. Clemson.

“Out! Now!” Charles pointed at the door. The doctor shrugged and said, “Suit yourselves,” then stalked through it.

Adele lay back in the bed and let another pain course through her. It involved her whole body now. Without Dr. Sawyer there, she felt free to give it her full attention. As if from a great distance she heard Charles open a window and yell out to one of his workers to fetch Mrs. Maggs.

After it was all over, after Mrs. Maggs had changed the linens and dressed Adele in a clean nightgown, after Charles had come back in and kissed her and held the baby, after she’d been clucked over by her mother, Adele lifted the baby from the cradle, laid it on her bed, and unwrapped it.

Once she had confirmed with her own eyes what they had all told her, that the baby was indeed female, she sighed, bundled her daughter back up in the blanket, and held her close. Georgeanne regarded her calmly.

“Oh well,” said Adele. “You’re a good-size baby, anyway.”

She put her nose to the faintly pulsing soft spot atop her daughter’s head, breathed in her fresh daisy scent.

Already she loved her ferociously. Had her own mother felt this way about her babies?

It was difficult to imagine. Someone, probably Mrs. Clemson, had clipped a pink silk rose to the baby’s sparse swatch of hair.

Adele gently removed it and chucked it into a corner.

“We won’t be having any of this nonsense. At the very least, I promise you that.”

“You forget,” Pauline had told her when Adele once asked her why any woman would get herself in the family way again once they knew how painful it was to give birth.

Adele pressed her sister: “You were screaming.”

“Oh, that must have been Jimmy crowning. You can see even now he has such an enormous head.” This was true.

Adele wondered how she could have missed the horrifying geometry problem posed by her nephew’s head.

Then Pauline had taken hold of Adele’s hands, and Adele felt her sister’s peace course through her.

“Don’t worry, Dellie. It’ll all be fine when it happens. Look at me. I’m not worried.”

This discussion had taken place less than a month before Pauline went to her final childbed.

Pauline had forgotten. Pauline hadn’t worried.

And look where it had gotten her. Adele would never forget.

Even now, nearly six months later, she could smell the iron tang of her blood, the ripe, embarrassing fumes of her own shit—no one had ever said anything about that part, and she very much doubted any of them had forgotten—and, strongest of all, the stink of her own fear.

She bundled Georgeanne into the apple crate nest—a plush swirl of blankets padding the wooden slats.

Georgeanne smiled up at her, as if she already knew what being placed in the apple crate meant.

“That’s right, George. We’re going on a little drive.

” The baby loved nothing more than a ride in anything motorized.

She gurgled and cooed and, if the ride lasted long enough, drifted into a sound sleep, her cupid lips pursed with pleasure.

When they reached Mrs. Maggs’s place, Mrs. Maggs held out her arms and said, “Oh, this one’s a peach, isn’t she.

” Adele surrendered her baby and watched with pride as Mrs. Maggs traced George’s perfect nose—a button like Pauline’s and Mrs. Clemson’s—as she gently probed the top of George’s head, as she unwrapped and kissed George’s sweet pea toes.

Her baby was a peach, and she ought to want another one.

Both her mother and Mrs. Maggs had praised her after the delivery.

Told her how well she’d done. What an easy birth it had been.

How it would be even easier the second time around.

No one had mentioned the loss of Pauline’s baby. The loss of Pauline herself.

“Aren’t you sweet to bring her out for a visit. Come in and have some coffee and tell me all about her.”

George kicked against her blankets. “A strong one too. Just like her mother.” Mrs. Maggs handed George back to Adele and lit the kerosene lamps in her dark kitchen. She set the water to boil and then regarded Adele. “You’re looking healthy.”

“Thank you. I believe I am.”

Mrs. Maggs peered at her some more. “Sometimes when ladies bring their babies to see me, they’re really coming for themselves, because something’s ailing them.”

“Oh. No, I’m not ailing,” said Adele.

“No. I can see that. And not expecting again either. I’d see it round your eyes if you were.”

Some panic must have flashed across Adele’s face, because Mrs. Maggs nodded. “Ah.” Then: “She’s eating well? You weaning her yet?”

“Oh yes. I mean, to the eating well. Not the weaning.”