"I don't like it when you talk dirty," he said to her after one of their lovemaking sessions had ended. "Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, but I don't think women should talk that way. It's not…"

"Ladylike?" she said.

He was standing in the bathroom door, tying the belt of his robe. He made a little fussy business of it so as not to look at her. "Yeah," he said. "It's not ladylike."

"I just want to be able to say what I want, Mitch."

"You mean what you want when we're in bed?" he said.

"Isn't that allowed?"

He made an exasperated sigh. "Rachel…" he said, "I told you before. You can say whatever you want to say."

"No I can't," she replied. "You tell me that, but you don't mean it. You're ready to snap at me if I say anything critical."

"That's not true."

"You're doing it right now."

"I'm not. I'm just saying I've been brought up in a different way than you. When I'm in bed with somebody I don't want to be given orders."

Now he was beginning to annoy her, and she wasn't in the mood to keep her irritation out of sight. "If you think me asking you to fuck me a little harder-"

"There you go again."

"-is me giving you orders we've got a problem, because-"

"I don't want to hear this."

"-and that's part of the problem."

"No, the problem is you having a foul mouth."

She got up out of bed. She was still naked, still sweaty from their lovemaking (he was always the first to the shower, scrubbing himself clean). Her nakedness intimidated him. It was the same body he'd been coupling with ten minutes before; now he couldn't look at her below her neck. She'd, not thought of him as absurd until that moment. Arrogant sometimes, childish sometimes. But never, until now, absurd. There he was, a grown man, averting his eyes from her body like a nervous schoolboy. She would have laughed had it not been so pitiful.

"Just so we understand one another, Mitchell," she said, her tone scarcely betraying the fury she felt. "I do not have a foul mouth. If you've got a problem with talking about sex-"

"Don't put it on me."

"Let me finish."

"I've heard all I need to hear."

"I haven't finished talking."

"Well I've finished listening," he said, crossing to the bedroom door.

She moved to intercept him, feeling bizarrely empowered by her own nakedness. She saw him cowed by her lack of shame and it aroused an exhibitionist streak in her. If he was going to treat her like a coarse woman, then damn it she'd behave like one, and take some pleasure in his discomfort.

"Is that all the baby-making we're going to be doing tonight?" she said to him.

"I'm not sleeping in this room with you tonight, if that's what you're asking."

"The more often we do it," Rachel pointed out, "the more chance I'll produce a little Geary. You do know that?"

"Right now, I don't care," he said, and walked out on her.

It wasn't until she'd showered, and was toweling herself dry, that the tears started to come. They were surprisingly inconsequential, given what had just taken place. She made swift work of them, then washed her face clean, and went to bed.

She'd slept alone for many years, and been none the worse for it, she told herself. If she had to do so again for the rest of her life, then so be it. She wasn't going to beg anyone for their company between the sheets; not even Mitchell Geary.

Paradoxically, they'd made a baby the very night she'd ended up sleeping alone. Seven weeks later Rachel was sitting in the office of Dr. Lloyd Waxman, the Geary family physician, with Waxman telling her the glad news.

"You're in very good health, Mrs. Geary," he said. "I'm sure everything's going to proceed along just fine. Did your mother have easy pregnancies, by the way?"

"As far as I know."

"Well that's another good sign." He jotted the information in his notes. "Maybe you'd like to come in and see me again in, say, a month's time?"

"No instructions in the meantime?"

"Nothing to excess," Waxman replied,, with a simple little shrug. "That's what I always tell people. You're a healthy woman, there's really no reason why this shouldn't be a breeze for you. Just don't go out on the town with Margie. Or if you go out, let her do all the drinking. She's very capable of that. Lord knows, it'll probably kill her one of these days."

Rachel had made a tentative peace with Mitchell about a week and a half after the argument in the bedroom, but things had not been fully repaired between them. She wasn't so much hurt by the exchange as she was insulted, and she wasn't about to kid herself that just because he was making an effort to be conciliatory the opinions he espoused weren't still lurking behind his smile. As he'd said at the time, they were part of the way he'd been brought up. Such deeply held feelings weren't going to disappear overnight.

But the news from Dr. Waxman was so rapturously greeted on all sides she forgot about the argument, for at least a few weeks. Everybody was so pleased, it was as though something miraculous had happened.

"It's only a baby," she remarked to Deborah one day.

"Rachel," Deborah said, with a faintly forbidding tone. "You know better than that."

"All right, it's a Geary baby," Rachel said. "But Lord, all this hoopla! And there's still seven months to go."

"When I was pregnant with Garrison," Deborah said, "Cadmus sent me flowers every day for the last two months of my pregnancy, with a little card attached, and the number of days left."

"Like a countdown?"

"Exactly."

"The more I know about this family, the stranger it seems."

Deborah smiled, her gaze sliding away.

"What does that mean?" Rachel said.

"What?"

"The smile."

Deborah shrugged. "Oh, just that the older I get the stranger everything seems." She was sitting on the sofa beside the window, and the sun was bright; it made her features hard to discern. "You know how you assume things'll come clear as you get older? But of course nothing does. Sometimes I find myself looking at the faces of people I've known for years and years and they're complete mysteries to me. Like something from another planet." She paused, sipped her peppermint tea, stared out of the window. "What were we talking about?"

"How strange all the Gearys are."

"Hm. I suppose you think I'm the oddest of the lot."

"No," Rachel protested. "I didn't mean to say-"

"Say whatever you feel like saying," Deborah said, her tone still distracted. "Take no notice of Mitchell." She looked in Rachel's direction, her gaze uncommitted. "He told me you were angry at him. I don't blame you, frankly. He can be very controlling. He doesn't get that from George, he gets it from Garrison. And Garrison gets it from Cadmus." Rachel didn't remark on any of this. "He said you had quite an argument."

"It's over with now," Rachel said.

"I had to pry it out of him. But he knows better than to try and conceal anything from his mother."

Several thoughts had come into Rachel's head at the same time and were competing for attention. One, that if Deborah didn't find it odd that her son was sharing bedroom conversation with her, then she was indeed just as strange as the rest of the family. Two, that Mitchell wasn't to be trusted to keep their intimate business to himself. And three, that she would hereafter take her mother-in-law at her word, and say whatever the hell came into her head, however unpalatable it sounded. They were stuck with her now. She was going to give the Geary clan a child. That conferred power upon her.

Margie put it best, in fact, when she remarked that "the kid's going to give you something to bargain with." This was a grim vision of things, to be sure, but by now all of Rachel's romantic delusions were in retreat. If the child she was carrying was a necessary part of getting her way, then so be it.