Then maybe, Kimmy thought, you are more like your mother than you know.

They hugged then, made promises of staying in touch. When the girl was gone, Kimmy got dressed. She drove to the florist and asked for a dozen tulips. Tulips had been Candi's favorite. She took the four-hour trip to the graveyard and knelt by her friend's grave. There was no one else around. Kimmy dusted off the tiny headstone. She had paid for the plot and stone herself. No potter's grave for Candi.

"Your daughter came by today," she said out loud.

There was a slight breeze. Kimmy closed her eyes and listened. She thought that she could hear Candi's voice, silenced so long, beg her to keep her daughter safe.

And there, with the hot Nevada sun pounding on her skin, Kimmy promised that she would.

IRVINGTON, NEW JERSEY

JUNE 20

"ACAMERA PHONE," Matt Hunter muttered with a shake of his head.

He looked up for divine guidance, but the only thing looking back was an enormous beer bottle.

The bottle was a familiar sight, one Matt saw every time he stepped out of his sagging two-family with the shedding paint job. With its crown 185 feet in the air, the famed bottle dominated the skyline. Pabst Blue Ribbon used to have a brewery here, but they abandoned it in 1985. Years ago, the bottle had been a glorious water tower with copper-plated steel plates, glossy enamel, and a gold stopper. At night spotlights would illuminate the bottle so that Jerseyites could see it from miles around.

But no more. Now the color looked beer-bottle brown but it was really rust red. The bottle's label was long gone. Following its lead, the once-robust neighborhood around it had not so much fallen apart as slowly disintegrated. Nobody had worked in the brewery for twenty years. From the eroding ruins, one would think it would have been much longer.

Matt stopped on the top step of their stoop. Olivia, the love of his life, did not. The car keys jangled in her hand.

"I don't think we should," he said.

Olivia did not break stride. "Come on. It'll be fun."

"A phone should be a phone," Matt said. "A camera should be a camera."

"Oh, that's deep."

"One gizmo doing both… it's a perversion."

"Your area of expertise," Olivia said.

"Ha, ha. You don't see the danger?"

"Er, nope."

"A camera and a phone in one"- Matt stopped, searching for how to continue-"it's, I don't know, it's interspecies breeding when you think about it, like one of those B-movie experiments that grows out of control and destroys all in its path."

Olivia just stared at him. "You're so weird."

"I'm not sure we should get camera phones, that's all."

She hit the remote and the car doors unlocked. She reached for the door handle. Matt hesitated.

Olivia looked at him.

"What?" he asked.

"If we both had camera phones," Olivia said, "I could send you nudies when you're at work."

Matt opened the door. "Verizon or Sprint?"

Olivia gave him a smile that made his chest thrum. "I love you, you know."

"I love you too."

They were both inside the car. She turned to him. He could see the concern and it almost made him turn away. "It's going to be okay," Olivia said. "You know that, right?"

He nodded and feigned a smile. Olivia wouldn't buy it, but the effort would count toward something.

"Olivia?" he said.

"Yes?"

"Tell me more about the nudies."

She punched his arm.

But Matt's unease returned the moment he entered the Sprint store and started hearing about the two-year commitment. The salesman's smile looked somehow satanic, like the devil in one of those movies where a naïve guy sells his soul. When the salesman whipped out a map of the United States – the "nonroaming" areas, he informed them, were in bright red- Matt started to back away.

As for Olivia, there was simply no quelling her excitement, but then again his wife had a natural lean toward the enthusiastic. She was one of those rare people who finds joy in things both large and small, one of those traits that demonstrates, certainly in their case, that opposites do attract.

The salesman kept jabbering. Matt tuned him out, but Olivia gave the man her full attention. She asked a question or two, just out of formality, but the salesman knew that this one was not only hooked, lined, and sinkered but fried up and halfway down the gullet.

"Let me just get the paperwork ready," Hades said, slinking away.

Olivia gripped Matt's arm, her face beaming. "Isn't this fun?"

Matt made a face.

"What?"

"Did you really use the word 'nudie'?"

She laughed and leaned her head against his shoulder.

Of course Olivia's giddiness- and nonstop beaming- was due to much more than the changing of their mobile phone service. Purchasing the camera phones was merely a symbol, a signpost, of what was to come.

A baby.

Two days ago, Olivia had taken a home pregnancy test and, in a move Matt found oddly loaded with religious significance, a red cross finally appeared on the white stick. He was stunned silent. They had been trying to have a child for a year- pretty much since they first got married. The stress of continuous failure had turned what had always been a rather spontaneous if not downright magical experience into well-orchestrated chores of temperature taking, calendar markings, prolonged abstinence, concentrated ardor.

Now that was behind them. It was early, he warned her. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But Olivia had a glow that could not be denied. Her positive mood was a force, a storm, a tide. Matt had no chance against it.

That was why they were here.

Camera phones, Olivia had stressed, would allow the soon-to-be threesome to share family life in a way their parents' generation could never have envisioned. Thanks to the camera phone, neither of them would miss out on their child's life-defining or even mundane moments- the first step, the first words, the average play-date, what-have-you.

That, at least, was the plan.

An hour later, when they returned to their half of the two-family home, Olivia gave him a quick kiss and started up the stairs.

"Hey," Matt called after her, holding up his new phone and arching an eyebrow. "Want to try out the, uh, video feature?"

"The video only lasts fifteen seconds."

"Fifteen seconds." He considered that, shrugged, and said, "So we'll extend foreplay."

Olivia understandably groaned.

They lived in what most would consider a seedy area, in the strangely comforting shadow of the giant beer bottle of Irvington. When he was fresh out of prison, Matt had felt he deserved no better (which worked neatly because he could afford little better) and despite protestations from family, he began renting space nine years ago. Irvington is a tired city with a large African-American population, probably north of eighty percent. Some might reach the obvious conclusion about guilt over what he'd had to be like in prison. Matt knew that such things were never so simple, but he had no better explanation other than he couldn't yet return to the suburbs. The change would have been too fast, the land equivalent of the bends.

Either way, this neighborhood- the Shell gas station, the old hardware store, the deli on the corner, the winos on the cracked sidewalk, the cut-throughs to Newark Airport, the tavern hidden near the old Pabst brewery- had become home.

When Olivia relocated from Virginia, he figured that she'd insist on moving to a better neighborhood. She was used to, he knew, if not better, definitely different. Olivia grew up in the small hick town of Northways, Virginia. When Olivia was a toddler, her mother ran off. Her father raised her alone.