How am I going to handle nurturing an actual living human being who is totally dependent on me for all its needs?

Look at my dog! I mean, I left my dog at home instead of bringing her here to the park with me for my morning jog because she was still sleeping and didn’t want to get up when I got up. Even when I rattled her leash. What kind of mom would do that? What kind of mom goes, “Okay. Whatever” when her kids tell her they want to stay home and sleep instead of go to school?

I’ll tell you want kind. The kind you see being led away in handcuffs on the evening news, going, “Git that camera outta my face!”

Namely me.

Seriously, though. That’s how early I’m up. So early my own dog expressed no interest in getting up and joining me. That’s really sad.

Especially since Lucy doesn’t know about the big shock she’s shortly headed for: Ever since Cooper let my father—the ex-con—move in, Lucy’s been living the high life, thanks to Dad’s habit of whipping up gourmet dinners and taking her on long rambles all over the city (in exchange for the free room and board, Cooper had Dad tail a few of his clients’ soon-to-be exes. Dad thought he looked less conspicuous hanging around outside the Ritz if he was walking a dog).

But now that Dad’s reconnected with his old business partner, Larry, and the two of them have cooked up this new super-secret plot to get them “back in the music biz,” he’s moving on up… not so much to a deluxe apartment in the sky, but to the second bedroom in Larry’s co-op on Park and Fifty-seventh, at least.

Which believe me, I’m not complaining about. Sure, I’m sorry to see Dad go—it was kind of nice to come home to an already walked dog and home-cooked meal every night.

But how many nearly thirty-year-old girls do you know who still live with their dads?

Still, if Lucy knew how shortly her gravy train was about to end, I bet she wouldn’t have been quite so blasé about taking a walk with me this morning.

Excuse me. A race-training jog.

I think Lucy might actually have had the right idea though. Once you get past the part about ogling all the cute tenure track assistant professors in their running shorts, this jogging thing is lame. I think I’ll just walk. Walking is excellent exercise. They say if you walk briskly for half an hour a day, you won’t gain weight, or something. Which isn’t as good as losing weight. You know, if you need to.

But it’s better than nothing.

Yeah, walking is good. Of course, all these people are careening past me. Sporty people. Their uteruses clearly aren’t falling out. How are they keeping theirs inside? What’s the secret?

“Heather?”

Yikes. It’s Tad.

“You okay?”

He is jogging beside me, pretty much in place, because I’m going so slowly.

“I’m fine!” I cry. “Just, you know. Pacing myself. Like you said.”

“Oh.” Tad looks concerned. “So… everything is all right?”

“Everything’s fine!” Except my uterus. Or ovaries. Whichever. I hope Tad doesn’t plan on having children. I mean, with me. Except through adoption. Because I think all my equipment fell out back there by the dog run.

“Um,” Tad says. “Okay. Well… ”

“Go on,” I say cheerfully. Because I’m very careful not to let Tad see my real morning persona. Because he’s not ready for it. Yet. “I’m good.”

“Okay,” Tad says again. “See you.”

He takes off again, fleet and golden as a gazelle, his ponytail bobbing behind him. Look at him go.That’s my boyfriend, I want to say to the size zero who comes whipping past me, in her tiny running shorts and seventeen tank tops. (Seriously, what is the point of the layered tank top look? And you can tell one of those tank tops is a sports bra, which, excuse me, she does not need, not actually having breasts. Me, I’m the one who practically suffered an eye injury back there, when I tried to jog a few steps.)Yeah. My boyfriend. He’s hot, right?

Oh, hey, look. I made it all the way around the park! Once. And okay, I walked most of the way, but still. Only eleven more times to go! Yeah, this 5K thing will be a cinch. I wonder why Tad’s so hot for me to do a 5K with him anyway. It can’t be just that he cares about me and wants me to be healthy, can it? Because I just went to the health center for a physical and I am totally fine. A little in the overweight zone with my BMI, but who says the BMI is an accurate indicator of health anyway?

Except the U.S. government.

Well, I guess a couple that runs together stays together…

Only not, because he’s like five laps ahead of me.

Make that six.

How did I let him talk me into this? Oh, wait, I know how… I just want him to like me. And since he’s a fit, health-conscious person, I want him to think I’m one, too. It’s amazing I’ve managed to keep him going this long… almost three months. Twelve weeks the guy and I have been going out, and he still thinks I’m the kind of girl who runs 5Ks in the morning for fun, and not the kind of girl who takes baths instead of showers because I’m too lazy to stand up for as long as it takes to wash my hair.

This, undoubtedly, is due to the fact that he takes off his glasses before we go to bed.

Cooper tried to warn me, of course, in his own subtle way. He ran into us while Tad and I were grabbing lunch at Zen Palate one day. I’ve never brought Tad home because… well, Cooper never brings his lady friends home. And I’m pretty sure he has some, because there are occasionally messages on the answering machine that can’t be explained any other way… a woman’s voice, purring sexily,Coop, it’s Kendra. Call me. That kind of thing.

But I hadn’t been able to avoid making introductions at Zen Palate, which Tad goes to because it’s vegetarian, and Cooper goes to because—well, to tell you the truth, I have no idea why Cooper was there that day.

Anyway, later, I hadn’t been able to resist asking Cooper what he’d thought of Tad. I guess this part of me was totally hoping that, now that Cooper had seen me all happy with a killer Frisbee—playing hottie, he’d regret telling me I needed a rebound guy, and that he didn’t want to be it.

But all Cooper had asked was, considering Tad was a vegetarian, what on earth we could possibly have in common.

Which I found sort of insulting. I mean, there’s lots of stuff I care about besides food.

And, okay, Tad isn’t really interested in any of them. Like, he’s more into the Cartesian plane, and I’m more into the Cartoon Network. He likes Neil Young, and I like Neil Diamond (as an ironic pop culture figure, not to listen to. Except “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show,” and only when I’m alone). I like movies with explosions in them. He likes movies with subtitles in them.

That kind of thing.

But still. Who goes around asking people that kind of thing? What they have in common as a couple, I mean? How rude is that? I wanted to ask Cooper what he thought WE, as in he and I, had in common as a couple… until I remembered we’re not a couple.

The scary thing is that Cooper and I have tons of things in common… we both like good food (such as Nathan’s hot dogs, oysters on the half shell, and Peking duck, to name a few), and good music (such as blues, all jazz but fusion, classical, opera, R and B, any kind of rock except for heavy metal, although I have a secret soft spot for Aerosmith), and good wine (well, okay, I can’t really tell the difference between a good wine and a bad one, but I do know the good stuff doesn’t taste like salad dressing or give me a headache).

And, of course, really bad TV. Which I hadn’t known Cooper liked, too, until recently. I’d come across him in a moment when he’d clearly thought he was alone in the house. He’d reached hastily for the remote, attempting to switch to CNN before I got a look. But I saw. Oh, I saw.

“Shame on you, Cooper,” I’d said… though inwardly, of course, I’d been thrilled. “The Golden Girls?”