Jill and Katie didn’t offer to help anymore because I always said no. They are inexact and careless in the kitchen. It takes longer to explain what I want than to do it myself, and help is only helpful if it’s okay with you when you say chopped but get diced, and it’s not okay with me. And it embarrasses me to cook in front of Lucas. It’s not like what you make at home for dinner for friends is supposed to be like a restaurant anyway, and he always says nice things about my cooking, but it still makes me uncomfortable. Lucas says this is a problem he encounters with everyone he knows. Not even his mother will cook for him anymore. He never gets invited to friends’ houses for dinner. If he wants a meal he didn’t make himself, he has to go out. I’ll cook for him occasionally, but not while he watches. Thus I had Jason and Ethan to sous for me. Since the former was already drunk, I put him to work setting the table. And since Ethan’s skills were as yet untried, I put him on the task of dicing herbs and removing shallots from shallot peels. Do I sound like a control freak? Only when I cook.
Katie and Jill and Lucas watched Atlas roll over in the living room—new as of this morning—and I could hear them clapping and cheering every time he did it, Jill and Katie friends again as if nothing had happened at all. Ethan and I worked on dinner and talked about baseball. Sort of. I was cubing squash for the crepes.
“Those look exactly like those pillbox hats the Pirates wore in the seventies,” said Ethan.
“Worst uniform ever,” I said.
“Bad but not worst ever. There’ve been lots of uniforms worse than those.”
“Name one,” I challenged.
“All those powder blue road uniforms in the eighties. Those weird camo tops the Padres have been wearing lately. The all-one-color uniforms they were doing for a while—red hat, red jersey, red pants, red shoes, red laces. The Astros in the eighties.”
“The Astros were having a coded coming-out party,” I said. “Those uniforms weren’t ugly. Those uniforms were gay. Rainbows? Stars? It’s not even subtle.”
“No gay man would wear a uniform that ugly,” said Ethan. “What about those shorts the White Sox wore that one game?”
“They did not.”
“Did so.”
“No way. How could they slide?”
“No idea. I guess they got a lot of dirt in their underwear.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. He Googled it on his phone to show me. I was temporarily too stunned to cook.
“Are you guys talking about baseball?” yelled Katie from the other room. “Baseball is boring. Stop talking and make us some dinner. We’re starved.”
“You’re missing all of this rolling over,” added Jill, full of giggles. “Bring us food and a camera.”
Tired of his belly that morning, Atlas had rolled over while I sat with him reading aloud about the plague years in late sixteenth-century London. He’d been able to push the top of him up for a couple of weeks, but that morning, he tucked one arm under, his left, and pushed himself right up and over onto his back. “Ohmygodyouguys,” I screamed, forgetting that (1) I am not ten, (2) I was not really speaking to them, and (3) this would surely scare the crap out of them both. Jill, pale as death, was downstairs before I finished standing up, Katie not far behind her, completely breathless.
“He rolled over,” I said, delighted, gesturing towards an on-his-back Atlas trying to put his toes in his mouth.
“You scared me to death,” Katie scolded.
Jill burst into tears, making me feel terrible for hating her.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I apologized, putting an arm around her. “I was just so excited.”
“It’s not that,” she sobbed. “I can’t believe I missed it. I should have been here. I should never have been asleep. This is why new mothers are so sleep deprived. So they don’t miss anything.” And she sat down next to her son, put her face in her hands, and cried. Atlas reached his arm out towards her, tucked it underneath him, and rolled back over onto his stomach.
Over the next hour, we all sat together in our pajamas and watched him do this a dozen more times until he rolled all the way across the floor and under the sofa, and we dragged him back out, and he started again. Then I went running with the dog. Then I took a shower. Then Katie and I went grocery shopping. Then I called my parents and my grandmother to tell them Atlas had rolled over. Then I did some work. Then I started dinner. Jill just sat on the floor all day watching Atlas, determined not to miss anything else, exclaiming over each new roll as if it were the first (not his first, the first, the first time anyone anywhere had ever rolled over).
Dinner was good. We all got drunk, even Katie, though not on alcohol, just on proximity to us. We were silly and laughing, passing Atlas between us so everyone had a chance to eat, but not wanting to put him to bed either, not wanting him to miss this. At some point in the whirling, after cake, after coffee, still with the sangria, Jason leaned over to Katie and asked her to have his baby. We were all cracking up. We thought it was very funny. Except, evidently, he was serious.
“Kind of a large favor,” said Katie.
“You’re good at favors. You let me sleep on your sofa,” said Jason. “And you owe me. I babysit. And I gave you all my notes from orals. That saved you so much work. Plus I’m very good in bed.”
“It’s true.” Lucas nodded.
“We’ve been talking about this for a long time. We’ve been thinking about this forever. We’re always thinking about this. We’ve always known we want to be parents together.”
Lucas and Jason looked like love at each other. Katie started to look panicked. Jill and I exchanged glances, splitting the difference between amusement and coming down off our high. Ethan, still grinning, looked around for the hidden cameras.
“Why me?” asked Katie.
“You’re perfect actually,” Jason said eagerly. Clearly he had been thinking about this for a while. “Maybe uniquely among all the people I know, you understand sex just for procreation. You’d be bringing a new life into the world.”
“A mitzvah,” said Lucas.
“You’d be bringing a child to people who can’t have one on their own. You’d be bringing so much joy to so many people.”
“My mother would buy you many gifts,” Lucas added.
“Are you crazy? Why would I do this?” said Katie, at which the guys brightened, thinking she was considering it, though really I knew there were actually and truly no circumstances in no universes past or to come that could make this happen.
“Well, we thought of that,” said Jason. “The joy of helping others. The good and godly and spiritual act of making new life—”
“Why Jason?” I interrupted to ask Lucas. “How did you decide him and not you?”
“Actually, our first choice was for us both to have sex with Katie”—who was blushing so hard, with anger or embarrassment, I feared for her health—“so that we’d never know who the bio father was. But we don’t look alike, so we’d probably know anyway, and we thought Katie would be more comfortable with someone she knew better. Also, sex with girls grosses me out. No offense. I’m not sure I even could.”