I don't turn around, I'm looking for the canning stuff. There are more boxes and things and junk that I had long forgotten about. A motorcycle helmet, a turkey fryer, and a plastic owl. I move quite a few boxes and finally open one that is unmarked. Inside is a mirror ball. We bought it at Radio Shack for a Halloween party years ago. I pick it up, "Remember this.?" I say, and turn around.

Alice is standing there with her jacket open, she has pulled her shirt up, just short of her breasts. I can see part of her white bra. Her jeans are unzipped, yet barely open. She has a stomach on her, a small belly. She is pregnant.

She holds a look I have never seen before. It is of disgust and spite. She nods adamantly, as if saying, yes, yes, yes... Her tongue is out, and she makes a goofy, mocking, scary sound. "Yeahhhhhhah.", which breaks off into silence. Her eyes, full of tears now, are fixed with anger. She pulls her shirt back down. There is tremble in her hands.

"Alice," I say, very quietly. I place the mirror ball back into its styro-foam bed. I know her enough that she is going to break down and wail.

I approach her, and of course I'm wrong. Alice regains her composure and zips up with confidence.

"Well. Wow," I say. I want to pull her to me, hug her, but that seems unnatural. I'm a scary giant with meat hooks. I'm diseased. I'm blood shot eyes. I'm a long scary tongue.

But Alice isn't Little Bo Peep either, no Little Miss Muffit, she is the contrary, she is remarkable and getting stronger as we stand. I'm thinking; a fricken baby? A baby? A baby? Our baby.This all registers with my heart and breath.

"There's this couple on Lake Drive," she says. "that's going to adopt our baby." She nearly chokes with that.

I know enough not to speak, although there is an opening to do so, a great silence, but I know she has more to say.

"I've met with them. They seem very put together." Alice's pace picks up before she cries. "There's an agency through my sister's church that handles private adoptions."

I hold my opinion and my comments, even my breath now. I don't say anything about how just because someone that lives in a house on Lake Drive, doesn't make them good people. Lots of sick people screw up their lives and the lives of their children in the houses on Lake Drive, at least as much as those in smaller houses in lesser parts of town.

"I need you not to contest this," she says.

I hear Derrick upstairs, walking across the kitchen floor. We're too quiet for him to hear us. I place him near the patio door. Then it is quiet. I lose the tracking, he has stopped, and is perhaps looking out at the dark, maybe up at the sky.

"I'll do what you want me to do," I say.

"Thanks," she says, she seems grateful, and wipes her eyes with her sleeve.

"You really want strangers in a house on Lake Drive raising our baby?"

She responds with a mixture of cry and, "John you have no fuckin' clue!"

I have a flash of what I assume this house on Lake Drive looks like. I picture Lake Michigan - another flash. I want to place my hand over her belly - FLASH. I picture her breast feeding - FLASH. I picture, then long for my drink glass upstairs - FLASH. I picture Derrick at the patio window again, looking up at the night sky-FLASH. Alice spots the box that reads Mason Jars and picks it up.

"You leaving?" I say.

"I didn't know you'd have company John," she says very blunt, like throwing rocks at a dead body. "I didn't know you'd be drunk. I pictured this differently."