Chosen Read Free

off and got a tight-lipped look by snarking about their hosts on the short drive over.
    “Don’t the McAdoos just look like infertile people?”
    “What is that supposed to mean?” Her bristly answer should have stopped him, but Paul sometimes doesn’t know when to quit.
    “John’s old enough to have had his balls shot off storming the beaches at Normandy, and Francie just looks…dried out.” He’d had the good sense not to tell his wife about the one accidental sex dream he had had about Francie McAdoo after they first met, not an inconceivable thing until you got to know her; a decent body, if yougo for that type, average face, but in the dream, when he had tried to put it in her, she was so dry he got paper cuts.
    Now, stuck at the McAdoos’ dining room table, because he is not always so challenged in knowing how to say the right thing, Paul leans over into Eva’s mass of spring-loaded blond hair and whispers, “Next year, our house. Just you, me, and Junior.”
    Eva methodically spears a piece of turkey, a rolling cranberry, and a fluff of stuffing, swipes her fork through gravy, and turns to their hostess. She chews her perfect bite, nodding as Francie McAdoo yammers on about back-ordered Pottery Barn furniture, but Paul knows she heard him. With her right hand, she reaches under the table and strokes Paul’s knee like it’s the head of an obedient golden retriever.
    “So, Paul, you’re still with Nike?” John McAdoo asks him. It is the first he’s spoken since they all loaded up their plates at the cherry sideboard after a stiff half hour of cocktails, salty Costco hors d’oeuvres, and strangled small talk.
    “Mm”—Paul wipes his mouth—“I’m actually not.” He does not add, “I have my own company,” though he does. His father would have taken this opportunity to dig in his pocket for a business card, “S UPER N OVA E LECTRIC —a super company with service you can trust!” But Paul is not his father, in so many ways. “Maybe you’re thinking of someone else from the agency. What was their name, honey, the Nike people?”
    Eva, whom he has seen successfully attend three conversations at once, doesn’t miss a nod for Francie but says, “The Severins, Nate and Gina, both with Nike.”
    Francie veers erratically off topic; she abandons distressed wood nightstands and jumps into the husbands’ conversation. “They’re getting a baby soon too—January, I think. I heard they got the most wonderful birth mother, really desirable, your absolute dream—Heather W. She’s white, blue eyes, bright, a college student, I think, or maybe she wanted to go to college, remember I told you about her, from the message boards, John? They say she has that adorable little boy?”
    John swirls the ice cubes in his drink, and there is silence. Paul wonders if John also resents these all-consuming adoption and infertility message boards. At first Paul had humored Eva’s obsession, even enjoyed coming home to the sagas of her online world, rolled his eyes when she had to get a wrist brace because of carpal tunnel syndrome from hours at the keyboard. These days, it was taking her ninety minutes twice a day just to keep up with her posting.
    “John,” Francie repeats, “remember me telling you about that perfect birth mother, Heather W.?”
    To Paul’s relief, John finally raises his eyes to his wife’s piercing pigeon glare and nods. Though they have known each other casually for two years, Paul is sure he wouldn’t be able to pick John McAdoo out from one of a dozen puffy, rich, Scotch-ruddy, fifty-something executives sagging around a boardroom table. The guy made his money in the Silicon Valley dot-com world and is now semiretired, doing some hobby brewery, the Soaring Scotsman. His beer, offered to Paul before dinner, sits full, bitter and undrinkable.
    “Oh, that’s nice. Good for the Severins.” Eva comes to the rescue, still constructing the same perfect bites; turkey, berry, stuffing,