Then Came You Read Free

I’d only had sex with three different boys, an embarrassingly low tally at my age. I was starting to think that I was one of those people who didn’t like sex very much. Maybe it made me lucky. I wouldn’t spend my whole life getting my heart broken, chasing after this guy or that one.
    “And are you single?”
    I nodded, trying not to look too excited, to give the appearance that men stopped by the food court to offer me piles of cash every Monday I went to the mall, but my mind was racing, imagining what I could do with twenty thousand dollars, a sum I hadn’t imagined possessing unless I won the lottery or married very, very well. Even with the investment-banking job I was going to take after I graduated, I’d have to manage rent in New York City and start paying back my loans, so the idea of having five figures’ worth of discretionary income was new to me, extraordinary, and alluring.
    Jared Baker handed me a business card, a rectangle of heavy ivory paper with embossed letters on top that said PRINCETON FERTILITY CLINIC, INC. His name was underneath, with telephonenumbers and an e-mail address. “Be in touch,” he said. “I think you’d be an excellent candidate.”
    “Twenty thousand dollars,” I said again.
    “Minimum,” he repeated. “Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind telling me your name?”
    “Julia Strauss,” I said. “My friends call me Jules.”
    “Jules,” he said, giving me another appraising look and shaking my hand again.
    So that was how it started: in the Princeton MarketFair, over a Styrofoam plate of sweet and sour chicken and a spring roll that I never got to finish. It seemed so simple. I thought that selling an egg would be like giving blood, like checking the Organ Donation box on your driver’s license, like giving away something you’d never wanted or even noticed much to begin with. And yes, at first, I was just in it for the money. It wasn’t about altruism, or feminism, or any other ism . It was about the cash. But I wasn’t going to blow it on clothes or a car or a graduation bash, on Ecstasy or a trip to Vail, or Europe, or one of the hundred frivolous things my classmates might have chosen. I was going to take that money and I was going to try to save my father ... or, more accurately, I was going to give him one last chance to save himself.

ANNIE
     
    I stood in the kitchen with the telephone in my hand, heart pounding, until I heard a familiar voice on the other end say hello. “Ma?”
    “Annie?” she asked. I could hear the sound of the TV set blaring in the background. My mother loved her programs, especially The View, which was why I knew exactly where to find her Monday through Friday from eleven to noon. “Are you still coming?”
    I exhaled. She’d remembered. That was good. I wasn’t sure whether my mom had anything more than regular forgetfulness or something worse, like early-onset Alzheimer’s, which I’d looked up a few times on the Internet, but if there was something important, something you needed my mother to remember, you had to tell her and tell her and tell her again, and even then be prepared for the possibility that it would still slip her mind.
    “Nancy’s here already. We’re just going over my bank statement.”
    I imagined my sister sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with her acrylic nails tapping at her calculator. “The boys and I are on our way. And I’ve got some good news.”
    “Ooh, fun,” she said. “Bye-bye, now.”
    I switched off The Backyardigans, wondering when it was thatmy mother had started sounding more like a child than my actual children, and hurried Frank Junior, five, and Spencer, who had just turned three, upstairs to the bathroom, the only one in our three-story, five-bedroom farmhouse in Phoenixville, about forty-five miles outside Philadelphia. Frank and I had bought the farmhouse at auction five years ago. It had been a bargain, a big, sprawling place originally built in 1890, on three acres of land,