The phone rings, and I'm not afraid. Not even when it's snowing and Patrick's late getting home from his shift, and I'm reminded that police officers can die in car accidents just as easily as they can on the job. I just cross the kitchen briskly, pick up the receiver without checking the caller ID, and when I hear Penny Fayette's Kentucky drawl I do not feel relief, because there is nothing to be relieved about.

“Hi Megan,” Penny says. “Have you heard from Patrick?”

“Nope.” I walk back into the living room, where my son is sitting on the couch, still playing his father's XBox. Aaron's not afraid of the phone either, and this is one of my greatest accomplishments as a mother.

“You haven't?”

“Nope.”

“Well, that's funny.”

Out with it, I think. Patrick was in court with Penny's husband today, and so I'm once again the back channel by which she can try to nail down Carl's whereabouts. “They're probably just doing paperwork,” I say. “You know how it is.”

“I sure do.” Penny lets out a sad little laugh. “Carl has to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.”

“That sucks.” Leave him, I think. Penny's the head regional sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, and most of the money is hers. She also knows that even though police officers often have a lot of post-shift paperwork, this doesn't mean Carl isn't cheating on her. Therefore she's forced to fish around with these phone calls, hoping to snag some spare, rotten piece of information that will tell her once and for all yes he is or no he's not, and it's my job to not confirm anything either way. I can't tell her, for example, that Carl actually has Christmas Eve off, and I don't want to, either. As far as I'm concerned, Penny Lafayette can figure these things out for herself.

“Well, give me a call if you hear anything, all right?”

“Sure.” I lean over, turn on the outside lights, my sweater stretching tight over my stomach. My clothes have begun to not fit quite right again, and there's something almost pleasant about this, like a sore muscle. My bulbs begin their crazy twinkle, and I think of Penny's Christmas lights, those soft stately white candles in each window of that huge house on the other side of the city.

I go back into the living room, stand next to where Aaron's sitting. Apparently, I'm in his way, because he grunts, slides a couple inches to the side. I don't think he even understands the game, his Tom Clancy spy doesn't even come close to the Columbians or Tajiks or whoever this particular mission calls upon you to “neutralize.” Instead, Aaron just runs into corners and falls off ledges, the black-suited figure on the screen breathing heavily whenever one of the terrorists gets in one of their own whacks.

“Do I make a better door than a window?” I ask. This is something his father says to me, an inside-the-family joke.

“Yes,” Aaron says.

“Do you even know what you're doing?” The spy sets off an alarm, and his head--which has some bizarre three-pronged apparatus mounted on it--whips from side to side in animated panic. “What's that on his face?”

“A camera.” My son's voice is already tinged with that same tired frustration his father gets when he has to explain what he thinks should be obvious. But I'm the one who's sat Aaron down in front of the TV, so I can't really complain. When he's finally killed and the Mission Failed screen comes up, I navigate through the menus for him, restart the game.

After a few minutes, Penny calls again. “Carl's not answering his cell phone,” she says. “I think something's wrong.”

“Do you want me to call Patrick?”

“I hate to make you do that.”

“I'll call you back.” I hang up the phone before she can say thank you, dial Patrick's number. It's one thing for Carl to lie to his wife, it's another to avoid her entirely, make her think he's plastered all over the highway somewhere.

When my husband answers, it's in the voice he only dares to use when he's stuck at the station, the one that suggests I'm still too stupid to realize that the less I call, the quicker he'll be able come home.

“What?” he says.

“Hello to you too,” I say. “Penny called. Twice.”

“Well, don't let her get her hooks into you.” Now that he knows this call isn't about his being late, his tone has loosened into sympathy.

“Is Carl there?”

“Unfortunately, Officer Fayette is unavailable for the moment.” This means Carl is at Killarney's with his girlfriend, a state trooper named Jessica who was in Patrick's class at the academy. “Would you like to leave a message for him?”

“Tell him his wife called.” Patrick promises he will, and before he hangs up, he tells me he loves me. When I call Penny back, her phone is busy, and so I sit and wait, listen to the tapping of my son's fingers, the foreign shouts of computerized guards on alert, and wonder how it is that I've actually come to feel sorry for this woman.

The first time my husband brought his service weapon home, I was surprised by how dull and gray and ordinary it looked. It was more like something out of a Black and Decker catalogue than the sleek and shiny pistols I'd seen in the movies, and when I mentioned this to Patrick, he said yes, that's how I should think of it, as a tool, a highly specialized piece of equipment designed for one specific task. Then he'd put both the gun and the rag he'd been cleaning it with in a shoebox on the top shelf of our closet and fallen face-first onto the bed. The department had started him off on the midnight shift, and his life was divided between times he struggled to stay conscious and times he had to force himself into sleep. When he was awake, we'd fight. We ended up going to the Fayette's Labor Day party mostly because we thought being around other people would make us less likely to spend the afternoon at each other's throats.

Since Carl had already been on the force for a few years, the Fayettes no longer had to live within the city limits. The houses in their neighborhood all had stone paths snaking through the lawns, shaded entryways and stone chimneys, the kind of places Patrick and I had both grown up in and always assumed we'd live in ourselves. Instead, we were sweating it out in a downtown apartment complex, and I was kicking myself for insisting Patrick take the job that would keep us closest to our families instead of those town-cop jobs up in the mountains, places where he would've spent most of his time pulling skiers with out-of-state plates over for speeding and pulling drunks out of snowbanks.

When we arrived, Carl was standing in his backyard with his daughter on his shoulder, his other hand dripping with lobster parts. He was shirtless, the thickness of his body just beginning to melt into fat around his waist. Patrick, right? he said. Glad you could make it. Hope you brought a towel, beer's in the cooler. Later, after Patrick and I had drunk too much to drive, we were in the handful of people left around the picnic table, all of us listening to Carl's stories about being a cop in South Carolina. Since I was the only woman left--other than Penny--he directed the worst of it my way, all that talk about entrance wounds and crack whores and “nigger-be-nice” sticks, trying to shock me, trying to turn me on, probably. He was so intent on me that he didn't seem to notice that Patrick was transfixed by his own wife.

Or maybe he just didn't care. Carl must've known that none of those Yankee boys had ever seen anything like Penny. She was sitting down at the end of table in a blue-and-white sundress, running her own commentary on his stories, keeping all the other men in stitches. Oh, Carl, that's such bullllllshit, she'd say, making bullllllshit sound like the sexiest thing in the world, as if she'd just said “making love” instead. And what do you do, honey, Penny asked, sweeping her red hair back from her face.

I teach math, I said.

That's great. High school?

Middle school, Patrick answered for me.

We should give you a gun, Carl said.

No kidding, Penny said. Get ‘em before they start. At this point Patrick put his arm around me, but I knew what he was thinking. If this was what it took to be a city wife's cop, I'd never make it.

To tell the truth, I hadn't done much to make him think otherwise. When the black-and-blue marks had begun appearing on his skin, raining down his ribs and thighs, I'd wondered aloud how the boy I'd known since high school could be out there mixing it up on the streets. Your poor, poor body, I said, and whenever he came home needing to talk about some car crash decapitation he'd seen that day, some little kid running around naked through rooms with dog shit on the floor, I'd remind him of our earlier, shared dream of his teaching phys ed in the same school where I worked. You could take classes this fall, I'd say. Just give yourself the option, at least.

Are you fucking kidding me? Patrick would reply. His teeth would be clenched, his body rigid in the bed next to mine. Do you really think this is why I'm telling you this shit? So you can give me permission to quit?

Even before I see the shape of the vehicle in the driveway, I know whose it is, and when I answer the door, Penny doesn't move, not even to take her hands from the pockets of her coat. Her truck is still running, the high beams still aimed at my kitchen windows. “I know you know something,” she says.

“I don't know anything.” Behind me, I hear Aaron slide off the couch, his controller clattering to the floor, and so I walk out onto the steps, close the door behind me. There's no one else in the truck, and I wonder where Penny's daughter is right now.

“Don't fuck around with me, Megan.” She says it like I fuck around with other people all the time.

“He's at the station. I just talked to Patrick five minutes ago.”

“I thought you said you didn't know anything.”

This is it, I tell myself, this is the last time I run interference for Carl Fayette. But I know that's not true. The first time I met Carl's girlfriend, Jessica had hugged me without warning, began talking about how she'd been partnered with Patrick during pepper-spray training at the academy. It was so nice to go through that with a guy who didn't need to act all tough, she said, and Jessica's still the only female officer who's genuinely happy when I make one of my rare appearances at the bar, the only one who, cop or no cop, acknowledges that we are two women with a man in common, and that we can be friends. The rest of them barely speak to me, and I can tell they're all disappointed Patrick and I haven't split up yet. Squealing on Carl means squealing on Jessica, and I won't do it. “God, Penny, what is this?” I fold my arms, make my teeth chatter. “Give me a break.”

Penny stares at me for a moment, then begins walking back to her truck. This isn't for show, she's really going to leave humiliated, having gotten nothing in return for her accusation, and she'll never be able to call me again, neither as a friend nor a fellow sufferer. “Penny wait.” I follow her down the steps and into the snow, the red and green Christmas lights reflecting in the silver trim of my gym sneakers.

She turns around with a look of weary suspicion. “What do you want, Megan?” she asks, and I can feel my gut unwinding as I realize what I'm about to do. It will only be a furthering of the lie, for one thing, but I don't see any other way to respond and still call myself a human being.

“I swear to God I don't know anything,” I say. “Please come in.”

Penny sniffs, clears her throat, and for a moment I think she's going to lay into me, say I know you've always hated me, you must love this, but then she opens reaches into her truck, turns the engine off.

We walk back to the house without speaking, but when I push the door open, Aaron is standing right there, so close that I almost knock him over. His little pink face looks so lost and lonely that Penny has to laugh. “Oh no, Aaron,” she says, “Where did Mommy go?” She laughs again when he tries to duck between my legs and the row of cabinets beneath the counter. “He's so shy,” Penny says.

“Only around people he doesn't know,” I say.

“Alicia's at a friend's tonight.” She sits down at the kitchen table, waits as I make coffee. “I guess I just got lonely or something.”

It's hard for me to picture Alicia with friends. As far as I can tell, Penny's daughter is herself practicing to be a mute, and I wonder why they decided against having any more children. One of them, at least, must have come the conclusion that, given the current situation, it's probably for the best, and now poor Alicia will have to grow up dealing with all of this by herself. I reminded again of how lucky I am, not only to have two parents who live close-by and still love each other, but four older siblings as well. If any kind of ruptured had occurred, my brothers and sisters would've formed a phalanx around me, and that's why I pushed to have another baby now, before Aaron gets too old. I don't believe in only children.

When the coffee's ready, I lower myself into the seat across from Penny, pull Aaron onto my lap. He leans forward, starts running his fingers across the tabletop and pushing the placemats up against one another, and I drawl him backward, against the familiar newness of my stomach. “Stop it,” I say, and then we play the game where I try to bind two of his hands together with one of mine, and I lose. “Do you want me to call Patrick?” I ask.

“Oh, I'm fine,” Penny says. “How far along are you?”

“Four months.”

Penny nods, lifts her cup to her lips with both hands. It doesn't bother me that, sitting there in her long coat and clutching her coffee, wisps of red hair plastered against her cheek, Penny looks more beautiful than I do on my best days. It's that knowing smile, that soft, slow tone of voice, as if she's a woman in some elemental way that I'm not. Her coming here is part of this, and now that the jealous queen has mastered herself, she is going to hold court here in this simple schoolteacher's house. “How've you been feeling?” she asks.

“Fine.”

“Has Patrick told you about what's happening in court?”

“No,” I say. “I don't like to hear about that stuff.” This isn't true anymore, and I actually know quite a bit about this particular case. A pregnant woman had called the station to complain about her boyfriend. He'd spent the last six hours kicking her ass, she'd said, but then when they'd tried to arrest him, she'd bitten through the sleeve of Carl's uniform. Then she'd bit her own lip and tried to spit on the wound, claiming she had hepatitis. Then she'd intentionally shit her pants in the back of Carl's cruiser. But if it makes Penny feel better to think I'm some little kid, I'll play along.

“You don't want to, believe me. Everybody hates cops, you know?”

No, I think, even as my mouth makes its sympathetic hmmmm, everybody hates cops like Carl. This is the first time Aaron's heard that someone might hate his father, and even though I can't tell if the comment registered with him or not, I could still kill Penny for saying it. Up until now, Aaron's Dad has been someone who helps people, who makes bad men stop, and I don't want to have to explain about how sometimes even the people the bad men are hurting hate his father. You know what I think? Patrick said the night after they'd arrested the pregnant woman. I think people deserve what they get. And you know what else? I think I might actually be an evil person for thinking this. By now I've learned not to even hint that he should give up being a police officer--since this is what he calls himself, refusing to even let the word “cop” be said in his presence--but I still think it. Yes, I think, you've done your best, you're good at your job, you can handle yourself. Now quit.

Aaron leans forward, spilling himself in half over my arms. “You know what?” I say, letting him go. “I'm going to call Patrick again. I just don't want Carl to be worried if he gets home and wonders where you are.” I hug the phone to my shoulder, avoiding Penny's eyes, and when Patrick picks up, I let him know through every code of our secret language that Carl is to stop whatever it is he's doing, come over here and get his wife out of my house.

There was a time, though, when even being a police officer wasn't enough. A few of the guys on the force are ex-military, and for a while Patrick was considering joining the Marines. Maybe he really hadn't done his part, he reasoned, maybe he'd be a better police officer, a better person, if he did just one four-year bid. It was as if he honestly thought he could put himself in harm's way, move himself across the ocean to places where human life was a million times cheaper than on even the worst street in Manchester, and that I'd have to sit and take it, if only to make up for the fact that I'd once doubted he was cut out for law enforcement. For the first time, I began to think about divorce, to rehearse ways of explaining to my family and friends why Patrick and I were ending a ten-year relationship when I was pregnant and we'd just bought a house, ways that wouldn't include admitting that the baby's conception was the only time we'd had sex that entire fall, or that my husband was leaving me because he thought I was a wimp. Or that I was leaving him because I was tired of being thought of in this way.

That spring, the hornets that had spent the winter sleeping in our walls began to wake up, and when I came home from school, there'd be at least one on each windowsill. A half-dozen more would be roaming the ceiling and walls, and I couldn't even sit down or even pick up a newspaper without first examining every inch of every surface I was about to come into contact with. I even found one in the bed once, and so I took to sleeping in long pants, terrified that one would crawl up my thigh in the night, sting me awake. At first, Patrick just laughed, but then he began to get annoyed. Just vacuum them up, for Christ's sake, he'd say. Or at least trap them in a glass so I can get rid of them when I get home. He had bigger things to worry about, he said, and one night we'd lain awake as he'd explained how, if a certain likely event occurred in one Central Asian country, it could very well bring about a change in a neighboring country's upcoming elections, inflaming a specific ethnic group in an outlying province and starting an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. The end result would be that the Muslims would have a nuclear weapon, and Patrick was staring at the ceiling, ticking off what would happen next until I thought I would scream. So that means you should join the Marines? I said.

Well, someone's got to do something. Someone's got to be worry about it.

Hey, I'm worried. I'm worried for two.

Oh, that's right, he exploded. Only you care about the baby. I don't care about him at all.

Evidently not, if you're going to join the Marines.

There are wolves, there are sheep, and there are sheepdogs. Patrick was saying this quite a bit back then, usually in his weariest of voices, and predicating it with There are three types of people in this world. It was a cop thing, for sure.

Oh, fuck you.

Don't worry about it. He turned onto his side, away from me, clutched his pillow to his face. You just keep those hornets under wraps and we'll be all set.

I didn't say anything after that. I just lay there in the darkness, not waiting for an apology, or even for my anger to subside. In fact, I realized I was feeling the way men must feel when they've finally had enough, just can't stop themselves from taking a swing at the woman they claim to love. When I knew Patrick was asleep, I reached down between his legs, took the skin of his inner right thigh between my fingers and twisted, the only time I'd ever tried to physically hurt another human being.

He was over me in a second, me with his knees. What the fuck was that?

A hornet. I went to pinch him again, but he slapped my hand away, grabbed both of my wrists and forced them onto the bed. For a moment we stayed that way, my stomach rising up between our bodies, and then he jumped off the bed, went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

When I went in fifteen minutes later, he was still sitting on the toilet with the lid down, his elbows on his knees. Did you come in here so you wouldn't hit me? I asked, but he didn't answer or even look at me. You know what? I took a step closer. If there was a big nuclear war and my Mom and Dad were dead and your parents were dead and our son's face god melted off and there was no more United States, I still wouldn't let you join the goddamned Marines. What I didn't say was because then we wouldn't be together, and that's all I really care about. I wasn't sure if this was really true anymore, and I didn't want to give him any excuse to act like this was another instance where he to be “strong for both of us,” either.

His face wouldn't really melt off, Patrick said. He wasn't smiling, but it looked as if he might, in an moment. That's not what happens with acute radiation poisoning.

You know what I mean. I swayed a little, not in a sexy way, but as if I had been hit, a physical acknowledgement that all the things I'd just said might very well come to pass. They were already happening, in a way, right there in the bathroom, we were already dying, radioactive snow flying out of a dark yellow sky, and I wanted to climb on top of him and fuck, fuck, fuck, but I knew I wouldn't. We hadn't had sex since I'd become pregnant either, and I was afraid of how impersonal it would seem, as if it really were the last time. I could feel the fight beginning to end, and I knew that if we just waited a few days, it would feel like us again.

Do you know what happens with acute radiation poisoning?

No, I said, I don't, and for once he didn't tell me.

Now Patrick is walking through the door, and Carl is coming behind him, kicking the snow off his boots and smiling like Santa Claus himself. “Hello, hello,” he says, but when he looks at me, the smile turns into a jeer. I can imagine the conversation that must've taken place at Kilarney's, Carl trying to brush Patrick off, Patrick remaining calm but insistent, refusing to leave until Carl paid for his tab and stood up, swearing bitterly the whole time. Jessica would've been pushing him out the door as well, her own anger directed more at herself than at Penny, and probably still at the bar now, wondering how her life had gotten to be this way, dating a married man who doesn't even treat his wife well.

“Oh my God,” Penny stands up slowly, as if should doesn't know whether she should fly into Carl's arms or find the sharpest knife in the counter-rack. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, nothing.” Carl stands in the center of the room, beaming. I thought of it myself, he is saying. I wanted to come here and surprise you. I love you, you know. At that moment, Aaron comes into the kitchen, and Patrick lays one open palm down at his side, inviting him to come over and rub his head against it like a cat. “What's up, bud?” Patrick asks, and Aaron's response is lost as he mashes his face against his father's pants. They're so happy to see one another, they've missed each other so much, and I can feel the jealousy kicking in, thin and sick and bitter. But I don't want to be mad at them, I want to be mad at Carl, so I leap to my feet, clap my hands together.

“It's a Christmas Miracle,” I say. Patrick gives me a look, and Carl's smile freezes on his face.

“Megan,” he says. “Meg, Meg, Megan.”

“Yes?” I ask. It's okay with me if Carl Fayette hates my guts. It really is. Even as I keep his secrets.

“I got.” Aaron holds up three fingers up to his face, stretches his cheek with one of them. “I got to level three.”

“You did?” Patrick asks, his face suddenly one of intense interest, but when he looks at me, I shake my head. I don't think the game Aaron was playing even has levels.

“Carl come on,” Penny says. She takes a step forward, puts her hand on Carl's shoulder.

“What a nice little house.” Carl swivels his head, makes a show of looking around the kitchen. “You're kind of a little princess around here, aren't you?”

“Sure am.” I bat my eyelashes at him. “I've got my crown upstairs.”

“Get your way a lot, I bet.”

“Oh, every time. I run my husband ragged.”

“I know.” Carl nods. He's not smiling anymore. “I know you do.”

“Carl, let's go.” Penny pushes her husband, but she's unable to force his body into even the shadow of a movement. He flicks her arm away without even looking in her direction, and out of the corner of my eye I see Patrick softly push Aaron toward the living room, begin to shake his jacket off. His eyes never leave the back of Carl's head, and I stifle the urge to laugh out loud. Carl's half a foot taller than Patrick, and significantly wider. If I do goad Carl into crossing some sort of line, I'm not quite sure what he plans to do about it, especially with Aaron hanging all over him. But this doesn't make me want to stop. In fact it only makes me want to keep going. Let's do it, I think, let's find out once and for all who's the toughest, who's the most callous. Fuck this fucking around.

“What can I tell you?” I say. “I'm high maintenance. I want my husband to come home after work every night.”

Carl opens his mouth, winding up again, but before he can respond, Penny opens the kitchen door. “This is so stupid,” she says, then walks out by herself.

For a moment, Carl glowers at me. Then, all at once, his entire body seems to sag, as if he's just realized that without his wife in the room, he's just a man standing in the kitchen of somebody else's house, unwanted and getting in the way of dinner. “Thanks a lot, Megan,” he says.

“Don't blame me,” I say. “Just answer your phone when your wife calls.” He doesn't say anything else, or even look at Patrick. He just leaves. As the door closes, Aaron begins to cry, and Patrick scoops him up, shakes his head at me. Not angrily, not even in a bewildered sort of way, but the way you shake your head at someone who's done something you don't totally agree with but can't help but admire.

“Never heard Mommy talk that way before, huh buddy?” he asks, and Aaron buries his red, screaming face, the one that seems to get narrower every day, into his shoulder. His answer comes as a long, grating scream, an absurdly drawn out No-oo-oo-oo-oo that makes us both laugh.

Later in bed, I ask Patrick about what happened in court. “Not much.” He laughs, remembering. “She said she had diarrhea and we wouldn't let her use the bathroom.”

“Did she?” It's not inconceivable that such a thing could happen, especially with Carl, or that Patrick would choose to not tell me about it. But when he turns over, he looks disgusted that I would even ask.

“I saw her face. She went like this.” He clenches his teeth in an exaggerated pantomime of someone trying to go to the bathroom, glares at me with a hatred so comical that I'm surprised he's capable of replicating it.

“No,” I say, laughing. “She didn't look like that.”

“Oh yes, she did.” Patrick makes the face again, and I laugh so hard that I begin hiccupping. He waits for me to calm down before sliding his arms around me, and I can tell by the thoughtful expression on his face that he's thinking about my little stand-off with Carl Fayette. “Mama Sheepdog,” he says, and I don't know if it's his words or the way he pulls me to him--rough and playful, almost sexless--that brings the anger glittering back to the surface.

“Don't call me that,” I snap, and I turn over onto my back. After a moment, he shifts his body downward, lays his head lightly on my stomach. I let him stay there, run my hand once through his hair, all the apology I can manage.