“I’ve never seen anything like this,” the managing editor had said, describing the piles of mail, baby blankets, baby books, teddy bears, and assorted religious and secular good-luck icons that had filled the Moxie mailroom. “Would you consider writing for us regularly?” She had it all figured out – I’d do monthly dispatches from the single-mom front, ongoing updates on my life and Joy’s. “I want you to tell us what it’s like to live your life, in your body – to work, to date, to balance your single friends with your obligations as a mother,” she said.

“What about Bruce?” I asked. I was thrilled with the chance to write for Moxie (and even more thrilled once they’d told me what it paid), but I was less than enamoured with the thought of seeing my articles appear next to Bruce’s every month, watching him tell readers about his sex life while I filled them in on spit-up and poopy diapers and how I could never find a bathing suit that fit.

“Bruce’s contract hasn’t been renewed,” she said crisply. Which was just fine with me, I said, and happily agreed to her terms.

I spent December settling back into my new apartment, and my life. I kept things easy. I’d wake up in the mornings and get dressed and dress the baby, put Nifkin on his leash, push Joy in the stroller, walk to the park, sit in the sun. Nifkin would fetch his ball, the neighbors would fuss over Joy. After, I’d meet Samantha for coffee, and practice being out in public, around cars and buses and strangers and the hundred thousand other things I’d learned to be afraid of after Joy came into the world so abruptly.

Along those lines, I found a therapist, too: a warm woman about my mother’s age with a comforting way about her, plus an endless supply of Kleenex, who did not seem at all alarmed when I spent the first two sessions crying nonstop, and the third one telling the once-upon-a-time story of how much my father had loved me and how it had hurt me when he’d left, rather than addressing what surely seemed like the more pertinent issues at hand.

I called Betsy, my editor, and made arrangements to come back part-time, to pitch in on some big projects, to work from home if I was needed. I called my mother and made a standing date: Every Friday night, dinner at her house, and Joy and I would sleep over so we could go to Wee Ones swimming class at the Jewish Center the next morning. Joy took to the water like a little duck. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tanya would growl, as Joy paddled her arms, looking adorable in a small pink bathing suit with ruffles all over the bottom. “She’s going to swim like a fish!”

I called Audrey and apologized… well, I did whatever apologizing I could, in between her nonstop apologies for Bruce. She was sorry for how he’d behaved, sorry he hadn’t been there for me, sorriest of all that she hadn’t known so she could have made him do the right thing. Which, of course, wasn’t possible. You can’t make grownups do what they don’t want to do. But I didn’t say any of that.

I told her I’d be honored if she would have a role in Joy’s life. She asked, very nervously, if I had any intention of letting Bruce have a role in Joy’s life. I told her that I didn’t… but I told her that things change. A year ago I couldn’t have imagined myself with a baby. So who knows? Next year maybe Bruce will come over for brunch or a bike ride, and Joy will call him Daddy. Anything’s possible, right?

I didn’t call Bruce. I thought about it and thought about it, turned it over and over in my mind, and looked at it from every angle I could think of, and in the end I decided that I couldn’t. I’d been able to let go of a lot of the anger… but not all of it. Maybe that too would come in time.

“So you haven’t talked to him at all?” Peter asked, as he walked alongside me, balancing one hand beside mine on Joy’s stroller.

“Not once.”

“You don’t hear from him?”

“I hear… things about him. It’s this very Byzantine system. Audrey tells my mother, who tells Tanya, who tells everyone she knows, including Lucy, who usually tells me.”

“How do you feel about that?”

I smiled at him, beneath the sky, which had finally gone completely black. “You sound like my shrink.” I took a deep breath and huffed it out, watching it turn into a silver cloud and blow away. “It was awful at first, and it still is sometimes.”

His voice was very gentle. “But only sometimes?”

I smiled at him. “Hardly ever,” I said. “Hardly every anymore.” I reached for his hand and he squeezed my fingers. “Things happen, you know? That’s my one big lesson from therapy. Things happen, and you can’t make them un-happen. You don’t get do-overs, you can’t roll back the clock, and the only thing you can change, and the only thing it does any good to worry about, is how you let them affect you.”

“So how are you letting this affect you?”

I smiled sideways at him. “You’re very persistent.”

He looked at me seriously. “I have ulterior motives.”

“Oh?”

Peter cleared his throat. “I wonder if you’d… consider me.”

I tilted my head. “For the position of in-house diet counselor?”

“In-house something,” he muttered.

“How old are you, anyway?” I teased. It was the one topic we’d never quite gotten around to during our trips to bookstores and the beach and to the park with Joy.

“How old do you think I am?”

I took my honest guess and revised it five years downward. “Forty?”

He sighed. “I’m thirty-seven.”

I was so startled at that there was no way to even try to hide it. “Really?”

His voice, usually slow and deep and self-assured, sounded higher, hesitant, as he explained. “It’s just that I’m so tall, I think… and my hair started going gray when I was eighteen… and, you know, being a professor, I think everyone just makes certain assumptions”

“You’re thirty-seven?”

“Do you want to see my driver’s license?”

“No,” I said, “no, I believe you.”

“I know,” he began, “I know I’m still probably too old for you, and I’m probably not exactly what you had in mind.”

“Don’t be silly…”

“I’m not glamorous or quick on my feet.” He looked down at his feet and sighed. “I’m kind of a plodder, I guess.”

“Plotter? Like, Murder, She Wrote?”

A faint twitch of a smile lifted his lips. “Plodder. Like, one foot in front of the other.”

“Especially now with the shinsplints,” I murmured.

“And I… I mean, I really…”

“Have we come to the emotional part of the presentation?” I asked, still teasing. “You don’t mind that I’m a larger woman?”

He wrapped his long fingers around my wrist. “I think you look like a queen,” he said with such intensity that I was startled… and tremendously pleased. “I think you’re the most amazing, exciting woman I’ve ever met. I think you’re smart, and funny, and you have the most wonderful heart…” He paused, swallowing hard. “Cannie.” And then he stopped.

I smiled – a private, contented smile – as he sat there, holding my wrist, waiting for my answer. And I knew what it was, I thought, looking at him looking at me. The answer was that I loved him… that he was as kind and considerate and loving a man as I could ever hope for. That he was warm-hearted, and decent, and sweet, and that we could have adventures together… me, and Peter, and Joy.

“Would you like to be the first man I kiss this millennium?” I inquired.

Peter leaned close. I could feel his warm breath on my cheek. “I would like to be the only man you kiss this millennium,” he said emphatically. And he brushed my neck with his lips… then my ear… then my cheek. I giggled until he kissed my lips to quiet me. Snuggled against my chest, squeezed between us, Joy gave a little shout and waved one fist in the air.

“Cannie?” Peter whispered, his voice pitched low, for my ears only, and one hand in his jacket pocket. “I want to ask you something.”

“Shh,” I said, knowing in my heart what his question was, and what my answer would be. I do, I thought. I will. “Shh,” I said, “they’re starting.”