My mother was 37 years old, twice divorced and childless when she met my father. She had been living in Manhattan for 17 years, having grown up in Connecticut and gone to the Rhode Island School of Design to study painting. She had dozens of friends, went to parties and attended art openings. She smoked pot in the Village and spent Tuesday nights in smoky jazz clubs, sipping martinis and recrossing her legs.

My parents had been set up on a blind date by mutual friends, but the night they were supposed to go out, my mother stood my father up. She’d gone to Long Island that day with a friend to pick strawberries, and by the time she came home, the last thing she felt like doing was going on a blind date with some older businessman from Atlanta.

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Colin is on the other end of the line.

Did you take it?

Yeah.

Well?

You have to wait, like, five minutes, I say.

Oh.

It is January, late at night, and the deep banks of snow outside the windows glow in the dark. Colin is in Atlanta and I am in Vermont. My mother has been dead for exactly one year.

I am back at Marlboro College, picking up after a one-year hiatus following my mother’s death. I’m living off campus, in a subsidized two-story condo in town, with a classmate named Tricia.

Like me, she is a poetry major.

I have been back at Marlboro less than a week when I realize that my period is late. I count the dates backward and then forward again, give it a few more days, and finally buy a test kit at Walmart.

I call Colin that night. We had been seeing each other for less than six months when I left Atlanta to return to school. I had taken a year off from school after my mother’s death, but my father and I both decided that it was time for me to get back in the swing of things.

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