He’s tugged forward by the sight, he can’t help himself. He’s never felt this excited about Stella, not even at the beginning. Stella was an accident, a mistake, and now she’s practically living with him. She’s even talking about children, for God’s sake. In the car on the way home from Gaia, the same frigid February night they’d run into Beth, Stella was quieter than usual as they crawled through the dark toward home. She held their dinner — two fat slices of turkey loaf — on her lap, under the roaring heat vent to keep it warm. Normally she’d have been talking a mile a minute, restlessly dipping into their takeout and eating crumbling pieces of turkey loaf with her fingers, but instead she sat with her cap pulled down to her eyebrows and watched the blurred lights of oncoming cars and the snow gliding in long streaks toward the windshield, all the while making those abrupt little gestures that meant she was having a conversation with herself in the Stella Continuum. At last she sighed and turned to him, and he thought: this won’t be good.
“What?” He shifted in his seat, his parka hissing.
“We haven’t talked about kids,” she said.
Wherever Beth was at the moment — Kevin realized with a pang that he had no idea anymore where she and Noah lived — she was picking up the vibe of this conversation, hearing it in real time over whatever jungle telegraph women are hooked into and, of course, laughing her ass off. Joining her from wherever he was, was McNulty, though his laughter was less sarcastic and triumphant and I-told-you-so, and more rueful and world-weary and I-been-there-buddy. Back when they were both working at Big Star, McNulty had somehow managed to score a younger girlfriend for a time, a tall, spooky redhead, and he’d gotten her pregnant. He told Kevin about it late one soporific weekday afternoon when they were both at the cash register. McNulty wreathed his head in a cloud of cigarette smoke as if he was trying to hide behind it.
“Is she going to have it?” Kevin dropped his voice, even though there were no customers in the store. He could only wonder what that would be like, to be a father at McNulty’s advanced age of forty.
“No,” said McNulty, wearily rubbing his face. “I’m paying for an abortion.” He breathed smoke. “Least I could do.” He sucked the smoke back in. “But she doesn’t want to see me after that.”
Kevin stammered something, but McNulty only shook his head and stared through the swirling smoke as if at something on the horizon. “The thing is,” he said, “at my age, if you want to hang onto a younger woman, you have to be willing to give her children.”
Only now did he focus on Kevin through the blue haze.
“I don’t expect you to understand this now,” McNulty said, in his diffident stoner drone. “But someday, you will.”
And now, Kevin did. In the stifling silence of the car, the tires of his Accord crunching over packed snow and the chains of the cars in the opposite lane rattling like maracas, Kevin thought of all the things he could say. We haven’t talked about kids? I’ll say we haven’t! And we’re not going to! Not now, not ever. It was one of those heart-freezing moments, when they wait to let you have it until you’re in an enclosed space, with no place to run. (When Beth cornered him in the bath, for example.) What are you talking about — kids? Are you crazy? We’re not like that, Stella. Their relationship was predicated on a cute meet and a blow job, and maintained on the basis of a lot of semisincerely enthusiastic sex. But of course he couldn’t say that, so he said nothing, listening to the chains of the oncoming cars clinking at him like Marley’s ghost.
“So what do you think?” she said.
His mouth was so dry, he wasn’t sure he could speak, even if he wanted to.
“I’m almost fifty,” he said at last.
“So?”
“So, figure it out. Say we start tonight, I’d be fifty-one by time the kid would be born. That means I’d be”—God help him, was this true? — “nearly seventy before he graduates from high school.”
This would have silenced Beth, because it would have made her furious, leading to an explosion later on. But give Stella credit, he’s thinking now, in the heat under the pedestrian bridge in Austin, Stella’s not an idiot, Stella can read subtext like a Kremlinologist. And Stella’s wily, she’s not a slugger like Beth was. Stella would never ask him point-blank, “Don’t you want to be with me for the next eighteen years?” No, Stella’s got footwork, Stella floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. Stella knows how to not take no for an answer.
“You’d be so cute,” she’d said, reaching across the car. His hood was pushed back around his earlobes, and her glove rasped along the fabric as she stroked the side of his head. “You’ll have graying sides at her graduation, like that guy on The Sopranos.”
“Paulie Walnuts?” Kevin said. “That’s your role model for fatherhood?”
Stella laughed and said, in her best HBO Jersey accent, “He’s a good earner!”
Then she cracked open the plastic shell and filled the car with the warm scent of turkey loaf, popping a piece between her lips. Leaving Kevin’s head ringing with the idea of children, just like she meant to.
But who would bring children into the world, now? The pillars under the ramp of the pedestrian bridge are spattered with stickers and stenciled slogans, which Kevin recognizes from the kiosks and sidewalks around the Diag back home. HAPPY OILDEPENDENCE DAY says one sticker. 100,000 DEAD IRAQIS — HAD ENOUGH WAR YET? says another. That’s the pitch he needs to try on Stella, to discourage her from childbearing. New York, Madrid, London, Mumbai — it’s only a matter of time before it happens again: not if, but when — and next time it’ll be a car bomb on State Street, a suicide bomber at Briarwood Mall, an airliner dropped from the sky over Metro by a Stinger. Plague virus in a reservoir, nerve gas in the subway, a nuke in a cargo container. Everybody knows it, even Stella. Buchanan Street Station freaked her out, too.