Expecting: A Novel by Ann Lewis Hamilton Page A

when they were dating and imaging their future—how they’d marry and their children would pop out, one after the other. No miscarriages or complications would be involved. Alan and Laurie, their charmed lives. Adoption was mentioned, but almost as a fallback. The thing you do “just in case” or once you have two or three of your own.
    Alan realizes how shallow that sounds now. Shallow and stupid. “Your own.” As if adopted children don’t belong to you? Aren’t part of your family? And yet… “But a stranger’s baby?” Alan says to Laurie. “Suppose the mother is a meth addict, or we do an open adoption where we’re always in contact with the birth parents. Is that what we want? Sharing a child?”
    Laurie sips her wine. “There are risks in having biological children too. Who knows what’ll happen? Babies don’t come with a warranty.”
    Alan nods at Laurie. “Yeah. But shouldn’t we let Dr. God try his Dr. God thing first? Haven’t you always wanted to have somebody inject dye into your fallopian tubes?”
    “No,” she says. “My dream has been to jerk off in a doctor’s office so people can examine my sperm.”
    She grins at him and he has to laugh.
    And then he thinks about it. “So…how exactly are they going to examine my sperm?”
    Laurie smiles at him again. He doesn’t laugh this time.
    ***
    Alan enjoys being married to Laurie because she’s his best friend—and not in that fake what-they-say-on-eHarmony-ads way, but in a real way. Sometimes she reminds him of Matt, his best friend when he was growing up—the perfect hang out, share jokes, belch-the-national-anthem-with pal. His relationship with Laurie is like that. Minus the belching. Plus, he gets to have sex with her.
    He told his parents when he was nine he was never getting married because if he did, he wouldn’t see Matt anymore.
    “Matt and me, we’re going to visit every country. There are almost two hundred , isn’t that incredible?”
    “Incredible,” his mother said.
    She didn’t believe him. But he was sure he’d never find a girl who was fearless, who’d eat bugs and sleep on floors with spiders crawling on her face. What girl would do that?
    On their first date, a Dodgers game, Laurie told Alan one of her dreams was to visit every country in the world, even the hard to get into ones, like North Korea and Cuba. Alan had found his female Matt.
    ***
    The night before Laurie has her first test, he has a nightmare. He dreamed he was in Cuba with Laurie and she was wearing a baby carrier, and when he bent over to look at the baby, inside the carrier he was surprised to see a large bottle of dark Cuban rum.
    “A chip off the old block,” Laurie said to him. “Not to mention one hundred proof.” She pulled out her diaper bag to reveal it was stuffed with cocktail glasses and fresh limes. “Would you like a Cuban daiquiri? They’re quite tasty.”
    When he wakes up, he thinks about telling Laurie the dream but reconsiders. He’ll keep his freaked-out, rum-bottle dream to himself.
    Laurie goes through her testing—ultrasound, X-rays, hysteroscopy, blood work. Nothing shows up. Alan does blood work as well, and when that’s done, it’s time for the sperm sample. They say he can come into the doctor’s office or bring in a specimen from home.
    “Specimen doesn’t seem like the right word,” he tells Laurie.
    “What’s better? Your ‘bodily essence’?” Laurie suggests.
    A clinician at the fertility clinic gives him a small plastic bottle and a paper bag and tells him morning semen is best. He imagines collecting his specimen, driving to Beverly Hills, and getting mugged by a kid who takes the bag, looks inside, and says, “Whoa, what’s this? It looks like jiz.”
    “It’s my bodily essence,” he tells him before he’s pistol-whipped into unconsciousness.
    And how does he go about collecting his specimen at home? Laurie volunteers to buy a sexy French maid outfit.
    “You think this is funny,” he