Homeland and Other Stories by Barbara Kingsolver

whole question of how many,” said my wife Lena from the bedroom while I was brushing my teeth. “If you have one, you almost have to have another one. People act like you’re a criminal if you don’t.”
    The subject had threaded itself completely through our lives, like a snaking green vine through the boughs of a tree. If there was no formal introduction to the subject, if she didn’t say “At work today…” or “You know, I was thinking…” then I knew it was this conversation we were having.
    I rinsed my toothbrush and hung it in the brass ring next to Lena’s. “Isn’t that getting the cart before the donkey?” I asked.
    â€œI suppose.”
    I came into the bedroom, where she was sitting up in bed with a book. She took off her glasses. Lena is thirty-seven, and an amazing person to see. Every man in love believes his wife is beautiful, I know, but I also know that people look at Lena, and look again. She has long, very straight black hair with one lock ofwhite streaming out like shooting stars above her high forehead. Every member of her mother’s family has this forelock, which is controlled by a single dominant gene, but in Lena that gene has found its perfect resting place.
    â€œWhatever else there is to consider,” she said, “we both have to agree, before going ahead with it. Either one of us has veto power.”
    I assumed this meant that she was leaning toward, but that I was probably leaning against, and ought to speak up. Most of the men I knew thought of their children as something their wives had produced, nurtured, and given to the world like tomatoes grown for the market. With Lena it couldn’t be this way.
    â€œI don’t know what I think,” I said. “I guess I’ve just assumed that if you really wanted children I’d have no right to object.”
    She looked surprised. “If I wanted to do it solo, what’s the point of being married? I could just use a turkey baster.” Lena had a friend in St. Louis who had done just that.
    â€œI know,” I said. “But it’s hard for me to say what I really think.”
    Lena’s eyes are a very serious, oceanic shade of blue. “What do you really think?” she asked me.
    â€œWell. I have to admit the idea overwhelms me. To rock the boat, just when I feel like I’ve finally gotten my life arranged the right way.” I considered this. “From what I can tell, it’s not even like rocking the boat. It’s like sinking the boat, and swimming for eighteen years.”
    She started to say something, but didn’t.
    â€œBut I’m really not sure,” I said. “I’ll think about it some more.”
    â€œGood.” She kissed me and turned out the light.
    It seemed odd to have this question arise in my life now, when other men my age were beginning to groan about the price of college tuition. I couldn’t remember a time in life when I’dever clearly visualized my own progeny. Lena and I came together relatively late in the scheme of things, without the usual assumptions people have about starting a family and a life. We bought a two-story house in the maple shade of Convocation Street and assembled our collective belongings there, but as for a life, each of us already had one. I am nearly forty, and a professor of botany. Before I met Lena, three years ago, I devoted myself entirely to opening young minds onto the mysteries of xylem and phloem. I teach the other half of the chicken-and-egg story, the miracle of life that starts with pollen and ends with the astonishing, completed fact of a fruit.
    Also, I am a great gardener. Some would call it puttering, but I feel that I commune with nature in the tradition of many great thinkers: Thoreau, Whitman, Aristotle. My communion is simply more domestic. I receive inspiration from cauliflowers. I have always had friends among my colleagues, but never a