Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving Page B

table before Dominic could poach the shrimp in his marinara sauce. Sobbing, the distraught young woman went to bed without her dinner.
    In the night, Annunziata awoke to the confusing sounds of Rosie’s miscarriage—“confusing” because, at that moment, Nunzi didn’t know if the loss of the baby was a blessing or a curse. Dominic Baciagalupo lay in his bed, listening to his second or once-removed cousin crying. The toilet kept flushing, the bathtub was filling—there must have been blood—and, over it all, came the sympathetic crooning of his mother’s most consoling voice. “Rosie, maybe it’s better this way. Now you don’t need to quit your job—not even temporarily! Now we don’t have to come up with a husband for you—not a real one or the imaginary kind! Listen to me, Rosie—it wasn’t a baby, not yet.”
    But Dominic lay wondering, What have I done? Even an imaginary marriage to Rosie gave the boy a nearly constant erection. (Well, he was sixteen years old—no wonder!) When he heard that Rosie had stopped crying, young Dom held his breath. “Did Dominic hear me—did I wake him up, do you think?” the boy heard the girl ask his mother.
    “Well, he sleeps like the dead,” Nunzi said, “but you did make quite a ruckus—understandably, of course.”
    “He must have heard me!” the girl cried. “I have to talk to him!” she said. Dominic could hear her step out of the tub. There was the vigorous rubbing of a towel, and the sound of her bare feet on the bathroom floor.
    “ I can explain to Dom in the morning,” his mother was saying, but his not-really-a-cousin’s bare feet were already padding down the hall to the spare room.
    “No! I have something to tell him!” Rosie called. Dominic could hear a drawer open; a coat hanger fell in her closet. Then the girl was in his room—she just opened his door, without knocking, and lay down on the bed beside him. He could feel her wet hair touch his face.
    “I heard you,” he told her.
    “I’m going to be fine,” Rosie began. “I’ll have a baby, some other day.”
    “Does it hurt?” he asked her. He kept his face turned away from her on the pillow, because he had brushed his teeth too long ago—he was afraid his breath was bad.
    “I didn’t think I wanted the baby until I lost it,” Rosie was saying. He couldn’t think of what to say, but she went on. “What you said to me, Dominic, was the nicest thing anyone ever said to me—I’ll never forget it.”
    “I would marry you, you know—I wasn’t just saying it,” the boy said.
    She hugged him and kissed his ear. She was on top of the covers, and he was under them, but he could still feel her body pressing against his back. “I’ll never have a nicer offer—I know it,” his not-really-a-cousin said.
    “Maybe we could get married when I’m a little older,” Dominic suggested.
    “Maybe we will !” the girl cried, hugging him again.
    Did she mean it, the sixteen-year-old wondered, or was she just being nice?
    From the bathroom, where Annunziata was draining and scrubbing the tub, their voices were audible but indistinct. What surprised Nunzi was that Dominic was talking; the boy rarely spoke. His voice was still changing—it was getting lower. But from the moment Annunziata had heard Rosie say, “Maybe we will !”—well, Dominic began to talk and talk, and the girl’s interjections grew fainter but lengthier. What they said was indecipherable, but they were whispering as breathlessly as lovers.
    As she went on compulsively cleaning the bathtub, Annunziata no longer wondered if the miscarriage had been a blessing or a curse; the miscarriage was no longer the point. It was Rosie Calogero herself—was she a blessing or a curse? What had Nunzi been thinking? She’d opened her house to a pretty, intelligent (and clearly emotional) young woman—one who’d been rejected by her lover and banished from home by her family—without realizing what an irresistible temptation the