February by Lisa Moore

children came by accident, every single one of them. Cal was a reader, of course; he read everything he got his hands on. They both read. Helen had a book in her overnight bag and so did Cal, and after they’d had sex and showered and looked through the TV channels and eaten and drunk some more beer, they each got out their books, and they had the bedside lamps on. They fell asleep like that. Cal with a book over his chest.
    Neither of them had paid any attention to the Church; whatever the Church said about birth control they had ignored entirely. The trouble was that they simply could not keep the idea of birth control in their heads. The smell of latex and spermicide—they’d done that the first few times, maybe. The idea of birth control had been a hard one to keep hold of. Have you got a condom? I thought you had them. I thought you had them.
    And Helen had thought, when she was pregnant, It’s a boy and he will be like Cal, and my son will be like that: black hair and blue eyes and thousands of mirrors smashing in his wake.
    But of course John looked nothing like Cal. He was not clumsy and he looked like her, exactly like Helen.
    . . . . .
    Jane Telling John, November 2008
    JANE IS AT the airport in Toronto. She’d been on her way home to Alberta and she had discovered, in the terminal at Pearson Airport, that she could not go home. She’d been sitting at a crowded Tim Hortons with an apple-cinnamon tea and her laptop. There had been an email from her father. The baby had jabbed a toe into her spine. A toe or a drill bit.
    A young woman with drawn-on eyebrows is working the Tim Hortons counter. She has the sweet smile and shiny scalded complexion of someone on antidepressants, and there is a scar, a soft white wrinkle, running from her nose to the top of her misshapen lip.
    The customer in front of Jane had wanted an oatmeal raisin cookie, and the girl, whose wide backside was squeezed flat in polyester pants, could not see the oatmeal raisin cookies.
    Right in front of you, the customer said. The girl’s plump hand with the square of wax paper hovered over the donuts and a blush crawled up her neck.
    Oatmeal raisin, the customer said. She was wearing a glossy black plastic coat that squeaked when she lifted her arm to point. A clean, uncomplicated sound. Jane felt glad to be back in Canada. She was sick of New York, the grime and abrasive twang and the poverty she had documented— unflinchingly , her supervisor had said—in her master’s thesis. She was leaving after four years, just as things were about to change for the better.
    Second shelf from the bottom, Jane said. Three trays over. No, three. One, two, yes. Jane listened to the woman unfold her arms, the moist plastic making kissing sounds. She thought of the snow over a field of stubble back home, and the Rockies off in the distance, smoky and white-capped. She was at the peak of a euphoric hormonal surge.
    Oatmeal, the customer said again.
    Raisin?
    Oatmeal. Raisin.
    The Tim Hortons girl snatched up a cookie and dropped it in a paper envelope. Anything else, she said. A gold ring hung from her nose like a drip. Then the girl got Jane’s tea and stood with it in her hand, staring forward with what might have been paralyzed awe or a prolonged yawn. She gave herself a little shake and put the cup on the counter.
    When’s your baby coming, the girl asked.
    February, Jane said.
    I got three at home, the girl said. My brain went out with the placenta. But it’s not too bad because I live near the airport so I get to work easy. My mom helps out.
    Jane got a table and pried the lid off the tea and the steam smelled of apples, and she felt the baby’s hand—she thought it was a hand—wobbling her tight tummy.
    Then she read her father’s email. Jane would not be staying with her father after all. She pressed her eyes, first one, then the other, with a crumpled paper serviette.
    We’ll go it alone, Jane whispered to the baby. What she had actually