Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon

Cara’s head fell against her shoulder. “Richard.” Dorothy turned, not expecting Richard to accept a hug from her but obliged by her heart and sense of the proprieties to offer him one.
    He looked up at her, chewing on his lower lip, and the fury that she saw in his eyes made her take a step closer to Cara, to the baby in her belly, which he so obviously hated with a passion he could not, as a decent man, permit himself to acknowledge.
    “I’m all right,” he said.
    “I don’t see how you could be,” Dorothy said. “That baby in there is the child of a monster who raped your wife. How can you possibly be all right with that? I wouldn’t be.”
    She felt Cara stiffen. The hum of the air-conditioning filled the room.
    “I still think I’m going to skip the hug,” Richard said.
    The examination proceeded. Cara displayed the pale hemisphere of her belly to Dorothy. She lay back and spread her legs, and Dorothy, a glove snapped over her hand, reached up into her and investigated the condition of her cervix. Dorothy took Cara’s blood pressure and checked her pulse and then helped her onto the scale.
    “You are perfect,” Dorothy announced as Cara dressed herself. “You just keep on doing all the things you tell me you’ve been doing. Your baby is going to be perfect, too.”
    “What do you think it is?” Richard said, speaking for the first time since the examination had begun.
    “Is? You mean the sex?”
    “They couldn’t tell on the ultrasound. I mean, I know there’s no way to really know for sure, but I figured you’re a midwife, maybe you have some kind of mystical secret way of knowing.”
    “As a matter of fact I am never wrong about that,” Dorothy said. “Or so very rarely that it’s the same as always being right.”
    “And?”
    Dorothy put her right hand on Cara’s belly. She was carrying high, which tradition said meant the baby was a boy, but this had nothing to do with Dorothy’s feeling that the child was unquestionably male. It was just a feeling. There was nothing mystical to Dorothy about it.
    “That’s a little boy. A son.”
    Richard shook his head, face pinched, and let out a soft, hopeless gust of air through his teeth. He pulled Cara to her feet, and handed her her purse.
    “Son of the monster,” he said. “Wolfman Junior.”
    “I have been wrong once or twice,” Dorothy said softly, reaching for his hand.
    He eluded her grasp once more.
    “I’m sort of hoping for a girl,” he said.
    “Girls are great,” said Dorothy.
    Cara was due on the fifth of May. When the baby had not come by the twelfth, she went down to Melrose to see Dorothy, who palpated her abdomen, massaged her perineum with jojoba oil, and told her to double the dose of a vile tincture of black and blue cohosh which Cara had been taking for the past week.
    “How long will you let me go?” Cara said.
    “It’s not going to be an issue,” Dorothy said.
    “But if it is. How long?”
    “I can’t let you go much past two weeks. But don’t worry about it. You’re seventy-five percent effaced. Everything is nice and soft in there. You aren’t going to go any two weeks.”
    On the fifteenth of May and again on the seventeenth, Cara and a friend drove into Laurel Canyon to dine at a restaurant whose house salad was locally reputed to contain a mystery leaf that sent women into labor. On the eighteenth, Dorothy met Cara at the office of her OB in West Hollywood. A nonstress test was performed. The condition of her amniotic sac and its contents was evaluated. The doctor was tight-lipped throughout, and his manner toward Dorothy Cara found sardonic and cold. She guessed that they had had words before Cara’s arrival or were awaiting her departure before doing so. As he left to see his next patient, the doctor advised Cara to schedule an induction for the next day.
    “We don’t want that baby to get much bigger.”
    He went out.
    “I can get you two more days,” said Dorothy, sounding dry and