CLAIRE AND I were sitting up in her bed that night after our outing at Susie’s, having a two-girl pajama party. Edmund was on tour with the San Francisco Symphony, and Claire had said, “I really, really don’t want to go into labor here all by myself alone, girlfriend.”

  I looked over at her, lying in the huge divot she’d made in her memory-foam mattress with her rotund 260 pounds.

  “I can’t get any bigger,” she said. “It’s not possible. I wasn’t this big with two boys, so how can this little girl-child turn me into the blimp that ate the planet?”

  I laughed, thinking it was possible that when she’d had her first baby twenty years ago, she was a few sizes smaller than when she’d conceived Ruby Rose, but I didn’t say so.

  “What can I get you?” I asked.

  “Anything in the freezer compartment,” Claire said.

  “Copy that,” I said, grinning at her. I returned with a carton of Chunky Monkey and two spoons, climbed back into the bed, saying, “It’s cruel to call an ice cream Chunky Monkey when that’s what it turns you into.”

  Claire cackled, pried off the lid, and as we took turns dipping our spoons in, she said to me, “So how’s it going with you and Joe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Living together, you idiot. Are you thinking of getting seriously hooked up? As in married?”

  “I like the way you kind of edge into a subject.”

  “Hell. You’re not such a subtle creature yourself.”

  I tipped my spoon in her direction - touché, my friend - then I started talking. Claire knew most of it: ............