“the old man,” making Kyla wonder if she is supposed to know him. “The old man never understood me. He was always preoccupied with his It must be awful to be a man, she thinks. To live in a body that can achieve conception but not experience it. Every time Kyla became pregnant, she immediately sat up on the edge of the bed feeling the tingling, the blooming. damn job at that second-rate art school. He never had time for me, not for any of us. Now that he’s retired, he hasn’t changed. You think that when I went all the way home for a visit, he’d want to talk to his only son. No, he wants me to paint the fucking house.” Kyla is relieved to get to the airport parking lot, although it is a place where many bodies have been found in the trunks of many cars. She thinks the trip is over. She’s only got to get him and his luggage out of the car. But Douglas grabs tight at the back of Kyla’s honey hair and attempts to lock her eyes. “You’d better not be lying to me about Donovan. There are tests, you know.” “Why would I lie to you?” Her blue eyes protrude. “I guess you wouldn’t. I’m sorry. It’s just that this is a pretty passionate subject with me and I just thought that maybe, well, that maybe. ...” Kyla pats his hand as he trails off. She knows that what he is suffering from is not passion and she feels sorry for him. She decides to wait with him for his flight. The baggage checked, they are absorbed in themselves, waiting for the time to pass in the late- night airport like a jail sentence. Kyla is thinking about the idle threat of paternity tests. She wonders how much Douglas knows. She wonders if he knows that those blood tests could exclude a man as the possible father with ninety- nine percent accurate results. She wonders if he knows that it is pretty impossible to prove that any one man was the father of any one particular child.. She wonders if he knows that even if the im- munogenetic testing revealed that the HLA and RBC groups matched, and that there was a ninety-nine and one half percent probability of paternity, that only meant that in a metropolitan area of one million males, there lived over four thousand possible fathers. Kyla loses herself in a reverie of numbers and statistics until she notices Douglas wiping his eyes with a soggy Kleenex. She is flushed with a rush of pity for him. It must be awful to be a man, she thinks. To live in a body that can achieve conception but not experience it. Kyla is convinced that women can sense it. Every time she became pregnant, she immediately sat up on the edge of the bed feeling the tingling, the blooming. It was a such a useful signal. For then she took great pains to be alone for several weeks, to disappear mysteriously. She travelled to England the first time. She went to Canada the second time with a sixteen-month-old Rachel for company. The third and what she knew would be the last time, she took Rachel and Donovan to several communes in Montana, and then on to San Francisco. She made a point on each trip of meeting as many rugged and somewhat handsome blond men as possible. She wrote down their names, their approximate ages, and fudged the dates of these casual encounters in which usually not more than her travel plans or the weather were discussed. She kept this extensive list in h,er office. It was over a hundred times longer than the list in the secret place in her head. It could ultimately be reduced to a factor of seven, the number she had expelled from her favor, replacing it with three, plus herself. The boarding call. Douglas’ eyes lean out of his sockets. He takes Kyla’s large hand in his larger hands. His long finger traces the bones of her face. “Let me ask you something personal, o.k.?” He waits for her slow nod. “Does the father know? I mean, Donovan’s father. Or the girls’ father? Does he know?” “He doesn’t care.” Kyla’s lie is the kind that relegates truth to the realm of art rather than science, the kind of lie that can never be detected because the teller believes it absolutely. “Well, tell him for me that he’s a shit.” And Douglas joins the line of other travelers laden with ski jackets as they prepare to leave a land where gigantic red and pink flowers fatten in the sun and the pale skin of children quickly toasts brown. Kyla watches him turn the corridor that leads into the jet. From the back, she thinks, he might be her father. She picks up the tissue Douglas left on his seat and stuffs it in the pocket of her too tight jeans. Writer Ruthann Robson lives in Tallahassee, Florida. A collection of her short fiction is forthcoming from Firebrand. This is her first story in CSQ. Artist Claudia Cave lives in Salem, Oregon. Her last illustration for CSQ was the cover of the Fall 1987 edition. 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