After three months, most of her postnatal flab had suc- cumbed to her running campaign. The endless days of her pregnancy were a fading memory, though her swollen body image still lurched up sometimes in her dreams. She'd been happy, mostly-huge and achy, but cruising on motherhood's hormones. She'd given David some rough times. "Mood swings," he'd said, smiling with fatuous male tolerance.

In the last weeks they'd both been spooked and twitchy, like barnyard animals before an earthquake. Trying to cope, they talked in platitudes. Pregnancy was one of those arche- typal situations that seemed to breed cliche's.

But it was the right decision. It had been the right time.

Now they had the home they'd built and the child they'd wanted. Special things, rare things, treasures.

It had brought her mother back into her life, but that would pass. Basically, things were sound, they were happy. Nothing wildly ecstatic, Laura thought, but a solid happiness, the kind she believed they had earned.

Laura picked at the part in her hair, watching the mirror.

That light threading of gray-there hadn't been so much before the baby. She was thirty-two now, married eight years.

She touched the faint creases at the corners of her eyes, thinking of her mother's face. They had the same eyes-set wide, blue with a glimmer of yellow-green. "Coyote eyes,"

her grandmother had called them. Laura had her dead father's long, straight nose and wide mouth, with an upper lip that fell a little short. Her front teeth were too big and square.

Genetics, Laura thought. You pass them on to the next generation. Then they relax and start to crumble on you. They do it anyway. You just have to pay a little extra for using the copyright.