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Not a Boy

Her father committed suicide early in the summer. Grown tired of life, cold dinners, and used cars. Maybe he hated the possibility that his second wife, pregnant and huge, would bear another daughter. Stephanie, 22, was his oldest daughter. His death made her feel six years old, the same age she'd been when her grandfather died.

Her father's father, with the stomach ulcer, drowned in his own blood. Good deaths were not intentional.

She wondered why her father had done it. Turned on the black 59 Buick and swam around the garage in its fumes. She wondered if he'd have done it if he'd known the son he always wanted was well on the way.

Instead, there were three daughters. And at least one of them wondered how life would have been as a boy.

She'd spent years trying to be a boy. Climbing trees, digging for fossils and arrowheads, going along to the car races and baseball games her father loved. None of this mattered. Her name was Stephanie Renee, not Stephen Richard Junior. She was not a boy.

She liked baseball, though, even understood the game. Except for the finer points of strategy, baseball was easy. Like football. Kind of like life. And like life, she enjoyed watching and wanted to learn how to play.

Death was easy, too, once you got used to it.

Death surrounded them those first months of the new millennium. Her cousin died of cancer despite years of debilitating chemotherapy. Her grandmother's neighbor wasted away from old age and disease. Her father killed himself. Even so, leaves opened, rain washed the pavements clean, flowers bloomed.

Stephanie's half-brother was born two months after the last funeral. She went with her sisters to visit him in the hospital. He had a round, fat face, with a nose like Stephanie's. It made her wonder how her own children would look.

"What's his name?" asked twenty year old Leah.

"Richard James."

"What happened to Stephen Richard Junior?" Stephanie muttered under her breath.

"Stephanie!" Leah gasped. No one else seemed to have heard.

"I think it's bad luck to name someone after a suicide," whispered Chrissy, proving her wrong. At sixteen, until last night she had been the youngest.

"You guys are rude." Leah again. Always playing according to the rules.

"He's cute."

"Thanks," their step-mother choked. She did not look at Stephanie. Richard started to cry.

"We'd better go," Stephanie said. "Bye bye, Ricky. See you when you get home."

Another two months drifted by. Stephanie gathered news of Ricky's growth through her

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