Ask her about that, I thought. But later.

Now Carly was caught up in the sound of her own voice and on a roll. While Arlene continued with the makeup, mov­ing to her eyes, she bubbled on.

"Like I told you on the phone, I tried and tried to adopt, through a whole bunch of lawyers, but it was a nightmare. One guy even helped me put ads in newspapers all around the country, but nothing worked. I kept getting scammed by women who wanted thousands of dollars up front, then backed out at the last minute." She was getting up, looking intense. "Let me have a minute. I want to make coffee for everybody."

I followed her into the kitchen, which was the "country" type with a faux granite counter and lots of copper-bottomed pans hanging from the ceiling.

She was right about the pain of adoption, which was why her story was such a burst of sunshine. As part of the start-up research for my picture, I'd actually gone to meet an adoption attorney out in Brooklyn, a sleazy-looking guy named Frank Brasco. I'd been pretending to be a client, to find out first­hand how tough it really was. What I heard was chilling.

"I don't want to get your hopes up," he'd declared for cheery openers. "Finding a healthy, Caucasian, American baby is virtually out of the question, so naturally we focus on foreign-borns. All the same, it can take years, and there's incredible paperwork. Passports for the kid, an extended visa for you while you go there and then wait around to process everything in triplicate. Bribes, corruption, you can't imag­ine." He sighed and adjusted his toupee, as though the very thought made him weary. "And that's just the foreign end. Here you have the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They give bean-counting paper-pushers a bad name." He examined me closely. "Not Jewish, I take it. 'Cause if that's what you're looking for, you may have to wait for the Messiah."

Now, almost a year and a lot of experience later, I knew full well how right he was. Which was what made Carly's story so fantastic.

"So how did you manage to get Kevin? You said it only took a few months?"

"Well, to go back to the beginning, I didn't start out want­ing to adopt. But when the guy I was planning to marry got cold feet—after four and a half years, the louse—and there was nobody else on the horizon, I decided to just have a baby on my own. You know, find some smart, good-looking hunk, seduce him, and get things going the old-fashioned way, or if that didn't work, then I figured I'd just go to a sperm bank. Who needs an actual man, right?"

She took out a white and green bag of coffee beans, la­beled Balducci's on the side. I was still holding Kevin, who threw Benny onto the floor, then began to sniffle and point.