Henry sensed the tenseness in his son’s voice. “Are you going to tell it?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Henry heard his own faint breath-catch. He slowed down, jostled, as Chuck wrapped his arms around her. “I thought…” Chuck broke off.
After they had kissed, she said, “So did I! So did Dr. Mandy, at first! I got so much radiation! Now we know different! I’m not sterile.”
Charles whispered, “That’s just too wonderful to believe.”
She said, matter-of-factly, being Lenore, “It’s actually only seventy-five per cent wonderful.”
“Which is enough miracle for these days!” Henry butted in, perplexedly. “I don’t get…?” He checked himself. “Oh,” he said.
Lenore turned to him then, and took his arm too, hugged him also. “About a quarter of the babies, Dr. Mandy said, are born dead—or not in their right minds—if their mothers were rayed.”
Chuck murmured, with the extra poignancy of the still-new husband, “That’s a terrible thing to face, I know! But Lenore, dear …!”
She said, “Not too terrible. Just means I might have to have four, for every three we keep.