Guiding Richie's hands with her own, she helps him dip the cup into the flour. The cup goes in easily, and through its thin wall, he can feel the silkiness and slight grit of the sifted flour. A tiny cloud rises in the cup's wake. Mother and son bring it up again, heaped with flour. Flour cascades down the silver sides. Laura tells the boy to hold the cup steady, which he nervously manages to do, and with one quick gesture she dismisses the grainy little heap on top and creates a flawless white surface exactly level with the lip of the cup. He continues holding the cup with both hands.

"Good," she says. "Now we put it in the other bowl. Do you think you can do that by yourself?"

"Yes," he says, though he is not at all certain. He believes this cup of flour to be singular and irreplaceable. It is one thing to be asked to carry a cabbage across the street, quite another to be asked to carry the recently unearthed head of Rilke's Apollo.

"Here we go, then," she says.

He cautiously moves the cup to the other bowl and holds it there, paralyzed, over the bowl's gleaming white concavity (it is the next smaller in a series of nesting bowls, pale green, with the same band of white leaves at its rim). He understands that he's expected to dump the flour into the bowl but it seems possible that he's misunderstood the directions, and will ruin everything; it seems possible that by spilling out the flour he will cause some larger catastrophe, upset some precarious balance. He wants to look at his mother's face but can't take his eyes off the cup.

"Turn it over," she says.

He turns it over in one hurried, frightened motion. The flour hesitates for a fraction of a second, then spills out. The flour falls solidly, in a mound that loosely echoes the shape of the measuring cup. A bigger cloud rises, almost touches his face, then vanishes. He stares own at what he's made: a white hill, slightly granular, speckled with pinpoint shadows, standing up from the glossy, creamier white of the bowl's interior.

"Oopsie," his mother says.

He looks at her in terror. His eyes fill with tears.

Laura sighs. Why is he so delicate, so prone to fits of inexplicable remorse? Why does she have to be so careful with him? For a moment - a moment - Richie's shape subtly changes. He becomes larger, brighter. His hand expands. A dead-white glow seems, briefly, to surround him. For a moment she wants only to leave - not to harm him, she'd never do that - but to be free, blameless, unaccountable.

"No, no," Laura says. "It's good. Very good. That's just exactly right."

He smiles tearfully, suddenly proud of himself, almost insanely relieved. All right then; nothing was needed but a few kind words, a bit of reassurance. She sighs. She gently touches his hair.

"Now then," she says. "Are you ready to do another one?"

He nods with such guileless, unguarded enthusiasm that her throat constricts in a spasm of love. It seems suddenly easy to bake a cake, to raise a child. She loves her purely, as mothers do - she does not resent him, does not wish to leave. She loves her husband, and is glad to be married. It seems possible (it does not seem impossible) that she's slipped across an invisible line, the line that has always separated her from what she would prefer to feel, who she would prefer to be. It does not seem impossible that she has undergone a subtle but profound transformation, here in this kitchen, at this most ordinary of moments: She has caught up with herself. She has worked so long, so hard, in such good faith, and now she's gotten the knack of living happily, as herself, the way a child learns at a particular moment to balance on a two-wheel bicycle. It seems she will be fine. She will not lose hope. She will not mourn her lost possibilities, her unexplored talents (what is she has no talents, after all?). She will remain devoted to her son, her husband, her home and duties, all her gifts. She will want this second child.