“I guess,” Jessie says.

“Not as pretty as you, of course,” Blair says.

Jessie stops in her tracks. “Blair?”

“Yes?”

“Please stop.”

Blair feels a pain in her midsection, as though the words pierced her. “Okay, sorry, sorry.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” Jessie says, and she flings open the door to Buttner’s.

Buttner’s smells the same, Blair thinks. Like the new leather of school shoes and the boiled wool of peacoats and the saleswomen’s perfume and floor polish. Blair has been coming to this store her entire life; she prefers it to any place in Boston, even Filene’s.

She leads Jessie back to the lingerie department and finds Miss Timsy, the same woman who fitted Blair for her bra twelve years earlier. Francesca Timsy is a spinster, a Nantucket native who lives with her sister, Donatella Timsy, in a tiny cottage on Farmer Street. Both Timsy sisters sing in the choir at St. Paul’s. They’re as old as the hills and yet, curiously, Miss Timsy looks exactly the same as she did twelve years ago—blue hair (set once a week at Claire Elaine’s Beauty Shop next door), steel-rimmed glasses, pencil skirt, and tape measure draped around her neck.

“Katie Nichols?” Miss Timsy says. “Is that you? You’re having another baby?”

Blair puts a hand on Miss Timsy’s stick-thin forearm. “It’s Blair Foley, Miss Timsy, Kate’s daughter. I’m pregnant with twins.” Blair is tickled to be mistaken for her glamorous mother, although she’s certain it’s because Miss Timsy is almost completely senile.

Miss Timsy seems to snap right back to the summer of 1969 because she says, “Oh, Blair, dear, of course. My eyes were playing tricks on me, not surprising with the heat we’ve been having. I heard you were pregnant with twins. Donatella ran into your mother at the market.”

“Well, we’re here today to get my sister Jessie a bra!” Blair says. Jessie curls into herself and Blair realizes her voice is louder than normal because she’s trying to accommodate Miss Timsy’s ancient ears. “Her first bra!”

Miss Timsy regards Jessie. “Sister?” she says. “This isn’t Kirby. Kirby’s blond.”

“This isn’t Kirby,” Blair says. She notices Jessie trying to make herself even smaller and she hopes she doesn’t have to run through the family calculus with Miss Timsy. “This is Jessica, the youngest.”

Thankfully, Miss Timsy has moved on to business. She eyes Jessie’s chest.

“Well, I can tell you’re going to have a magnificent bosom in a few short years. Come, let’s get you fitted.”

Jessie throws Blair a pleading look but Blair pretends not to see. Miss Timsy is a professional, and being fitted by her is a rite of passage. Blair survived; Kirby survived; Jessie will survive.

“I’ll be over in the layette section!” Blair calls out.

She meanders through the women’s department, admiring the fall fashions—out already, even though it’s only mid-July—and feels another sharp pain. She wonders if she’ll even fit into regular clothes by fall.

She moves on to the children’s section and is haunted by memories of back-to-school shopping with Kate and Exalta. She even remembers one year when Tiger was in a baby carriage, so Blair’s father must have still been alive. She remembers another year when she chose a paisley blouse that had a matching orange skirt but somehow the skirt hadn’t made it home to Brookline and Blair cried because she had wanted to wear the outfit on the first day of school. Kate had called Buttner’s and they mailed the skirt, but had it made it in time? Blair can’t remember. So much of what seems painfully important in the moment fades away. Jessie is embarrassed about being fitted for a bra now, but ten years from now when she has the magnificent bosom that Miss Timsy predicted, she’ll be buying black lace bras and push-up bras to impress her boyfriends, and maybe one afternoon, as she’s having brunch with girlfriends at the Marliave, she’ll tell them the story of getting her first bra at Buttner’s.

Finally, Blair arrives at the baby section—toddler, infants, newborn layette. She has nothing for the twins, and no one has sent anything. Blair decides to choose four outfits for each gender, just to cover her bases. The clothes are precious, tiny and delicate like fine doll clothes. Blair gets four basic white onesies, two with white piping, two with blue, and four sailor suits, two male, two female. The sailor suits are impractical, she knows, but she can’t resist. She hands the outfits over to the salesgirl, who takes them to the register.

“You’ll need to wait to ring these up,” Blair says. “My sister is being fitted for a bra.”

Blair heads back to lingerie to see how Jessie is faring. She can hear Miss Timsy’s incessant patter: “You see, my dear, how this one provides lift? Shoulders back now, chin up…”

Suddenly, Blair feels a staggering pain; it’s like giant hands are squeezing her midsection. There’s a sound like the muted pop of a balloon, and water comes gushing out from between Blair’s legs.

She screams.

Miss Timsy pokes her head out from behind the dressing-room curtain, and the salesgirl rushes over to take Blair’s arm. “Are you okay, miss?” Then the salesgirl notices the puddle forming at Blair’s feet. Liquid is running down Blair’s bare legs, and Blair is mortified and confused, thinking she somehow lost control of her bladder and wet herself, but a split second later she realizes her water has broken right in the middle of Buttner’s next to a carousel of boys’ dungarees. A pain comes that is so rude and insistent that Blair knows this is it. Contractions. Labor.

“Jessie!” she says. “We need to go now!”

Jessie pops out of the dressing room in just her shorts and a white bra.

“Put your shirt on!” Blair says. “We have to go. I’m in labor. It’s time.”

Miss Timsy says, “Let us call an ambulance.”

“No, no,” Blair says. She isn’t about to make a scene; it’s bad enough she’s leaving them to clean up after her. “We have to go. My bag, my things—my mother will take me, it’s fine.”

Blinding pain. Blair grits her teeth, counts to ten. It passes.

She and Jessie walk up Main Street, Blair holding on to Jessie’s arm for dear life. Right outside of Mitchell’s Book Corner, Blair feels another contraction coming on; it’s like a truck is about to hit her.