A Summer to Die by Lois Lowry

that I was proud of. I won a music award in high school, and I was Maria Abbott. I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in college, something I worked hard for, and I was Maria Abbott. When I realized I wanted to marry Ben, I also realized that I didn't want to stop being Mafia Abbott. Ben could understand that. There's no law that says a wife must take her husband's name. So I didn't. Someday you may feel the same way about Meg Chalmets."
    Right now I know there's no one I would rather be than Meg Chalmers. It's a funny thing about names, how they become part of someone. I thought
suddenly of the little boy Will Banks, years ago, who sat in a room angry and sad, and carved WILLIAM on the closet floor.

    "Hey," I said. Funny I hadn't thought to ask before. "The baby. What are you going to name him? Her? It?"
    Maria groaned. "Ask any other question, Meg.
Don't
ask what we're going to name him her it. We can't decide. We fight about it all the time. We scream at each other. It's
awful.
"
    Ben said, "I've quit worrying about it. I figure the baby is going to arrive and before it does anything else, it's going to shake hands all around and say, 'Hi. I'm — — —.' That's the only way we're going to know what its name is."
    Then he jumped up, bounded through the living room, and opened a door. "But look! This is where it will be born!" I looked through the living room and saw an empty room beyond, very clean, its walls freshly painted white, with a brass bed alone in the center.
    "And this is where it will sleep," said Maria, smiling, touching the cradle with her bare foot, so that it rocked slightly.
    "And this is what it'll wear!" said Ben proudly, reaching into the drawer of a partly sanded pine chest, and pulling out a tiny blue nightgown. The drawer was filled with little folded things.
    "This is what it'll eat!" grinned Maria, cupping her hands around her breasts.

    "And—" Ben stood still suddenly, in the middle of the living room. "Meg, come. I want to show you something." He took my hand, and I followed him out the back door, picking up my photographs on the way. It was almost lunchtime.
    Ben took me past the garden where the peas were thriving against the wire trellises, across the newly cleared space where he'd been pulling up alders, past the little wooden bird feeder that Maria filled with seeds each morning. Behind a clump of young pine trees, he had pulled out brush and exposed part of a rock wall that had been there, I knew, for more than a hundred years. The sunlight filtered down through the nearby woods into the little secluded space; he had cut the grass there, and it was very soft, very green, very quiet.
    He put his arm over my shoulders and said, "This is where we'll bury the baby, if it doesn't live."
    I couldn't believe it. I pushed his arm off me and said, "
What?
"
    "You know," he said firmly, "sometimes things don't work out the way you want them to. If the baby dies, Maria and I will bury it here."
    "It's not going to die! What a horrible thing to say!"
    "Look, Meg," Ben said, "you can
pretend
that bad
things will never happen. But life's a lot easier if you realize and admit that sometimes they do. Of course the baby's probably going to be just fine. But Maria and I talk about the other possibility, too. Just in case; just in case."

    I turned away from him and left him standing there. I was so angry I was shaking. I looked back; his hands were in his pockets, and he was watching me.
    I said, "Just in case you're interested, Ben Brady, I think you're an absolutely rotten person. That baby doesn't deserve you for a father."
    Then I walked home, and on the way home I was sorry I had said it, but it was too late to go back.

8.

    Molly is in the hospital again, and it's my fault.
    Why can't I learn when to keep my mouth shut? I'd already said something I regretted, to Ben, and hadn't had the nerve to go to him and apologize. It was just a week later that I blew it with Molly.
    She was lying on