Need Advil badly. “Marriage isn’t like broccoli. You don’t nibble on a stem to see if you like it.”

“You’re comparing men to vegetables?”

I almost liked it better when Eva thought I was a lesbian.

Two of the kids in Eva’s New York preschool class were raised in lesbian households, and the kids were fantastic, funny, bright, well adjusted. At three, Eva was crushed when I told her that there would never be two mommies in our family. We were a one-mommy household.

“Just one mommy?” she’d cried. “But what about the Ark? All the animals came in twos.”

It seemed like a good teaching opportunity, so I explained that Noah’s pairs weren’t female and female, but male and female, and I hastened to add that the decision wasn’t so the world could live in harmony, but for reproductive reasons. The animals on Noah’s Ark had a serious job. They had to repopulate the world that had just been drowned in the forty days of rain.

The drowning part of course caught her attention.

As did other Old Testament favorites like Cain killing Abel, Sodom being set on fire, Lot’s wife turning to salt, and Abraham laying Isaac on an altar as a sacrifice. The dramatic illustration in her children’s Bible of Abraham holding a knife over his son particularly fascinated her. Gave her some nightmares, too. But she never forgot the story.

She never forgets anything. She has the memory of an elephant.

“I thought we were here so you could swim,” I say, trying to change the subject, wanting her to go play, be a normal little girl, although that’s probably pushing it. “The pool closes next week once school starts, and it’ll be nine months before it opens again.”

Eva glances past me to look at the crowded deep end. The pool is packed today, as it’s in the mid-nineties and nearing the end of summer.

“I am hot,” she admits, fanning herself.

“So go swim.”

But she doesn’t move. She lies there on her side, studying the girls playing in the deep end. She’s scared. Scared of being rejected again.

With me, she’s brave and funny. Articulate and confident. But around the little girls here, her confidence vanishes. She just doesn’t fit in, and I don’t know why. She had no problem making friends in New York City. She was reasonably popular at her school in Manhattan. Why doesn’t she have friends here?

“Should I go off the diving board or go down to the shallow end?” Eva asks, leaning against her arm, her dark green eyes tracking every move the girls make.

“Do what you want to do.”

She hesitates and then slips off the lounge chair and drops her towel. “Okay. I’ll swim in the deep end.”

I shouldn’t be, but I’m nervous as I sit in my lounge chair at the edge of the Points Country Club pool, watching Eva paddle around the deep end trying to get the other girls to notice her.

Just as she’s done all summer. Just as she did last summer after we’d moved here.

I try not to stare at the group of girls playing just out of Eva’s reach. Why don’t they like her? Why won’t they include her?

Eva’s staring at them, too. She’s clinging to the tiled wall and watching with wistful eyes as they splash and laugh.

Despite my studied nonchalance, I worry. I hate that wishful expression on Eva’s face. It’s so not who she is, so not who she should be.

Eva’s brilliant.