Seven years later, in our bedroom in the house we’d bought, a room with high ceilings and bare floors and no furniture besides a mattress and the Tupperware bins where we kept our clothes, it was just as thrilling, just as sweet. I knew the place on the small of his back where he liked me to brush my fingertips, and he knew to put his mouth right up against my ear so I could hear his breathing change as his hips sped up, then stuttered to a stop. His sounds, his taste, the feel of his forearms in my hands, his head tucked into the hollow between my neck and shoulders, every inch of him was so familiar and so dear.

When we were done, he fell asleep almost instantly, sprawled facedown, naked on the bed. He had a better body than any of the movie stars in People, a muscular back that narrowed to a slender waist, a gorgeously curved bottom. Curled against him, breathing in the scent of his sweat and skin. I let myself doze for a few minutes. Then I settled the comforter over his back and collected my panties and nightshirt from the floor. Frank was so tired these days. He’d work an eight-hour shift at the scanner, examining the X-rays of carry-ons or beckoning travelers through the metal detectors, dealing with people who screamed and cursed and even spat at him, taking out their frustration with the nightmare air travel had become on the most convenient target. After work three days a week, he’d spend three hours more in a classroom, where he was training to do airplane maintenance. Those were union jobs; the pay started at thirty dollars an hour, plus benefits and three weeks of paid vacation. We’d agreed that the time and money he spent was worth it. By the time he graduated the airlines would be hiring again, but it meant that he left the house before seven most mornings, and on nights he had classes he rarely came home before ten.

I crept into the kitchen to empty the dishwasher and surf the Internet, looking at surrogates’ stories, pricing home renovations and wall-to-wall carpet and new couches, trying to figure out how to continue the process I’d started upstairs, the marital magic of not only getting Frank to agree to let me be a surrogate but also making him believe the whole thing was his idea.

I thought about it while I drove Spencer to nursery school, while I swept the floors or weeded the garden or folded a load of laundry, imagining the feeling of being someone who could give instead of someone who was taking. I would picture the look of gratitude on the new mother’s face as I placed the baby in her arms. Oh, thank you, Annie, we can never thank you enough. It would be so different from the look I saw on our pastor’s face when I was rummaging through the church swap bins for winter boots or the one I imagined the credit-card representative wearing when I called to explain that our payment would be late again.

For weeks, I’d been working on Frank, but carefully, the way I’d learned to do it. Instead of bombarding him with requests or giving speeches, I’d casually slip something into a conversation: “Did I tell you Dana Swede from Vacation Bible School had a miscarriage? It’s her third, poor thing.” He’d give me a look and I’d ladle another scoop of tuna casserole onto his plate and tell him I was baking Dana a pie. When the actress from his favorite TV show was on the cover of People magazine with her baby twin girls — they’d been carried by a surrogate in Minnesota — I snuck the magazine out of the pediatrician’s office and onto our coffee table, where I could be sure he’d see it. When Good Morning America did a piece on military wives making extra money carrying babies, I inched the volume up. When the toilet broke and we had to call the plumber, I allowed myself one small sigh over the bill, and I permitted myself another sigh when the doorknob on the front door came off — again — in my hands, and I’d had to send Frank Junior in through the kitchen window to open the door.

That was Part One of my plan. Part Two took place in the bedroom every night that Frank didn’t have class. Instead of collapsing on the couch as soon as I’d gotten the boys down and rinsed their toothpaste out of the sink and re-hung their towels, I’d put on something Frank liked — a pair of lacy panties or a tight tank top, the negligee I’d bought for our honeymoon. I’d light that candle and stay up in bed, waiting. Most nights I didn’t have to wait long.

On one Tuesday morning — a week after the Good Morning America story — I loaded the dishwasher, turned off the TV, and said casually, without looking at him, “What do you think about it? That surrogacy thing?”

Frank Junior and Spencer were at the table, fighting over the last piece of toast. I put the orange juice back in the fridge, shut the door with my hip, then looked at my husband. His dark-blue shirt, with the TSA patch on the shoulder, was neatly pressed, his shoes were shined, and he was freshly shaved, but he already looked tired. His ID badge was in his pocket. He hated that badge, which let the angriest passengers use his name. It was always the last thing he put on and the first thing he took off. “I don’t know. It’s interesting.”

“They pay a lot. I could look into it. What do you think?”

He looked at me closely. “You want to do that? Have a baby for someone?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe find out more about it.”

“You mean it?”

“Why not?” He frowned at the boys, at Spencer in particular, who had a pink crayon in his hand and was scribbling dreamily in his coloring book. “Sit up straight, men.” The two of them stiffened their backs, imitating the posture Frank had brought home from the service. I turned back to the sink. He didn’t look happy. I understood why: he wanted to be the one to provide for us, to give us the things we wanted. . and I suspected that seeing me walking around with my belly all big from another man’s baby would bother him, even though there’d be no sex involved, no cheating. But it had been so long since I felt like I was doing my part, and since I didn’t feel guilty pulling out my debit card at the grocery store or at Walmart.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” I said. My hands were cold, the way they got when I was nervous or excited, or when I was telling a lie. My heart was breaking for Frank, but I was also excited, thinking about the money and how we could spend it, imagining, for the hundredth time, the moment of placing the baby into another woman’s arms, or even a man’s arms, although I doubted that would happen. My cousin Michael was gay, and he and his boyfriend were two of the kindest, gentlest men I knew, but Frank felt differently, thanks to all his years in church hearing about sinful this and sinful that, and I knew not to push my luck. I imagined, too, the look on Nancy’s face; the two of us walking together at the Franklin Mills mall, Nancy getting ready to pull out her platinum card as someone we knew from high school spotted us: Oh, Annie, I heard about what you’re doing and I think it’s just amazing. So generous. Maybe I’d take a few college classes, too, show Big Sister that she wasn’t the only smart one in the family. Maybe I’d take all of us on vacation, my parents, too, someplace that didn’t have a squash court, or maybe we’d stay on-site the next time we went to Disneyland.

I kissed Frank by the door, handing him the lunch I’d packed. I gathered Spencer in my arms and loaded him into his stroller. He was getting too tall for it, his feet dangling almost to the ground, but he was still too little to manage the trip to the bus stop and back. I helped Frank Junior put on his backpack, then walked both boys down the hill to the bottom of our driveway, where we waited, counting the cars that drove along our quiet street until the school bus wheezed to a stop. Back at home, I put Spencer down in front of Sesame Street with a bowl of raisins and pretzels, a sippy cup full of apple juice, and the remote control, which, sad to say, he knew how to work better than I did.

The farmhouse had a little room off the kitchen that had once been a cold pantry. Someday, I’d planned on turning it into an office, with shelves for canned goods and cookbooks and a desk where I could look up recipes. I’d painted the walls a creamy golden-white called Buttermilk, and cut out pictures of built-in desks and refinished flea-market chairs, but that was as far as I’d gotten.

I turned on our computer and browsed around the clinic’s website, which I already knew almost by heart. It was full of video links and fancy flash effects, words that came swimming up to the top of the screen like they were surfacing from the bottom of a deep pool. CARING. COMPASSIONATE. DISCREET. The word MONEY never showed up, but money was what I sensed. For starters, the clinic looked more like the day spas I saw in magazines than like any doctor’s office I’d ever visited. There were bouquets of flowers in the exam rooms, tables draped in real sheets, not the flimsy paper that my doctor’s office used. The women in the pictures were nicely dressed — no sweatpants and Phillies shirts for them. All of them were pretty, too, which I guess made sense, because, when you get right down to it, who wants to go through nine months of pregnancy and then hand the baby over to someone who looks worse than you do?

While Spence was singing along with “Elmo’s World,” I called up my application, trying to read it the way a woman looking for a surrogate would. Most of the questions had been fairly straightforward: Did I have a driver’s license? Did I work outside the home? Was I married? Happily married?

That one had worried me, because the truth was, Frank and I had hit a rough patch a few years ago, the summer when Spencer was a baby and Frank had gotten furloughed for eight weeks. He got to keep his health benefits but didn’t get paid for all that time. At first it had been okay. There was plenty for him to do around the house. He’d set his alarm, same as always, and from seven in the morning until dinnertime he’d be busy, patching cracks in the ceiling, painting the dining-room walls, planing a door that had never closed properly, fitting the bathroom with a new showerhead, pulling the refrigerator out from its spot against the wall and vacuuming the coils clean. He washed and waxed the car, then used Q-tips to clean the air-conditioning vents and even shampooed the carpets. In the afternoons, when Frank Junior woke up from his nap, he’d take him into the backyard and teach him how to throw a football in a spiral.