Peg grinned up at her. Olive wanted to memorize every detail of their life together: the chip in Peg’s front tooth, the lip of pink sock peeking out from her tennis shoe. The orange juice sweating on the counter, and the newel post of the banister that fell off its perch weekly no matter how much wood glue they used. The scatter of pens near the phone, tossed like runes, that were all out of ink. There was such art in the ordinary, it could leave you in tears.

“Where are you off to today so early, anyway?” Peg asked, sticking her head back underneath the sink.

Olive hadn’t told Peg about going to the oncologist’s office last week; she had hid the file with the confusion of numbers and tests underneath the mattress, where Peg wouldn’t find it. It was tucked inside her purse now, for the nurse at the Center to interpret. But did Olive really need the translation? She knew, even if she needed someone else to say it to make it true. “A checkup. No big deal.”

Olive heard the throaty growl of the disposal, and Peg’s arpeggio of laughter. God, she had danced to the music of that laugh for a decade now. She felt like an explorer moving through a world she had always known, charged with cataloging the minutiae of the common, the grooves of the routine, just in case a thousand years from now someone else wanted to see things exactly as they had looked through her eyes. The way her hand slipped seamlessly into Peg’s in the dark of a movie theater when they didn’t have to worry if anyone might be shocked by two old women in love; the long silver hair, coiled into the shape of infinity in the shower drain; the cool, possessive stamp of her kiss.

What she would miss were these details. She wondered if, when you left this world, you got to take a certain number of them deep in your pockets, clenched in your fists, or tucked high on the roof of your mouth, with you forever.

—

WHEN LOUIE WASN’T PERFORMING ABORTIONS, he was teaching new doctors how to do them. He was an associate professor at the University of Hawaii and Boston University. He started his semesters the same way, telling the students that over five thousand years ago, in ancient China, mercury was used to induce abortions (although it most likely also killed the women). The Ebers Papyrus from 1500 B.C. mentioned abortions. He showed a slide of a bas relief from the year 1150 decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where a woman in the underworld was getting an abortion at the hands of a demon.

He told his medical students that Aristophanes mentioned pennyroyal tea as an abortifacient—just five grams of it could be toxic. That Pliny the Elder said if a woman didn’t want a pregnancy, she could step over a viper or ingest rue. Hippocrates suggested that a woman who wanted to miscarry jump and hit herself on the bottom with her heels until the embryo released and fell out; if that didn’t work, there was always a mixture of mouse dung, honey, Egyptian salt, resin, and wild colocynth that you could insert into the uterus. A Sanskrit manuscript from the eighth century recommended sitting over a pot of boiling water or steaming onions. Scribonis Largus, the court doctor for Emperor Claudius, had a recipe that included mandrake root, opium, Queen Anne’s lace, opopanax, and peppers. Tertullian, the Christian theologian, described instruments that match the ones used today for a D & E and said Hippocrates, Asclepiades, Erasistratus, Herophilus, and Soranus all employed them.

Abortion had been around, Louie told them, since the beginning of time.

“I got a new one for you, Dr. Ward,” Vonita said as he wandered into the reception area during a five-minute break. “Tansy.”

“She a patient?”

Vonita laughed. “No, it’s an herb. Or a flower or something. It was used in the Middle Ages to abort.”

He grinned. “Where’d you learn that?”

“Reading one of my romance novels,” she said.

“I didn’t think romance novels covered that topic.”

“Well, what else you think is gonna happen with all that sex?”

He laughed. Vonita was one of his favorite people in the world. She had run the clinic since 1989, when the previous owner had retired. She painted it orange because she wanted it to stand out proud, like it had on its best Sunday clothes. Vonita had grown up in Silver Grove, cinched tight in the Bible Belt, and her mama was a devout Baptist. When Vonita opened the clinic, the church here had contacted her mama to let her know what her wayward daughter was doing. Vonita Jean, her mother had said on the telephone, don’t tell me you’re opening an abortion clinic.

Then, Mama, don’t ask me, Vonita had replied.

“How busy am I gonna be today?” Louie asked.

“Do I look like a crystal ball?”

“You look like the person who does the scheduling.”

She grunted. “Well. I hope you ate a big breakfast today, ’cause it may also be your lunch.”

Louie grinned. It would be busy; it was always busy. He’d already started his first case, in fact, a woman in her second trimester who needed her cervix softened before the procedure. She’d be the first and the last patient he saw that morning. The waiting room already had women in it who were here for their counseling sessions, who would come back tomorrow for their procedures. They came from Natchez and Tupelo and from around the corner. They came from Alligator and Satartia and Starkville and Wiggins. There were 48,000 square miles of Mississippi and this was the only clinic at which you could get an abortion. You might have to drive five hours to get there, and of course, you had to wait twenty-four hours between counseling and the procedure, which meant more travel expenses that many desperate women couldn’t afford. Vonita had on speed dial the names of benefactors and organizations she could call when a woman showed up who didn’t have money for lunch or bus fare home, much less a procedure. And then there were the women who had to be referred to other states, because the Center only performed abortions up to sixteen weeks.

Vonita was emptying one of the blessing bags that the protesters handed out to the patients, who often—bewildered—turned them in at the reception desk. “I’ve got three sets of booties,” she said, “but I’m holding out for a little hat.” She glanced up. “You do the Cytotec?”

“I did indeed,” Louie replied.

Vonita held up a little hand-printed card from the blessing bag. “Defund Planned Parenthood,” she read. “You think they know we’re not a Planned Parenthood?”

It was like using the word Xerox instead of copy machine. Plus, federal funds already were legally prohibited from being used for abortions. They covered gynecological care; abortions were self-funding. In fact, they were the only procedure reproductive health services clinics offered that didn’t operate at a loss.

If Planned Parenthood was defunded, it wouldn’t stop abortions. Abortions would literally be the only things they could afford to do.

Sometimes Louie felt like they only existed in relation to the antis. If they all disappeared, would he go up in a puff of smoke? Could you stand for something if there wasn’t an opposition?

He watched Vonita sweep the contents of the blessing bag into a trash can. “Ladies, who’s waiting on labs?” A peppering of hands went up. Vonita pressed a button on her phone and summoned Harriet to come get the next wave of patients for their blood tests. She did this fluidly and seamlessly; it was like watching a conductor raise beauty from the discord of an orchestra.

“Hey, Vonita,” Louie said, “you ever think about taking a vacation?”

She didn’t even spare him a glance. “I’ll take one when you do, Dr. Ward.” The phone rang, and she answered it, already dismissing him. “Yes, honey,” Vonita said. “You’ve got the right place.”

—

IN A SMALL BANK OF chairs beside the lab, Joy sat with her earbuds firmly jammed into her ears, listening to her Disney playlist while the Cytotec did its work inside her. It would take a few hours before her cervix was soft enough to be dilated, which meant that she would be in the Center for a while, while other women came and went.

She shifted, slipping a crumpled picture out of her pocket. Yesterday, she had been one of a dozen women here for counseling, getting labs done and listening to Vonita walk through the forms required by the state and hearing Dr. Ward talk about the procedure. She had also been asked to give a urine sample, and had an ultrasound. A woman named Graciela had been the one who performed it; she had hair that reached past her hips, and even though her voice was soft, she was speaking by rote. “We are obligated to offer you the opportunity to listen to the fetal heartbeat and to see the sonogram,” Graciela told her, and to Joy’s surprise, she heard herself say yes. Then she started to sob. She cried for her own dumb luck, for her loneliness. She cried because even though she had taken every precaution possible, she had wound up—like her mother—boxed into bad choices because of a man.

Graciela had handed her a tissue and then squeezed her hands. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked, breaking from the script. Although she wasn’t talking about the ultrasound, she put the wand back in its cradle.