"P ersephone!" Her voice drifts to my room. "Are you ever going to wake up?"

   I drag myself out of bed and down the hall, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, hoping my groggy face, my rumpled hair, will disguise the change in me. She looks up. I needn't have worried.

   "I brought you something from the Thesmophoria," she says. "A gift."

   I sit down and she pushes an intricately painted box across the table.

   "Go on—aren't you going to open it?"

   I pull off the top and lift out a lump of pink linen. Out

rolls a terra-cotta pig, fat and confident, a smug expression on its snout.

   "There's more! Keep going!"

   Yes, another lump is buried in the fabric. I unwrap a terracotta piglet, a little squirmy helpless thing looking up with pleading eyes. Pig and piglet. A matched set.

   What am I supposed to say? Great toys, Mommy?

   "Aren't they wonderful?" Her voice is bright and eager. "The mortals outdid themselves this year. Such a pile of offerings—one of the biggest ever. I was already inhabiting my statue, waiting to be worshiped, and I saw a woman add these. Once the dancing started, I descended and set them aside."

   She smiles down at the all-knowing pig and her feeble little piglet, then up at my face. Not seeing anything. Not seeing me.

   "I wanted to bring you something special," she says. "I know you've been bored."

   I paste on a smile. "Thank you."

   She gets up from the table and fills a bowl with figs and walnuts, puts it in front of me, then sits again.

   "What a festival!" she says. "I could see the joy in their faces, read it in the looseness of their limbs. How happy women are without men!"

   There it is again.

   I pick up a fig and cradle it in a cupped hand. "You really hate men, don't you?"

   "I don't hate them. It's just that they're . . . irrelevant." She's getting that I'm-imparting-knowledge look. "True power lies in the womb, nurturing seeds and sheltering life."

   She reaches across the table to lift a stray lock of hair from my eyes and tuck it behind my ear. My hand tightens around the fig.

   She sees my hair; she doesn't see me. Doesn't see I'm not the same person she left three days ago. Doesn't smell the new scents his cloak left in my hair, or feel the warmth rising from my skin, or hear the difference in my heartbeat.

   Good.

   "But men are useful for some things, aren't they?" I ask. "You needed one to start me. I wasn't exactly selfseeding."

   She's in such a good mood, she laughs as if my question were a joke between us.

   "Yes, a man 'started' you, and then I found us a home far from men's bullying selfishness, their restraints, their demands."

   She rests a long, cool hand on my arm. I try not to pull away. And then I surprise myself by saying, "Who was my father?"

   It's a question I stopped asking years ago, once I noticed how her eyes always narrowed and how quickly she changed the subject. But this time she gives me what she'd probably describe as a look of understanding.

   "Your father? What does it matter? He saw no reason to be involved in your life." She sits back. Something occurs to her and she smiles. "And I suppose that means he gave us one thing to be grateful for: his absence! Let's not talk about him again. There's no need."

   No need. And so there's no need to tell her about the last three days, either.

   I stand and wrap the pigs back in their pink shroud.

   Grateful? Well, she gave me something to be grateful for, too. And it wasn't these ridiculous pigs. She made it as clear as sunlight that I need to keep my secret. She's incapable of understanding why I'd want a man in my life.

   I put the lump in the box and fasten the lid. There won't be any thunderstorms as long as she doesn't know.

   "Thank you," I say again.

   And she beams back at me, so happy we've had this little talk.