Slightly Suburban. Wendy Markham

      Mental Note: explore working the Mad Crapper into the Abate campaign.

      “I feel like it’s time, Jack,” I tell my husband, getting back to my other, more palatable brainstorm. “Seriously, we’ve been together seventy-five months and I really feel like we need a major change.”

      “Tracey, we can’t move to Tahiti.”

      “That’s not what I meant.”

      He sighs and folds the paper, putting it aside. “You want to have a baby?”

      Huh?

      “A baby?” I echo. “No. I don’t want to have a baby—yet,” I add, because presumably I will one day soon wake up with the urge to reproduce.

      At least, that’s what my friends keep telling me. Including Raphael, who is about to become a father at last. Not via the original old-fashioned means, since his significant other—Donatello, his husband—is also ovarian challenged.

      Not via a surrogate, either, which was one of their earliest plans. When I (and every other female they’ve ever met, plus a good many they haven’t) refused to lend them a womb—not that I don’t adore and wholeheartedly support their efforts—Raphael and Donatello decided to go the more recent old-fashioned route: foreign adoption.

      Sadly, that didn’t work, either. You’d be surprised how many countries forbid a monogamous, healthy, well-off gay couple to adopt from their overflowing orphanages.

      Or maybe you wouldn’t be. Maybe you don’t approve, either. But let me tell you, Raphael and Donatello deserve a chance as much as any stable, loving couple, and they are going to make terrific daddies. I know this for a fact, because they’ve had plenty of practice on the parade of foster kids they’ve been caring for over the past few years. Now one of those kids, Georgie, is going to become their son.

      As for me…

      “My biological clock isn’t ticking yet,” I inform my husband. Then I add cautiously, “Is yours?”

      “Nah. I just figured you’d start thinking about it sooner or later. Or now.”

      You may be wondering why this is only coming up after two-plus years of marriage.

      Well, it’s not. It’s been brought up (by me) and shot down (by Jack) before.

      I actually thought I might be pregnant when I skipped a period right around the time we got married. My ob-gyn said it was probably due to wedding stress. Still, I took a pregnancy test on our honeymoon. Of course it was negative.

      Even then, I wasn’t entirely convinced. When I did get my period, I was actually disappointed, and went through a brief period during our newlywed year when I was gung ho to start a family. After all, hadn’t I always wanted children? Hadn’t I been told enough times by my evil ex-boyfriend, Will, that I have birthing hips? Hadn’t I once even won a Babysitter of the Year award from my hometown Kiwanis Club? (I was seventeen. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about my high-school social life.)

      So, yeah, I’ve always wanted to start a family for legitimate reasons.

      Mostly, though, I just hated my job as account executive and I was desperate for a way out.

      At that point, anything—and I mean anything—round-the-clock morning sickness, childbirth without pain meds, endless sleepless nights, death by firing squad—would have been better than taking the subway to midtown every morning and dealing with my anal-retentive boss, account group director Adrian Smedly and an array of bitchy Clients.

      Luckily for me, Jack didn’t think an eight-week maternity leave was sufficient incentive for motherhood. At the time, I was a little miffed. But since it takes two to make a baby the original old-fashioned way, and I couldn’t find a willing sperm donor ( just kidding ), I reluctantly set aside the baby dream—half hearted and short-lived as it was.

      Not so long after, I found my salvation—or so I thought, pre-Crosby Courts—when I was at last moved into the Creative Department.

      Meanwhile, Jack and I pretty much dropped the baby-making subject. I figured it would come up again, though, when one of us found a burning desire to procreate—or play hooky from work for a few months.

      Or forever.

      Which is how I feel right about now.

      Seriously. I need to get out at some point. I’ve been at Blaire Barnett, aside from a brief foray as a catering waitress at Eat, Drink and Be Married, for my entire adult life. I’m so over agency life. And city life.

      Things have to change.

      So last night when I was eating overpriced turkey on overpriced bread with overpriced lettuce and drinking an overpriced Snapple, while keeping one eye out for cockroaches, trying to ignore the deafening crashes from 10J and watching the ten o’clock news with its usual urban murder and mayhem, I came up with a plan. A good one.

      Nope, pregnancy isn’t my proposed ticket out this time. This new plan doesn’t involve nearly as much physical pain. Or sex.

      Unless, of course, I need to use my wiles to bribe Jack.

      Just kidding. I don’t really do that.

      Much.

      “So, look, I think we should start thinking about moving,” I tell my husband, officially launching Operation Fresh Start. “We said we were going to do it someday, and we’ve got the down payment.”

      Thanks to his dad, who surprised us with a pretty big chunk of change for our wedding gift. I say surprised because even though he was filthy rich, he also was never the most generous guy in the world, and like I said before, he and Jack weren’t on the best terms.

      But he had mellowed a little over the years, and he did give us money to use toward a house. Jack—who, as a media planner, is proficient with handling large sums, though it’s usually the Client’s tens of millions and not our own tens of thousands—decided to invest it in a CD until we need it. That sounded like a good idea to me, and Jack and I have always been on the same page about our household finances.

      Unlike my parents, who have always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any.

      Also unlike Kate and Billy, who have also always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any shortage of it, as bona fide blue bloods.

      Anyway, Jack might be getting an inheritance, too, once his father’s will is sorted out. Jack Candell Senior had remarried a few months before he died, and his new wife is contesting his will, which left everything to his kids. She says he made a new one leaving—surprise!—everything to her. Only there seems to be some discrepancy about that.

      Even without a cut of his father’s fortune, though, Jack and I can probably afford a decent house in the suburbs.

      “So,” I say to Jack, “we’ve got the down payment, and I think we should start thinking about a move. Out of the city.”

      Jack looks at me, shifts his weight in his chair. “I don’t know.”

      Okay, the thing is…I didn’t ask him a question, so why is he answering one?

      “You don’t know…what?” I ask. “What don’t you know?”

      “Just…why do you want to leave the city?”

      “I’m sick of it. It’s crowded and noisy and expensive and stressful and dangerous and it smells and we’re surrounded by strangers, some of whom are circus freaks and pickpockets and perverts. I can’t take it anymore. I want to live in a small town.”

      “You grew up in a small town.”

      “I know, but—”

      “You left your small town the second you were out of college and moved five hundred miles to New York because you didn’t want to live in a small town. Remember?”

      Of