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He’d had this conversation with Julia "She can always change it," he said "But for now it’s Jenny See, she was a breech birth"

"I beg your pardon?"

"A breech presentation She was upside down in the birth canal, and--"

"I understand the terin to understand is why that would make her a Jenny instead of a Jennifer"

He reached for his cup, took a sip of coffee "I’m not sure this will make any sense," he said, "but that’s e realized she wasn’t going to be, you know, ordinary And there were soto call her Jennifer anyway, so--well, that’s why it says Jenny on her birth certificate"

"And it doesn’t have to be short for Jennifer," Denia said "Think of Pirate Jenny, in The Threepenny Opera But your little pirate’s name is Jenny Edwards And does she have athat money in trust for her"

"It’s Roussard," he said, and spelled it "My wife’s maiden name"

Forty-Seven

Pirate Jenny," he said "Maybe that’s what you’ll be next Halloween We’ll get you an eye patch, and your mother can make you a cutlass out of cardboard"

"Daddy ho happily on his lap "Daddy horeed "And in fifteen years or so, he’ll be the one stuck at hoe"

"And it’s all paid for," Julia said "You really think she’ll go through with it? Set up our little bundle of joy with a six-figure trust fund?"

"Well, you never know," he said "It was her idea, and I couldn’t talk her out of it She could change her mind, but I don’t think she will"

"And where will the pirate go to college, do you suppose? She could follow in her o to Sophie Newcoed my old school into Tulane I’m not sure it would be the sao soland preppy Where would you want her to go?"

"Nowhere, for the ti Fifteen years from now? I don’t know Some school where there aren’t any boys, how’s that?"

"Aren’t you the dreairl ent there, and don’t you know she got to keep her own horse there"

"Right in the dormitory?"

"In the stable, you idiot Jenny, you’ll be a pirate on horseback How does that sound?"

"Daddy home," Jenny said

"Well, you knohat’s important, don’t you? Yes, Daddy’s home Aren’t we lucky?"

After they’d put Jenny to bed and then gone to bed the and the easy shared silence that followed the love, she said she didn’t think she’d ever known anyone naather no one ever calls her that," he said "I believe she said she’d had it changed legally"

"Better than changing it illegally Jeb, Jenny, Denia--all of y’all have got na, except they’re not"

"That’s true, isn’t it?"

"I guess Is she pretty?"

"Denia Soderling? She’s an attractive woman"

"Why didn’t you sleep with her? Or did you? No, you didn’t What stopped you?"

"Huh?" He doubled up his pillow, propped himself up with it "Where did this come from? Why would that even be a possibility?"

"Oh, come on," she said "A beautiful lonely ? A handsouest room, it’ll be so much more comfortable than that nasty old uest roouess she may have been interested"

"And you weren’t?"

He considered the question "The last night," he said, "when she wanted to set up a fund for Jenny’s education, we talked about her name, and hoas just plain Jenny, and not short for anything"

"So they’d get it right on the paperwork"

"I suppose I told her how Jenny was a breech presentation"

"And she got it right away? Or did you have to explain?"

What he could have told Denia Soderling:

"See, there’s a very famous US airmail stamp of 1918, Scott C3a There were actually three stareen, and a twenty-four-cent carmine rose and blue They all pictured a Curtiss biplane, called the Jenny because it was part of the coh value, the twenty-four-cent stamp, was a bicolor, and that h the printing process, once for each color Only one sheet went through upside down, and as a result the stamps had what’s called an inverted center

"Now, this was an occasional consequence of bicolor printing In some countries, where quality control wasn’t a priority, or where enterprising employees had learned to make profitable mistakes, inverted centers turned up with some frequency In 1901 the US issued a stamp series to mark the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, the one where President McKinley was assassinated, and three of the six stamps could be found with their centers inverted They all illustratedon the denomination, you’d have a steamship or a locomotive or an electric automobile, and it’d be upside down

"Those three sta substantial five-figure prices But they didn’t catch the iination of the public the way that upside-down plane did These were the first air, and here’s this plane putting on an exhibition of philatelic stunt flying You can buy a decent copy of the regular stamp, Scott C3, for around a hundred dollars If you want the error, with the plane upside down, you’ll probably have to spend over a million