Melissa Senate (5 page)

We put our hats on, which did help with the hair-flying problem. And then
I don’t want to talk about it
became her answer to most questions between New Hampshire and the Massachusetts border, where she got another milk shake, chocolate this time, and we used the bathroom. She did not want to talk about “the baby.” She did not want to talk about Jake or James or Jason. She did not want to pose what-ifs.

“What does it feel like?” I asked her, anyway. “Being pregnant. Physically I mean. And mentally.”

“I don’t know.”

“Does it hurt? Can you feel something fluttering in your belly?”

“Nope,” she said. “According to that book you got me, I’m not going to feel anything for a while.”

The morning after she told me she was pregnant, I’d gone to Blueberry Books and bought us both a copy of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
On the inside front cover, I wrote:
For my sister, Stella Leigh Miller. With love, Ruby.
I wasn’t sure she’d bother reading the book, if she was really taking the prenatal vitamins she said her OB had prescribed. She had asked her OB if her McDonald’s cravings were okay for the baby, and apparently the doctor okayed three trips per week, but only plain hamburgers, a small fries and better yet, the apple dippers or one of their salads.

“Do you—”

“Ruby, I don’t know and I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

Of course she was scared. I tended to forget that about Stella. My sister had long been the brazen one, the Miller twin who’d throw musical instruments at heartbreakers. But in this she was out of her element; there was no context, no fallback. No owner of the other chromosomal letter, even.

I glanced at Stella’s profile, at the bit of eye I could see through the sides of her sunglasses. Stella had the longest eyelashes, even unenhanced with mascara they were still long. Not that she was unenhanced. Stella liked her makeup. Powder, bronzer, a shimmery sheer red lipstick. Eyeliner and mascara. I was so fair-skinned and blond (though a honey-blond, not white) that too much makeup, any
color,
made me look clownish, so I stuck to brown mascara and a little bronzing powder and clear lipgloss.

Stella was older than me by two minutes and twelve seconds, and she looked exactly like our father. But something told me that her child would look exactly like her and not Jake or James or Jason. Even if we did find the owner of the other chromosomal letter, even if he did materialize into a real person with one definite first name, the baby would look just like Stella.

We stopped for gas and for fresh sodas—me a Diet Coke and Stella a ginger ale—and to use the bathrooms and switch places in the car. As I took the driver’s seat, Stella lowered the back of the passenger seat so she could recline, her feet up on the dash.

“So did you and Tom ever figure out how many kids you’re going to have?” she asked, sipping her soda.

I envisioned quadruplets crawling around the living room. Four babies. Four. Four. Four. I opened the window and gulped in some of the clear warm air. I tried to blink two of the babies away, but the harder I tried, the more their faces became distinct.

“Guess not,” Stella said. “Oh, wait, I mean, guess you’re still having four.”

“I think the person who wants fewer kids wins,” I said. “Anyway, we’ll compromise, Stella. That’s what a relationship, a marriage, has to be based on. Neither person can demand and insist on his or her way.”

“Do you ever get your way?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said, and that was true. Tom, who liked modern and brand-new and stainless steel appliances, had wanted for us to buy a house of our own, new construction, instead of moving into my mini-Victorian, but my place meant so much to me that he said he’d gladly live there forever if I wanted.

“Right. So you’re having four kids,” she said. “At least mine will have lots of cousins,” she added, patting her belly.

“At least we’re in agreement on names,” I told her. “On our first date, we both said we always thought we’d name our daughter Scout, after Scout from
To Kill a Mockingbird,
our favorite book, but that we couldn’t because Demi Moore did.”

“You were naming your kid on your first date?” she asked, eyebrows raised. “God, what took you so long to get engaged?”

“No, I mean we both separately had picked Scout as a name. Long before we met.” When Tom and I adopted Marco from the pound, we thought about naming him Scout, but because he was a boy dog, the name would mean something else entirely, conjure up knots and oaths to Be Prepared instead of Harper Lee. “We talk about it in the abstract,” I explained. “‘When we have kids,’ that sort of thing. But no plans to get pregnant right away.”

I didn’t actually have the “I want to be a mother” feeling yet. I assumed I would one day. During family get-togethers with Tom’s sisters’ families, I tried to imagine myself in Caroline’s and Anne’s places—doing four things at once, while their husbands did one: fired up the grill. The women seemed to be in charge of the kids and the food and the house and the guests, and the husbands were in charge of flipping chicken and brushing barbecue sauce and talking to the guests. Caroline and Anne were both older than I was, but not by much. Maybe when I was thirty-five, I would crave family life.

Then again, Stella wouldn’t be doing four things at once while the owner of the other chromosomal letter fired up the grill and chatted with Tom at a barbecue. Over her dead body. She always said you made the life you wanted. But what about circumstances? Like her current ones. Where did they fit into that theory?

I was with Tom because I wanted to be, marrying him because I wanted to, wanted the life I would have with him. As opposed to the life I would have with Nick, which would last for all of two weeks.

What if, what if, what if, what if, what if….

Stella crunched on a malt ball. “Well if you do end up marrying Tom despite not really being in love with him, I’m sort of hoping you’ll get knocked up soon so the cousins will have each other.”

“Stella, I’m getting really sick of telling you that I do love him, okay?”

“So stop saying it. Speak the truth instead.”

I had an urge to pull the strings at her neck very tight. “Why don’t we just listen to music and not talk. Put Jack Johnson back on.”

Jack Johnson’s voice soothed from the speakers. He was the perfect choice. It was almost impossible to listen to Jack Johnson and feel stress.

“Tell me three great things about Tom,” she said. “Explain to me why I shouldn’t have overlooked all those nice guys.”

“I could tell you three thousand great things about Tom.” Huh. I could probably only tell her
three
great things about Nick. And I could probably say the same three things about Tom, well, maybe about two of them. They were both gifted teachers, for one. I’d observed both of them in action, and Tom actually had been able to leave many of his students slack jawed over a segment on multicultural poetry. Hands waving in the air to give opinions and ask questions.

“Okay, so gimme one.”

Incredible teacher
would mean nothing to Stella, who thought education was best gotten outside of a classroom. “I can count on him, really count on him,” I told her. I couldn’t say the same for Nick. I was his best friend, but he wasn’t mine.

“Tom would fight to the death for you?” she asked. “Jump into a pit of fire?”

“Yup, I am absolutely sure he would.”

“Silas was like that,” she said. “That’s a good one. But, you know, Ruby, I also wanted to rip his clothes off every minute. Do you feel that way about Tom?”

“I think he’s sexy,” I told her. And I did. He was sexy. In a Clark Kent kind of way. Part of Tom’s appeal was knowing how hot he was under those sweater-vests. How good he actually was in bed.

“Really?” she asked, peering at me as though I’d said I found Danny DeVito sexy.

I elbowed her and turned up Jack Johnson. As the red convertible passed signs for Boston and Worcester, I realized that Stella had fallen asleep. I turned down the music. The plan was to drive all the way to Syracuse, New York, almost nine hours altogether, and then stop for the night.

I was so relieved she couldn’t talk, couldn’t ask questions.

We switched places again just outside of Albany. I tried to read
What To Expect,
“Month 2,” but Stella was a constant lane-changer and I gave up. I dozed off for a while and woke up alone in the parking lot of a convenience store just as Stella was returning to the car. She’d gotten me a bag of gummy worms, which I appreciated, and she popped malt balls until signs for Syracuse began appearing.

“I’m so ready to stop for the night,” she said. It was barely eight-thirty, and just beginning to get dark.

“So where are we staying?” I asked. “Right in Syracuse?”

“Near the university,” was her response.

Near the university turned out to be
I didn’t make a reservation so let’s just find a place near the school, I’m sure there are tons.
And there were. But she said she planned the whole trip. Which meant I’d be planning the
rest
of the trip.

We found a decent-looking motel next door to a packed bar and grill called Chumley’s. Stella flirted with the waiter, who couldn’t be older than twenty-one. With one “you look so familiar,” he got the whole story about the famous Miller babies and how he’d probably seen us on
Where Are They Now?,
but he hadn’t. He did get a face reading, which paid for our dinner, and Stella’s phone number from when she briefly lived in Boston during her early twenties. Apparently, Stella hadn’t paid for a meal—or given out her real number—in years.

Our motel was standard issue: small, two twin beds with two end tables and two ugly lamps. Stella dropped onto the bed closest to the bathroom, which made sense, and was snoring in three seconds. I took my
What To Expect,
my cell phone, and the room key and headed out to the pool area a few feet from our door. The pool was dark and deserted and creepy, a dozen or so seen-better-days chaise longues dotted around. A huge black crow was pecking at something on the far side of the pool.

I lay on the chaise, wishing I’d thought to bring a towel. The backs of my thighs immediately stuck to the plastic. It was much hotter here than in Maine, more humid. But the tiny bugs and mosquitoes were exactly the same. I batted a few away with my book and then called Tom on my cell phone.

It was nice to hear his voice. Reassuring. Back home, things were as they should be. Tom was teaching two summer school classes, and they’d started today, plus he was getting a certificate in a graduate classics program at Bowdoin. He was busy.

“Marco misses you,” he said. “He’s laying at my feet in the living room, staring at the front door.”

I smiled to think of Marco and the silly dog faces he made. Marco was an older beagle and had a sad, drooping expression. When Tom had first met Stella, he paid her the fifty bucks to read Marco’s face, and after studying Marco from every angle, she reported that he wasn’t sad at all, that he was perfectly content, wished for more Scooby Snacks or whatever dogs ate for treats, and just had a sad face. Tom had a soft spot for Stella from then on, despite her shabby treatment of him. He always went overboard to treat Stella like a treasured guest, which annoyed her to no end. Despite already having two sisters, Tom was thrilled about getting another. This morning, he’d peppered her with questions as she ate her ridiculous Quisp cereal (she’d brought her own box), her favorite as a kid.

“So, Stella, what are you up to these days?” he’d asked.

“I’m actually working on a novel,” she’d said, in between crunches, then shot me a
Could he be more banal?
glance. “About diner waitresses around the country.”

“Really!” Tom had said, pouring a cup of coffee for me. “That’s fascinating. What’s your thesis?”

Crunch. Crunch, crunch. “At this point, I’m just interviewing. I’ll figure it out when I sit down to write.” Crunch.

Stella had long been interested in diner waitresses. Not waitresses in metropolitan areas, the ones that bored her with their head shots tucked into their apron pockets. But real live waitresses from the US of A. Waitresses who were waitresses and not models, actors or writers. Waitresses who were more likely single mothers.

It had once been Stella’s dream to be a roving diner waitress, work in every state in the country and then write a memoir. She’d actually gotten through a few states. She’d be on vacation somewhere, lie about needing a job, get it, and then work one shift and quit. If she was planning on actually interviewing diner waitresses during this cross-country trip, she’d already missed a few golden opportunities. Unless cute bar-and-grill waiters counted, which I assumed they didn’t.

I heard the sound of giggling in the distance and switched my cell phone to my other ear. Tom reminded me to take my one-a-day vitamin, which I always forgot, wished me pleasant dreams, and we hung up. The phone rang a second later, and I assumed it was Tom calling back to remind me of something else, but it was Nick. I bolted upright.

“Hey,” he said, and just that word alone sent tiny sparks shooting up my back. “There’s something I want to know.”

I waited.

“Did you leave because of me?”

“Actually, no,” I said. “Stella and I have been planning this trip for a while.” A harmless fib, I figured.

“Tell me something, Ruby. Is there a chance?”

I could picture Nick, lying down on his massive brown leather couch in front of the floor-to-ceiling wall of windows in his apartment. No shirt. Army-green cargo pants. Bare feet. His own dog curled up next to him, a skinny mutt named Billy that he’d adopted from the pound. I’d gone with him, and both of us went straight to Billy. That was his name on the little card on his kennel and Nick thought it suited him.