When in Doubt, Add Butter (31 page)

He cocked his head. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”

“Yes.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“There isn’t time now,” I said. “Suffice it to say, I’m pregnant.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then he smiled broadly, his face going red with excitement. “I see we need to have a nice long chat. Soon.”

“Yes. I’d like that.”

“Is this for real?” he asked.

I nodded.

“My goodness, we are going to have one
hell
of a trip to the baby department at Simon’s. And this time, I’m not taking no for an answer, missy. We’re going to outfit your nursery so completely that it’s going to look like Martha Stewart herself is going to sleep in the crib.”

I laughed.

“Okay.” He clapped his hands together. “Meanwhile, you haven’t heard the most exciting part about Filigree’s news. And I’m starting to think this might be
quite
timely.”

It was like Bob Barker was telling me there was still more in the “Showcase Showdown.” A new car. A boat. A cruise around the world. Financial security. An IRA. “What is it?”

“Simon’s is going to be producing and selling, exclusively—”

“At least at first,” Terry interjected. “Then we go national.”

“Yes, that’s right, after a brief, exclusive period, we
will
go national.”

“With what?” I asked.

“The
Filigree D.C. Cookbook.
” Lex beamed. “Can you even imagine a better time to do a project like that?” He looked me up and down. It was clear he knew what was going on, and it was also clear this was going to drive me crazy for some time to come. He was going to be like the doting old aunt, always asking after the pregnancy.

And I loved him for it.

“You want
me
to write a cookbook?” I asked him. Then looked to Terry. “Are you sure?”

“Unless you’re not interested,” Terry said. “I realize we’ll have to discuss terms, but I’m sure we can reach an agreement.”

“I’m
sure
of it,” Lex repeated. “What do you say?”

I almost couldn’t breathe with the excitement of it all. “I say I’m on board with whatever you want. Absolutely all of it. I’m just afraid at midnight you’re going to change your mind and this delicious pumpkin is going to turn back into a coach.”

Both Terry and Lex laughed heartily at that.

“Not going to happen,” Lex said, stopping a waiter whose platter held Filigree’s signature chocolate truffles. He took three off the tray and handed one to each of us.

“To our new alliance,” he said, raising his chocolate in the air like a flute of champagne.

“To us,” Terry agreed.

“Amen,” I said.

And we touched our chocolates together to toast what wasn’t just a new job for me, but also, quite possibly, my salvation.

*   *   *

For the next few weeks, I continued to disprove the “morning” part of morning sickness repeatedly—as well as the notion that it ebbed by the end of the first trimester—but thankfully, I never had a problem with it while cooking food. On Tuesday, I made Paul an unfortunate meal that tasted
delicious
to me, but which didn’t quite translate to unpregnant mouths.

“I just don’t know that mint
goes
with pesto and pineapple,” he said when he took a bite. I had just popped them out of the oven, and presented them proudly.

“Are you sure?” I said, and took a bite myself. “I think that’s delicious!”

He looked at me like I was crazy, and then said, “Please. Have some more.”

“Don’t mind if I—” There was a sudden cramp in my stomach.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, quick as a whip. He lay a hand on my back and arm, and looked concerned.

“Nothing. It’s gone.” I shook my head as if trying to forget a nasty memory. “I have no idea where that came from.”

“What was it?”

“Just a cramp—
Oh
!” I bent over as another one gripped me.

“Come here,” Paul said, guiding me strongly to one of the chairs in the living room.

I breathed deeply. “I think the cramps are gone,” I assured him. Then:
“Ouch.”

Somehow, I had stopped expecting them. Maybe because I had spent most of my life
not
being pregnant and not thinking about pregnancy. It’s like that first morning you look in the mirror after a dramatic haircut. It kind of takes a second before you remember.

Only, you know, this was way worse.

Paul must have seen that in my face. “I don’t like this. We should get you to an emergency room.”

“I don’t…” That was foolish. This was no time for stoicism. “You may be right. Let me just rest for a minute.”

“Something else is going on.” It was a statement, not a question. He was putting the pieces together, whether he realized it or not.

And this was my chance.

“Yes.” I took a breath and closed my eyes, concentrating on my abdomen for a moment. There was no pain. But I felt like all my insides had turned to Jell-O. Which incidentally, sounded just awful right now. “I’m pregnant.”

He said, “Should I ask—?”

“You’re the only one I’ve”—I dropped my voice—“slept with in months.” I couldn’t meet his eyes.

When he said nothing, however, I had to. He was looking at me. I couldn’t read his expression.

Finally, he spoke. “That’s … wow. I just … I don’t know what to say.”

“Yeah. Believe me, I was … shocked, too. To say the least.”

“Do you—” He stopped, and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “Are you planning to keep it?”

Interesting that he regarded this as my choice, even now that he knew how intrinsically involved he was in it. I took the tension in his jaw to mean he was wrestling with that.

I bit my lower lip. “I am. I’m sorry, I know I should have talked to you about this, or found you, or”—I shook my head—“I don’t know, done
something,
or maybe
everything,
differently before this was some big fait accompli that I’m telling you about like this, but…”

He nodded and looked down at his lap.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not asking for anything from you. I mean, we haven’t really even dated. You’re a one-night stand, and so am—”

He looked up with raised eyebrows. “That’s not exactly true, though, is it?”

I met his eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know
how
to define this. Any of it.”

“If you think about it,” he said with a slight and unexpected smile, “we have known each other for a while.”

I smiled back. I couldn’t help it. “Yeah … but we don’t know enough about each other to…”

To what? Become a family? Interesting how you could commit the act with just about anyone—have sex, make love, do the deed, whatever you wanted to call it—it meant as much or as little as you wanted it to until the sex became decidedly
un
sexy and became, instead, a medical condition.

And then a person.

“Right,” he said. “We don’t know each other that well. But I like you.”

My face grew hot. “Well, I like you, too.” Such a small thing in the face of such a big reality.

“I
really
do. And there’s no way I’m not going to be part of that kid’s life.” He still looked shocked, but I could tell he was adjusting. “So here we are. Wherever
here
is.”

Questions came to me now. The kinds of questions a person should ask a potential mate long, long before they reached this point. “Did you ever envision yourself, like, even having kids?”

He furrowed his brow in earnest. “Absolutely.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I wasn’t desperate for it. Just kind of figured it’d land in my lap if it was meant to be. The whole thing, wife, kids … kind of a lot of pressure to put on fate, I know.”

“No, I”—I ignored the skip in my heartbeat—“I have always said the same thing.”

We made eye contact.

His eyes dropped to my belly. “Kind of hard to imagine at a time like this, though, right?”

I sucked air in through my teeth. “Yes. Seriously. I mean, how freaked are you, really?”

He furrowed his brow again, this time in thought. “Strangely, not that much.”

I wanted to believe it, but it was hard. “Really?”

“Really.” He nodded. “I don’t know why, but really.”

I shifted my position, and another pain stabbed through my abdomen.

He didn’t have to be told; he saw it. And he didn’t hesitate. “We need to go to the ER now. If there’s
any
possibility this is something more than food poisoning or a virus, we need to get you checked out.”

Now, I was never one to make a big deal out of things unless the need to do so was overwhelming. But in this case, I agreed—I didn’t want to take a chance.

This baby felt like a second chance in so many ways; I had to protect it at all costs.

*   *   *

The emergency room was surprisingly busy for a Tuesday night, but as soon as they learned I was pregnant, they took me straight back to triage.

It was strange having Paul there with me as they went through the series of questions that were normally routine and done alone. Health history and so on. The answers were so different now than the last time I’d been to the doctor.

What would they be next time?

Would I still be pregnant?

Or would I have to answer the medical questionnaire differently from now on when it came to the questions of live births and miscarriages?

I knew these were maudlin thoughts, of no use whatsoever to anyone, and certainly not to me in that position, but they still plagued me. The longer I sat there, wondering what was happening and how the night would end, the more nervous I became.

Part of me wanted to run away, to not get tests or diagnoses, or anything, as if Not Knowing would protect me. Logic and intelligence have no power over fear, and the impulse to basically put my head in the sand was so overwhelming that a couple of times I looked at Paul and actually began to suggest we leave, but I knew—of course I knew—that I couldn’t really protect myself or the baby by remaining ignorant of what was really happening.

So I sat there, on the cold, hard chair in the ER, breathing shallowly as the blood pressure gauge tightened around my biceps, and trying not to look at the man sitting next to me, who was growing more important to me by the moment.

When I looked back on it, I realized that the moment I saw him at the bar, something about him had struck me. I’d never gone in much for the ideas of fate and soul mates and things like that, yet as soon as I’d laid eyes on him, something inside me said this was the One.

Then, of course, he’d disappeared and I thought I might never see him again, but maybe, on some deeper level, I knew even then that that wasn’t true. That he would be part of my life, in my head and in front of my eyes, for a long, long time to come. I felt I’d know that face forever.

I still feel that.

And sitting in that sterile, impersonal ER, something about his quiet, strong presence both reassured
and
disquieted me. I was glad he was there. Profoundly glad.

As if reading my mind, he reached over and took my hand in his.

I looked at him.

“This will all be okay,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but I’m sure of it. It will be okay.”

I tried to smile. Yes, deep down I thought he was right. But my brain always questioned my gut. “I hope you’re right,” I said, and twined my fingers in his.

The triage nurse declared my blood pressure fine and went off to find a room they could install me in for the next—if past history was any indicator—four or five endless hours.

When she’d left, Paul leaned closer to me. “Look, this is too right for everything to go wrong now. It’s like when I showed up at my door that day, and it was you. All along it had been you. And somehow, it wasn’t an outright shock. It was more like spending an hour on a math problem, and then getting the answer. And then the answer is really obvious, and you feel like kicking yourself.” He shrugged. “It was more like that.”

It was the perfect analogy. “I know what you mean.” The electronic doors to triage swung open, and a woman in scrubs walked past. “That’s kind of how I felt, too.”

“So the baby … I should have been shocked or maybe felt like my whole world was being shaken like an Etch A Sketch. But instead, it felt like … it feels right somehow. Something about a birth control failure, versus failure to use any birth control, makes this feel more”—again, he shrugged—“meant to be, I guess.”

“I hope so.” I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. It felt like so much was at stake.

“Hey, come on.” He pulled me closer to him and kissed the top of my head. “Don’t cry. Too much stuff had to happen just right to get us here. It isn’t all going to break now.”

I closed my eyes against an onslaught of burning tears. “I hope you’re right. Please be right.”

“Miss Craig?”

I looked up. The nurse was back.

“We’re ready to take you to your room.”

*   *   *

Six hours later, I was home, resting on the couch with the uncomfortable knowledge that I had an “incompetent cervix.”

I mean, seriously, of all the insulting terms,
incompetent
?

But the good news was that the doctor was going to be able to do a procedure to fix it. Everything was going to be fine, though I’d have to take it a bit easier than I’d planned to, and I had had the last wake-up call I needed in order to realize just how much I wanted this baby.

Just how determined I was to have him or her, no matter what.

I was going to make it work.

No,
we
were going to make it work. One way or the other.

I didn’t even really know Paul. But having him there, holding me and looking strong but worried—nothing could have soothed me more.

“Thanks for bringing me in and waiting with me.”

“I wouldn’t have had it any other way.” He swept a strand of hair from my forehead and looked very seriously at me.

I nodded and looked at him, letting his presence comfort me. I took a deep breath and let it out carefully. It wasn’t until then that I realized there were tears in my eyes.