“Mercury,” she said.
“Oh,” he said.
“I can’t have soft cheese or bacon either,” she added.
Emmett nodded again, and that was the extent of his contribution to the conversation.
I peered at Charla in the rearview mirror. She was trying very hard. For the first hour, she’d steered clear of pregnancy talk, but Emmett hadn’t responded any better. From the moment we put on our seat belts and pulled out of the garage, Charla had tried her best to lighten up the tension. She’d tried chatting (“So, were you two close as kids?”) and games (“How many girls’ first names can you come up with that start with the letter V?”) and then a running monologue about how many deer are hit on rural highways.
Finally, Emmett handed me a CD. Charla announced that it was her favorite, which got her smiling and Emmett what he wanted, which was her silence.
I popped it into the player. I could take the noise for about a minute, then turned on the radio instead.
“You always had bad taste in music,” Emmett said. “Totally commercial stuff.”
“I could sing,” Charla suggested, and before we could say, No, that’s really okay, she launched into folk favorites. She’d finished “This Land Is Your Land” and was now on “Blowin’ In the Wind.”
She stopped singing. “I really have to pee,” she said.
She really had to pee a lot. Apparently, pregnant women went to the bathroom every twenty minutes. Between the last two rest stops, she’d explained exactly what pressed on the bladder.
“I think it’s the baby’s tush,” she said.
“Victor,” Emmett said fast before she could elaborate.
“What, honey?” Charla asked.
“Names that start with V.”
She laughed. “Okay, I’ll change the subject. But Victor isn’t a girl’s name.”
“Victoria,” he said.
I laughed spontaneously, and we caught eyes in the rearview mirror. He looked away.
Our mother used to play the name game with Emmett and me. Emmett and I would come up with names she’d never heard of, like Danae (there were two in my sixth-grade class), and our mother would challenge us with names we’d never heard of, like Gertrude and Milt.
“I can barely hold it in,” Charla managed to say as I pulled onto the service road leading to a McDonald’s. “Maybe it’s the baby’s head pressing against my bladder—”
“Vera,” Emmett said. “Vanessa. Valerie. Vania.”
I laughed, but if you thought about it, it really wasn’t funny at all.
Twenty-five minutes later, Charla needed to stop again.
“How do you feel about the pregnancy?” I asked Emmett as she disappeared inside another McDonald’s.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
Hey, that was my line.
Forty minutes later, we were lost and Charla needed to stop again.
She held the map up to her face. “I can’t even concentrate on this tiny type. I have to go sooooo bad!”
“Emmett, can you figure out where we are and how to get back on the highway?” I asked him.
He had his headphones on. Charla nudged him. He took them off and grudgingly took the map. He peered out the window for a street sign.
“Make a left,” he said. “And just keep going.”
I did, and signs for the highway appeared.
So that was what constant travel was good for.
According to Emmett, we were now in the same McDonald’s we were in a half hour ago.
When you were born, raised and lived in New York City and didn’t have a car (7.5 million of the population?), you had to rent one when you needed to go anywhere. Highways, maps, rest stops were all new to me.
Charla came back to the car eating a McVeggie burger and slurping a vanilla shake.
“Ready?” I asked the two of them.
Emmett put on his headphones and closed his eyes. No one could ever accuse him of being a side-seat driver.
“Want some company?” Charla asked, nodding at the passenger seat. “Chatty here is giving me an earache.”
I laughed. “Sure.”
A moment later we were back on the highway, this time headed in the right direction.
Exit: Boonsonville. One and a half miles.
I now knew what a rush of blood to the head felt like. My heart started pounding. Boom. Boom. Boom. How could Charla not hear it? Boom. Boom. Boom.
But she was talking about baby names she liked. Thelonious for a boy.
Thelonious? Was that a name?
“I wouldn’t use a name that started with ‘The,’” I said. “Bad luck.”
“Huh?”
“Our father’s name is Theodore,” I pointed out.
“Ah. But do you like the name Thelonious?” she asked. “I think it’s really musical and meaningful.”
I glanced at her to see if she was kidding, but she wasn’t. Charla’s expression was perpetually hopeful, almost too sincere.
“Honestly?” I asked.
She nodded. “It’s a mouthful. Maybe a better name for a musician than a baby.”
“I also like Mike,” she said.
I laughed. “From Thelonious to Mike, huh?”
“Emmett likes the name Finn.”
That surprised me. “You and Emmett have discussed baby names?”
“Not really,” she said. “I mean, I have, and he usually says, ‘Charl, you’re only ten weeks pregnant.’ But a few days ago, I asked him how he felt about the name Lorenzo and he said—”
She burst into tears.
I pulled over. We both glanced back at Emmett; he was lightly snoring.
I handed her a tissue.
She blew her nose and sniffled. “He said Lorenzo Gould sounded really dumb.”
Oh. Meaning Emmett was so mentally out of the picture as the baby’s father that he didn’t even assume Charla would give the child his name.
“Give him a little time,” I told her. “He’s only known for what, a couple of weeks? Maybe when he gets used to the idea he’ll start saying Lorenzo Manfred sounds dumb.”
“He’ll be hitchhiking his way to Texas by then,” she said. “He likes the idea of trying out Austin. He says there’s a great music scene there.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I assured her. “Vegetarians don’t move to cattle country.”
She brightened for a split second. “That’s true! El, I’m really sorry, but I really have to pee again.”
“There’s an exit coming up any minute. I’m sure there will be a rest stop.”
“We passed the last exit ten minutes ago,” she said. “Didn’t you see the sign that said Next Exit, 14 miles?”
Nope, I hadn’t.
“And that was the exit we needed,” I said. “Boonsonville.”
“Some say there are no accidents,” she pointed out.
“I don’t think there are,” I told her.
“I could go for a burger,” Emmett said at the next rest stop. “Anyone want anything?”
Charla burst into tears.
So much for being a vegetarian.
“Hormones,” I told him. “She’ll be okay. Go ahead. We’re fine.”
He looked at Charla, chewed his lip for a second, then ambled off toward the rest stop.
Two women in a little blue car smiled after him; one of them wolf-whistled. He didn’t even turn around.
I took off my seat belt. “Come on, Charla. Let’s hit the bathrooms just in case you need to go. I can ask for directions back to the exit.”
“’Kay,” she said, wiping her eyes.
Five minutes later, bathroomed, face-splashed and ginger-aled, we sat at a picnic bench, rubbing our hands together. It was cold. Thirty-seven degrees and overcast.
“I’m freezing,” I said. “Want to head back to the car?”
“My father bailed on me too,” Charla said suddenly.
I glanced at her. “Really?”
She no
dded and took a sip of her soda. “He fell in love with someone else and that was that. He left when I was seven, moved to Oregon and I never saw him again until I went looking for him when I was twenty.”
“You found him?”
She nodded.
“I have a half brother and a half sister.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Did Emmett and I have half brothers and half sisters?
“What happened when you found him?” I asked.
“He acted all happy to see me, but it was more like I was a distant relative he’d met a few times and liked—and one he expected to go home and call in a few months or something. The whole thing was really disappointing. I guess I’m glad I found him, but it didn’t make me feel better.”
I looked at her. Her nose was red from crying, from the cold. “So why did you push Emmett to come with me?”
“Because it’s something you both need to do to move past a hump.”
She shook her head. “I feel like, if he’ll just confront this—” She started to cry.
I didn’t know what to say. She’d already been through the hardest part of what I was just beginning to do. I covered her hand with mine.
“It’s not that I think he’ll find his dad and suddenly have closure and be able to move on and settle down and marry me and be father of the year,” she said. “But a girl can dream, right?” She let out a deep breath. “I love him so much.”
I suddenly realized how misguided it was to judge other people’s relationships. If I weren’t Emmett’s sister but just a friend of Charla’s, I might have said, Why? Or…How could you love someone so immature? Someone who’s not even all that nice to you?
But I knew how. I loved Emmett, too. Only because he was my brother? I didn’t think so. I loved him because I knew him. Yes, we were family. But blood and love could be mutually exclusive. My father had taught me that.
“It’s good that he’s here,” she said. “That you’re both here. Yeah, I think he’s going to be a huge mess that I’m going to have to deal with while I’m pregnant. I think it’s going to be very raw and very ugly for him. But do you just repress this kind of loss and pain and live like Emmett, or do you face it head-on like you’re willing to do? Like you’re doing.”
Suddenly I wasn’t sure whether it was worth it or not. Was it so terrible to repress pain and loss that you couldn’t do anything about? Was it so terrible to accept the shitty, gritty reality that our father had left us and go about our lives as best we could? What were we supposed to do? Spend tens of thousands of dollars on therapists? Just accept and forget it? Go find him and demand answers?
How did you know?
I was here and I still didn’t know.
“I’ve been thinking about the job your boss offered me” came Emmett’s voice.
Startled, Charla and I whirled around. I had no idea how long Emmett had been standing there. He was holding a McDonald’s bag in one hand and a shake in the other. He’d left his jacket in the car, and his cheeks were red from the cold.
“Oh?” I said.
“Five hundred bucks is five hundred bucks, right?” he said. “Charla will need it to buy some stuff for the baby.”
Charla pressed a hand to her mouth. She flew up to hug him, and he awkwardly embraced her.
“I want to go home,” Emmett said to me. “Maybe next weekend we’ll try again, but I want to get out of here.”
I looked at him and nodded.
I wanted to go home too. We’d been gone four hours, and I’d never been so homesick in my life.
Noah was home. When I opened the door to our apartment, there he was, sprawled on the couch, watching a hockey game and reading Newsweek, a giant-size red-foil-wrapped pair of chocolate lips on the coffee table.
I ran into his arms. “But you’re in Colorado!”
“Actually, I’m right here,” he said as he took off my coat, trailing kisses down my neck and arms.
“But you’re on staking out aliens in the mayor’s backyard!”
“Ashley’s in the mayor’s backyard,” he corrected. “I’m in my yard.”
Mayor, my name’s Ashley, but you can call me Ash, because you’re the mayor and because I smolder…
I could see the headlines now: Hot News Reporter Noah Benjamin investigating the scandalous love affair between his former colleague, known only as Call Me Ash, and the mayor. Call Me Ash torn between hot Hot News colleague and UFO-spotting local politician.
“But I thought you weren’t coming home till Sunday night or even Monday night,” I said.
He pulled me next to him on the couch. “I wanted to be here when you got home. What you’re doing is tough stuff, and a phone call between us long-distance wasn’t going to cut it.”
“You came home just so you’d be here when I got home?”
He nodded. “And I got you this. Valentine’s Day goodies hit the stores early in the Midwest.”
He picked up the giant chocolate lips and pressed them to mine.
I laughed. “I don’t even know how to say thanks. Thanks isn’t enough.”
“It’s always enough,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not that selfless. I also came back because I missed you.”
Top Ten List for World’s Best Boyfriend and Fiancé and Husband-To-Be: #1: Noah Benjamin.
I kissed him. “I missed you, too.”
“How’d the trip go?” he asked.
“It didn’t. I mean, we didn’t even find the town he lives in. We never even left the highway, well, except for making wrong turns out of rest stops. We did get to experience many different McDonald’s, though.”
“How’d you and Emmett get along?”
“Like siblings,” I said.
He smiled. “I’ve never spent five agreeable minutes with Beth in a car. Not when we were kids and not now.”
I couldn’t imagine spending five agreeable minutes with Beth anywhere, and I wasn’t her sibling. Though I suppose soon enough, I sort of would be.
“Charla was a surprise, though,” I said. “I like her.”
“C’mere,” he said, massaging my shoulders. “Sit back and tell me all about it from start to finish.”
“You know what I would rather do?”
“What?”
I took off his T-shirt.
“And miss the hockey game?” he teased, grabbing the remote control and clicking off the TV.
“I love you, Noah,” I said. “I really, really love you.”
“Me, too,” he said, trailing kisses across my belly button.
I will stop twisting my ring on my finger. Noah is the man for me. Noah is the greatest boyfriend and fiancé in the world. It’s nice to come home to someone you love when you’ve spent the day with your stomach muscles clenched and your heart in your throat. It’s nice to come home to Valentine’s Day chocolate in January.
The good news for me was that for the first time in a long time, I was scared of something else.
chapter 12
“Fine. Whatever!” Philippa was muttering into her phone when I arrived at work on Monday morning. “Fine!” she yelled again. “Well then, I don’t care either!” She slammed down the phone, then picked it up and slammed it down three more times.
I poked my head over the rim of her cubicle. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, but her eyes filled with tears and her lips trembled.
I came around and sat down in her guest chair. “Did you and Parker just get into a fight?”
She shook her head.
I couldn’t imagine what else could have gone wrong in Philippa Wills’s charmed life. Barneys wasn’t having its semiannual sale? Her hairstylist was going on vacation and she needed a trim?
Devlin’s assistant poked her head in, said, “Hot off the press!” and handed Philippa a manila folder. “Your father-daughter shots. They’re terrific. Devlin is showing them to Astrid right now.”
I expected Philippa to lunge for the folder and rip it open, but she didn’t budge. Neither did her
expression. She was on the verge of tears again.
“Philippa, what’s wrong?” I asked.
She sniffled.
“Philippa, if you—”
Devlin’s assistant coughed. “Uh, Eloise, you’re needed in the conference room for a layout meeting.”
“Will you be all right till I come back?” I asked Philippa.
She managed a shaky nod, then stared down at her desk.
“You sure?”
She nodded. “I’m okay. Go ahead. Really.”
But the second I left her cubicle, I heard her try to stifle a squeaky sob.
Unless someone else on the Wow Weddings staff wore pink wingtip oxfords, Philippa Wills was in the middle stall of the women’s rest room, crying.
Whatever was bothering her was really bothering her. I’d been trapped in a design meeting on the Grooms-and-Fathers-To-Be feature for an hour and a half.
“Philippa, it’s me, Eloise.”
Silence. Rustle of toilet paper.
“Philippa? Are you okay?”
Sniffle. Nose blow. “Just allergies,” she finally said.
And then she burst into tears.
“Philippa, open up. Let me in.”
Silence.
A moment later, she unlatched the stall door, and I squeezed in. Her beautiful peaches-and-cream skin was ruddy, and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. She was sitting on the lid of the toilet, a wad of pink tissues in her lap.
“Philippa, maybe I can help. Did you get into a fight with Parker? It’s all right if you did. All couples fight and—”
She shook her head. “We didn’t get into a fight.”
“Astrid say something evil?”
Again, a head shake. “Astrid’s been really nice to me lately. She even stopped by my cubicle a little while ago to tell me that my family is the ultimate in Classic and that my father-daughter shots were spectacular. She said if she were giving grades for family, I’d get an A plus.”
Once again, I wouldn’t get a grade.
She burst into sobs again, burying her face in the tissues.
And you’re in here crying because…
“Then what’s wrong, Philippa?”
“Nothing. Forget it.” She stood up and blew her nose again, then burst into tears and sank back down.
Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? Page 12
