by Kate Rorick
And now the T-shirt was half burnt, in the trash.
“Maisey . . .” Sophia said, gingerly fishing the T-shirt out of the trash. “What happened?”
A huff and a sigh. Still she scribbled. “My T-shirt caught fire.”
“On what?”
“On my Stanford rejection letter.”
Cold disappointment shot through Sophia’s chest, followed quickly by the heat of anguish for her daughter.
“Oh, sweetie. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Maisey said, brushing off her mom’s embrace, still refusing to look anywhere other than her papers.
“It’s not fine. That’s your dream school.”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t want me. Obviously.” Maisey kept her eyes on the page, but her voice quavered. Sophia had to resist the urge to throw her arms around her daughter again. “I have to work on these other school applications.”
“Not right now you don’t,” Sophia replied. “Come on. Let’s find some chocolate, and a bad movie featuring gory death, and we can pretend every time someone dies it’s the Stanford admissions person.”
“No. I’m good.”
“Oh! Or better yet, I’ll call Sebastian,” Sophia said, whipping out her phone. “He can grab us some of those amazing macarons—I think the bakery’s open? It’s only . . . crap, it’s midnight . . .”
“NO, MOM.” The words were like cannons in the air. Booming and definite. Sophia froze with her finger on the Send button.
A rush of air left Maisey’s body. Like she was too tired, too vulnerable to keep up the pretense. Then, she straightened her shoulders, gathered her papers.
“I’ll keep working on these in my room.”
“Maisey, you don’t have to do everything right now. Let’s just . . . talk, okay?”
But Maisey gave a firm shake of her head as she brushed past her mother.
“Dad’s coming to get me tomorrow early to drive down to his parents. So if I don’t see you when I get up . . . have a good time in Baja.”
“I’ll be up,” Sophia said, quietly. “You’ll need pancakes—your dad will forget to feed you, I’d lay money on it.”
Maisey gave a half smile, turned to meet her mom’s eyes for the first time since Sophia had gotten home.
“Sure, but if not—I’ll make him stop at a diner on the way. I know how to feed myself now.”
“Of course you do.”
“And you know . . . have a good Christmas.”
And with that, Maisey shut her door, and left Sophia alone, in the middle of the silent kitchen, knowing that at some point in the last seventeen years, she had lost the right to burst into her daughter’s room and hug her, just to try and make everything better.
Chapter 9
“OH MY GOD! IT’S LITTLE NATHALIE! YOU look amazing!” squealed the older woman who opened the door. “How are you feeling?”
Two days after Christmas, the holiday decorations in Dad and Kathy’s condo were gone, replaced by a myriad of pink and blue streamers, pink and blue balloons, pink and blue table decorations, pink and blue foods, pink and blue EVERYTHING.
Nathalie stepped into the living room, noting that at least the tree was still up . . . but its usual decorations were gone, and it was now covered in pink and blue ornaments.
Where on earth did Kathy get all of those pink and blue ornaments?
This could only mean one thing: someone had shown Kathy the internet.
“Wow,” David said, a step behind Nathalie, as he hung up his cell. “This is . . . surreal.”
“And this must be Daddy-to-be!” the older woman said. She wore her hair in the hard shell of a bouffant that reminded Nathalie strongly of her eighth-grade French teacher.
“I’m Cecily—or Madame Craig, as Nathalie called me in eighth grade,” the woman trilled.
Ah. That explained that.
“Of course, now, I’m in her stepmama’s book club, and we were just so thrilled when we heard your news! And your sister’s! Family is the most amazing thing!”
Nathalie was still staring at the room, so David stepped up, pasted his “I’m a genial lawyer” smile on his face, and held out his hand. “David. And yes, Daddy-to-be.”
“Call me Cecily,” she simpered, melting under David’s smile.
Madame Craig—Nathalie would never be able to think of her as Cecily—took their coats, and exclaimed as she assessed Nathalie’s body. “Well, you’re hardly showing at all!” She put out her hand and Nathalie thought she was trying to shake her own . . . but then the hand landed on her stomach. “Just a little pooch! Lucky you! One would think it’s just holiday weight!”
Nathalie was slowly getting used to people knowing about her pregnancy. She had told her department head at the school, and was heartily congratulated right before she was given a timetable for scheduling a sub for the last few weeks of school (her due date at the end of May meant that she would be abandoning her students a hair before the end of the year, and a lot of sub lesson planning for herself beforehand).
Word made it around her department before she could believe it, and she was congratulated and hugged by people she’d worked with for several years who she’d barely ever shaken hands with. Everyone got very touchy when you were pregnant.
But this was the first time that someone had actually reached out and touched her stomach.
It was a bit of a shock to have your abdomen felt up by your eighth-grade French teacher. Even David seemed kind of stunned by it. He took a step forward, and half stood in front of Nathalie, shielding her from Madame Craig.
And she did not have a pooch! She was currently only eighteen weeks along . . . and granted her pants were getting tighter, but they still buttoned.
Kinda.
In truth, she was spending more and more time in her yoga pants. She’d even preliminarily perused the maternity section of Target while shopping for Christmas decorations, knowing that the time was going to come that she would have to invest in some work appropriate clothes with stretchy parts.
The maternity section kind of shocked her, actually. Usually, she averted her eyes when she went past, blinkered by never needing that section before. But now, she was drawn to it like a moth to a flame.
First, she was pleasantly surprised. The muumuus she’d feared were not in attendance. Instead there were stretchy sweaters, tailored shirts . . . the kind of things she would definitely be comfortable teaching in. Except . . .
Everything came in stripes. Horizontal stripes.
Now, Nathalie was not a fashionista by any means, but she’d lived with boobs and hips long enough to have ingrained upon her one of the central tenets of fashion: horizontal stripes are for teeny tiny skinny models and the occasional prisoner. For the rest of the masses, especially those with even a modicum of width anywhere on their bodies, horizontal stripes were verboten.
But now that a widening was expected and even encouraged, she guessed everyone was expected to gorge themselves on horizontal stripes for once in their lives. Might as well show it off, right?
She told David this when she got home, arms laden with strings of lights and garlands, but he was once again killing aliens on Xbox and barely noticed.
It was becoming a constant that if David wasn’t on his phone dealing with overseas billing issues, he was on the Xbox, trying to destroy creatures from a hostile blue civilization. In fact, he’d basically had his phone glued to his ear ever since he supposedly got off from work the Friday before Christmas.
Since it was their first Christmas in their new house, Nathalie had wanted to do it right. She’d bought her outside lights from Target, and was all set to hang them, until David pointed out they didn’t have an external outlet. They’d have to run an extension cord through an open window, and given that their neighborhood wasn’t the best and that it actually got cold in the winter, he wasn’t willing to do that. Garlands would have to suffice for the outside.
But inside the house, she went nuts. She got her t
ree up, decorated, tinseled (she figured tinsel would be out for the next several Christmases, as it was a likely baby-will-try-to-eat item), bought wreaths for every door, inside and out, and put out her mother’s collection of nutcrackers in prominent locations.
David had said the place looked like an elf vomitorium.
David hadn’t really been in the Christmas spirit. The foreign deal he was working on was dragging on with detail after detail having to be rehammered out every time someone found a typo. He was moody, and distant, but Nathalie knew that once she gave him his gift, all the tired would melt off of him.
Christmas Day, they’d spent the morning at home, in their pajamas. David even left his phone on its charger next to the bed while they traded presents and drank hot cocoa, enjoying their few hours before they had to drive the two hours north to Santa Barbara to have Christmas lunch with Nathalie’s dad and Kathy. It was the most blissful Nathalie had felt in a long time, the most at peace, and the most connected. After she finished opening her gift from David’s mom, Dr. Russo-Chen (socks, as per usual. This time with purple polka dots. Which, given the polka dots on David’s new pajama pants, must be all the rage in Italy), Nathalie handed David the envelope with her present in it to him.
He opened it . . . and his face fell.
“Monterey?”
“Three days, after Christmas.” She nodded eagerly. “We can leave right from the gender reveal party at my dad’s place. Your office is closed that week. And we never got to have the Monterey experience last time, so I say let’s go see some seaside cliffs. Just us.”
“I don’t . . .” David stopped and started again. “Can you get the deposit back?”
The whole of Nathalie’s body froze.
“I can’t go back to Monterey.”
Nathalie’s face fell. “You can’t?”
“ . . . because of work. I was just told on Friday. They, the foreign company we’re buying—the deal needs to be finalized before the start of the new fiscal term.”
“And the new fiscal term starts . . .”
“January first. Next week.”
“Oh.” It was all she could manage to say. “And you can’t make overseas phone calls from Monterey.”
David looked back down at the envelope. The carefully crafted card, the printout of their itinerary (she’d spent hours agonizing over the font choices), the pamphlet from the resort where they’d be staying. It was meant to be more than a getaway, a stress reducer for David. It was meant to be a babymoon for them—a way to get back to what was important.
“I’m sorry, hon,” he said, and to his credit, it truly sounded like he was. “If I help make this deal, it will be really good for us.”
“Yeah, okay.” Nathalie shook her head. “I don’t know about the deposit, but I’ll try.”
The rest of the day had been subdued, to say the least. Nathalie was almost glad when they came into Kathy’s kitchen later that afternoon to be feted and fed and exchange presents.
Kathy’s inane chattering kept everyone—Dad, Marcus, David, Lyndi, and Nathalie—from having to talk about anything substantial. And during the drive home that night, Nathalie could claim exhaustion, and avoid bringing up her disappointment about their trip.
And now, two days later, they had taken the drive up to Santa Barbara again, with David on the phone the whole time. By this time, her feelings about the Monterey trip had morphed from disappointed to rationalized. There was no point in being wistful for what she couldn’t have. David was obviously working very hard. And hey, she’d gotten half the security deposit back.
She was lucky that he’d been able to come to the gender reveal party, she told herself. He hadn’t intended to—too much to do, his paralegal was out of town and time was ticking down—but Nathalie put her foot down.
“We are finding out the gender of our child, via cake,” she’d said in her best Don’t-Mess-with-Teacher voice. “You are coming.”
No one, not even David, could deny the Don’t-Mess-with-Teacher voice.
However, it didn’t seem to work on other teachers, or if it did, Madame Craig would have recognized it when Nathalie said, “Please don’t do that,” regarding the French teacher’s presumptuous physical exam.
But Madame Craig didn’t seem to notice that she had overstepped by molesting her former student. Instead, she turned and called out to the room, “Kathy! They’re here!”
A parting of the book club seas, and Kathy emerged.
“Finally!” Kathy said, elbowing past other guests to come embrace Nathalie and David. “I was afraid you’d forgotten where we lived!”
“We were here two days ago,” Nathalie deadpanned.
“Then there’s no reason for you to be so late!” Kathy replied. “Your sister made the right decision, staying with us the past few days. That way she wouldn’t miss a thing!”
Nathalie’s eyes narrowed. “We’re not late—you said eleven, it’s eleven oh sev—”
“My fault,” David said, again putting his body between Nathalie and a late-middle-aged woman. “I got stuck on a work call.”
Kathy’s brittle smile turned aghast. “Working? Through the holidays? Oh, David, you certainly are dedicated.”
“I know,” David said, shaking his head. “It’s my curse.”
“It sure is,” Nathalie said, forcing a smile.
“Oh but look at you! I told you to dress like the guest of honor, and you’re wearing that?”
Nathalie looked down. “This is my best dress.” Of the ones that still fit, anyway. It was a loose green sheath made of stretchy fabric that looked amazing with tights and boots and a belt. She had just left off the belt, for possible pooch-related reasons. In fact, the dress was cut so well, it might last her the whole pregnancy.
“Guest of honor, Nathalie. Did you not have anything in pink and blue?”
“No,” Nathalie said, through gritted teeth. “I guess not.”
“I swear you’re almost as bad as your sister.” Kathy shook her head. “But luckily I got to take her shopping. Now, we’re going to do the big reveal at noon.”
“The big reveal?” David asked. “You mean cutting the cake. Finding out what color is on the inside?”
“Oh, don’t get me started on the reveal. I wanted to do these adorable smoke bombs in the condo complex’s courtyard, but the association nixed it. Then I wanted to do a big balloon release, but this one committee member—Frances Watson, horrible—was concerned about the balloon scraps choking seagulls. Seagulls, honestly. Like we need more of those.
“So yes, we are cutting cakes, but . . . we also have something special planned!” Kathy declared, clapping along with every word like a preschooler who was about to get cake.
To be fair, they were all about to get cake.
“And there’s your sister! Doesn’t she look amazing?” Kathy said, practically skipping the three steps to where Lyndi was clasped tight to Marcus’s side.
Nathalie had to admit, Lyndi did look amazing. She had the glow of pregnancy without the waistline of it. She wore a pink flowy minidress with a blue vest over it, discreet gold jewelry, and her hair in milkmaid braids. She looked like she was about to attend Coachella, not her own gender reveal party.
She glanced down at Lyndi’s hands. Good lord, she’d even had her manicure done in pink and blue, with gold accents.
Suddenly Nathalie’s green dress and boots didn’t seem so fashionable anymore.
“Oh, I absolutely adore this outfit! And I’m so glad we got matching manicures. It was such a fun day. Nathalie, you should have been there.”
Lyndi gave a shy smile. “I’m just glad the dress is loose so it will fit me for a while.”
“Oh, honey, with your figure, that dress will last through the pregnancy and beyond. And besides, you’re young enough that your body will bounce back so easily after the baby comes. You watch.”
Lyndi blushed. Meanwhile, Nathalie felt her pooch growing by the minute.
“And don’t
worry, I’ll take you shopping again for more maternity clothes when the time comes,” Kathy said, her eyes sparkling as she patted a stray hair back into place on Lyndi’s braids.
“Mom, you don’t have to—”
“Nonsense, like I would allow my baby and her baby to ever want for anything!” Kathy trilled, turning to face everyone else. Then her eyes caught something else. “Cecily! What are you doing? The blue deviled eggs are meant to go on the pink platter and vice versa!”
As Kathy moved away, the burn in Nathalie’s throat—from holding her tongue, not from heartburn—subsided. She turned to face Lyndi and Marcus.
And couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.
“Marcus, how’s it going?” David extended his hand.
“Oh, you know—same as two days ago, just . . . pinker,” Marcus replied, indicating the paper pompom that was directly above his head.
“Indeed. I assume you and Lyndi’s dad got roped into putting all the decorations up?” Marcus nodded with chagrin. David held up his left thumb. “I got this scar my second Christmas with Nat. Kathy made me get all her holiday shopping out of the car and then closed the trunk on my hand. Welcome to the family. We have hats.”
As Marcus laughed, so did Nathalie and Lyndi. It was times like this that she remembered just how much easier David made everything. He made parties easier, he made family easier. When she was clueless about what to say or how to act, he was her constant steadfast force.
She leaned into him, grateful. He squeezed her shoulder.
Then, his phone rang.
He glanced at it. “Sorry, hon, I have to take this.”
“No problem, I get it.” Nathalie nodded. Once he was gone, she turned to Lyndi and Marcus. “He’s got a lot of work.”
