With relief clear in her voice, Emma accepted the more comfortable topic. She told Macy how she’d rescued Layla, a Great Dane, on her way up to Virginia.
Macy listened, sort of, but couldn’t concentrate.
She wanted to tell Emma about how she’d been contemplating being a surrogate for Dorianne and Kenny, but she started focusing on the word “unobtainable” and couldn’t get past the ache of it. She decided if Emma wasn’t going to be in her life, she didn’t need to know any of that.
They said goodnight and hung up. Macy grabbed the ice pack from the freezer and went to stretch out on the sofa. She wondered if she’d hoped to find Emma living with someone, or not willing to talk to her at all. Had she wanted to find there was no way to be with her, so she could better focus on Michael? Emma said herself that she was unobtainable. But for some reason, Macy only half believed her.
If nothing else, Macy mused, she should be relieved. With things going nowhere with Emma, she wouldn’t have to give any serious thought to the ramifications of being “like that.” She wouldn’t have to worry about losing J-man to Jack because of it, or about how to eventually tell her son.
She draped the ice pack across her forehead and thought about Emma’s note that had accompanied the pictures she’d forgotten to thank her for. The note said Emma had found what she was looking for. Macy should have asked her to be more specific. Again, she found herself wondering, Have I found something in my life?
Macy closed her eyes and knew she had indeed found something. She’d thought about it and thought about it. And she knew that carrying Dori and Kenny’s baby was the natural, logical thing to do. She just had to convince Dori and Kenny.
Part Four
Nesting
Chapter Fourteen
A Done Deal
“I haven’t been here in so long,” Dorianne said.
“I love the French Market. And I’m so glad we’re doing these lunches.” Macy opened the menu, even though she already knew what she was having.
“Me, too.”
The waitress approached their table. “What can I get you ladies to drink?”
Macy ordered water with a lemon. “I’ll take sweet tea,” Dori said.
Macy smiled. Emma had always ordered unsweetened tea. She got what she ordered about half the time. Afterwards, guarding her tea from well-meaning wait staff armed with sweet tea became a full-time job for Emma. Macy figured that at least in Virginia, Em could get her iced tea how she liked it.
“A guy two tables away is staring at you,” Dorianne said.
Macy didn’t bother to look. She’d seen the familiar face as they were waiting to be seated and had refused to make eye contact. She still didn’t plan to.
“That hasn’t changed much,” Dori added, smiling.
Macy shrugged. She wanted to enjoy Dori’s company without interruptions. The past few weeks of getting reacquainted with Dori had meant a lot, and the fewer distractions, the better. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t realized how very much she had missed their friendship.
Dori sat back from the table when the waitress set down her sweet tea.
“Thanks for the water,” Macy said. “I’d like the Crepes Louisiana, please.”
“I’ll have the same,” Dori said. After the waitress went to put in their orders, Dori said, “You know, Jeremiah’s going to be a heartbreaker one day.”
“I just hope I raise him to respect people.”
“You will. You are. I just know you’re a good mother.”
Macy shrugged. She knew Dori would have been a great mother, and she hated how things had turned out for her. The words started again—even-steven, even-steven. “Have you talked to Grace lately?”
“No. She’s made it perfectly clear that she doesn’t give a hoot about me.”
“I’m sorry.” Macy sipped her water. “It’s probably for the best, though.”
“Oh?”
“I hope I’m not out of line,” Macy said, “but when I saw y’all at the bookstore, there was something about Grace that didn’t sit right with me.”
“Kenny’s been saying that all along. I was just convinced that she’d eventually feel a connection.”
“Maybe she will one day.”
“Not enough to carry my baby. That much I know for sure.”
“Well, maybe she wasn’t the best choice anyway. Maybe someone else would be more appropriate, someone you’ve known longer and better.” She felt a flutter in her belly.
“I don’t think I could ever put myself out there again to ask anyone else. Besides, I don’t really know anyone of childbearing age that well.”
“You know me that well.” Macy waited for Dorianne to respond. She didn’t. “Ever since Jeremiah said that thing about making us even-steven…”
“Trading a dog for a baby? Only a six-year-old would think that was normal.”
Macy looked away. She wanted to say that was because he hadn’t been corrupted by the world yet, that maybe adults should listen closer to what six-year-olds had to say.
Their salads came, and they busied themselves fussing with them. Dori’s fork stopped a few inches from her mouth. “Besides,” she said, her voice low and measured, “I couldn’t ask you to do something like that for me.”
Macy’s heart raced. “Let’s say you could.” She spoke quickly, not wanting to lose her nerve. “Let’s say you did ask, and I said yes.”
Dori stared at her fork for several moments before using it to separate the tomato from the lettuce. “Okay, let’s say I’m asking then.”
“And let’s say I’m saying yes.” Macy shoveled parmesan-laced salad into her mouth.
For several long moments, they ate without talking. Catching each other stealing glances, they took turns looking quickly away from one another.
The waitress took away the salad plates and left their lunches. Neither had started eating when she came back to top up Dori’s tea.
“This looks great,” Dori said. She teased the side of her crepe with her fork. “Yes, it looks great,” she repeated.
The casualness of Dori’s words confused Macy. Had she misunderstood their exchange just moments earlier? Had Macy been so focused on wanting to carry Dori and Kenny’s baby that she’d not understood what they’d said to one another? Her heart pounded. How horrible if they weren’t talking about the same thing, if they weren’t making the same agreement.
“You are white as a ghost,” Dori said.
Macy swallowed hard but was unable to dislodge the lump growing in her throat. “I think someone needs to say out loud what we just agreed to.”
“Okay,” Dori whispered.
“And I think it should be you to say it.”
Dori reached for her tea, her hand shaking. “I don’t think I can.”
“You don’t think you can do what we were talking about?”
“No, I don’t think I can be the one to say it out loud. What if I didn’t hear you right? God, I’d be so…” Her hand covered her mouth for a second and dropped into her lap.
Macy looked at Dori and saw the same vulnerable girl she had known in the eighth grade, when Dori’s father’s liver finally gave out. She was the same scared girl who’d cried into Macy’s neck, worried that she should have been sadder over her daddy dying.
“You are sad,” Macy had said. “Look at those tears. You’re just as sad as Penelope was in Stony-faced Sea Urchin when she thought her hero, Count Paulo, was dead. Remember?”
Dori had sniffled and nodded. Macy cleared her throat and said, “That’s better, my beauty,” in her best hero voice, making Dori smile through her tears.
She looked across the table at Dori, all grown up but still vulnerable. Macy took a sip of her water. Her heart pounded so hard she couldn’t believe the entire restaurant didn’t hear it.
“If you would like for me to carry a baby for you and Kenny, I would be honored to.”
Dori sipped her tea. “Thank you so much.” She reached across the table jus
t long enough to lightly touch Macy’s hand, then she took a bite of her crepe. “This is delicious.”
“Yes, and so light.” Macy glanced around the room to see if anyone had overheard, if anyone had registered the moment. No one seemed to have noticed how lives were about to change.
Dori smiled. “And the rice is the perfect balance to it.”
“Yes,” Macy agreed.
†
Kenny came home from work to find Dori cleaning the house. It wasn’t the ferocious housekeeping she did when she was upset; it was more like the excited, hummingbird kind she did when she was real happy. He hadn’t seen that kind of cleaning since she won tickets to see Brad Paisley in Atlanta years earlier.
Dori dusted the owl and the glass sea turtle and plucked some lint from the sofa. Kenny braced himself. He had no idea what could possibly have her feeling that good.
She reeled around, a huge grin plastered on her face. “Kenny, you’re home!”
Oh, Lord. He was nervous about what she could possibly be up to but not so nervous that he didn’t notice how pretty she looked, red cheeks and all.
“Come sit down. I’m making your favorite—meatloaf.”
He didn’t know where she got the idea that was his favorite. Hell, he’d have to douse it with a ton of Texas Pete just to get it down. “What’s up, baby?” he asked, more than a little scared.
She set two placemats on the oak table. Those mats were eggplant-colored, not purple. He’d made that mistake when she was buying them at Target, called them purple, and got a twenty minute lesson on different hues.
“Sit and eat, then we’ll talk,” Dorianne said, putting their plates of meatloaf and butter beans onto the table.
She was smiling so big, Kenny thought she was fixing to bust. Kenny sat, tried to eat, and begged her to quit staring at him. “Okay, out with it.”
“I love you so much, Kenny.” She all but crawled into his lap, kissing his cheeks and mouth.
“Oh shit, how much did you spend?” Visions of eggplant-colored furniture danced in his head.
“Stop kidding.”
“I ain’t kidding.”
The next thing he knew, she was telling him about her lunch with Macy. He listened, staring at his meatloaf that was like a wedge of cake, only frosted with hot sauce. The sauce was a cool color orange, but he’d bet Dori would say it was something else, another fancy color right out of a box of crayons.
Dori told him about how she and Macy had been meeting over lunch and coffee. She spent a few minutes about what a wonderful kid Jeremiah was, but Kenny already knew that. Seems she and Macy had done some major talking. In a matter of weeks, Dori managed to forgive Macy, and a whole lot more.
“How in the hell did you go from I-hate-Macy to thanks-for-the-uterus?”
Dori crossed her arms over her chest. “Of course you wouldn’t, couldn’t understand. You’re a man.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Dori. Listen to you.”
He didn’t think Dori listened to herself, or to him. She just went on.
“So, we were at lunch, and we got to talking about women of childbearing age.”
He waited for her to let on that she knew he and Macy had talked that day at the hospital. She didn’t. She just went on about their lunch. “Macy told me that ever since Jeremiah said that she should give me a baby in trade for Bella, that she—”
“What?”
“At the bookstore. Never mind.” She waved him off. “Macy said she’s been thinking about what Jeremiah said. I said I could never ask her to do something like that for me. Then she said that if I did ask, she’d say yes.”
Like so many other times, Kenny sat there staring at his wife, wondering when she’d flipped all those pages, because he sure as hell wasn’t reading along with her.
Dori kept on. “So then I said, ‘Let’s say I’m asking,’ and she said, ‘Then let’s say I’m saying yes.’”
Kenny almost dropped the soda he didn’t remember picking up.
“Next thing I know, we’re talking about it like it’s a done deal.”
“A done deal?” His shock wore off real quick. “Is it a done deal?”
“Well, of course not, Kenny. Why are you getting so mad? I thought you’d be happy.”
“I thought this whole thing was over when Grace said she wouldn’t be our surrogate.”
“You were willing to let Grace be our gestational carrier, why not Macy?”
“Our what?” he asked.
“Gestational carrier—since the eggs will be mine and the sperm yours. I learned that online.”
“Of course you did,” he said, more than a little ticked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” But then he went on to tell her he’d only gone along with the Grace thing because he never figured in a million years it would really happen.
“You weren’t all right with it, but you still let me go through the humiliation of asking Grace?”
He hated it when she twisted things around like that. “No, that ain’t what I meant.”
“So when you said you were okay with it, you lied to me?”
“I didn’t lie. I was okay with it then, but now it’s different. Now it’s Macy. Hell, Dori, Macy? What are you thinking, girl?”
“Why wouldn’t I think of her? You like her—you can admit that you do—and we know her. We know she’ll take care of herself while she’s pregnant.”
“But you just started talking to her again. You spent all them years hating her.”
“I’ve forgiven her. That’s all in the past.”
“You’ve forgiven her?”
“Yes, I have. Come on, think about it. She’s healthy, she—”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“Strong and sincere.”
“I guess.”
She put her hands on her hips. “So, what’s really bothering you?”
“It’s you I’m worried about.”
“What?” He didn’t answer, so she went on. “I’ve never wanted anything more, Kenny. You know that.”
“Yeah, but—” Kenny raked his fork through the hot sauce. He didn’t know how to tell her that he really did want a kid and was okay with it happening this new way, but that he had serious doubts about Dori’s choice of people. The idea of Grace was just plain crazy, but Macy? All he could think of was that with all the history there, things could get way too complicated.
“But what? Just say what’s on your mind.”
“But what if you unforgive her? What if you wake up one day while she’s fat and happy carrying our kid and just as quick as you forgave her, you unforgive her?”
“What kind of flaky twit do you think I am?”
He had never seen such anger on his wife’s face. Not once before in his life. He wanted to get her unmad at him, so he did the only thing he could think of. He ate every bite of that damned meatloaf, even kept eating after she’d left the room without saying another word to him.
Then he went into the spare room where she kept her computer. He stood close but didn’t dare touch her, just looked over her shoulder. Wanting to score some points with her, he tried to act interested in what she was doing. She was looking at info about clinics. It seemed there were clinics that did nothing but make people like him and Dori into mamas and daddies.
“Costs a lot, don’t it?” he asked.
She just shrugged.
“I don’t think you’re flaky, and I know you ain’t no twit.”
He figured she’d at least say thanks, but she just kept on clicking that computer mouse all over the place.
“Okay, Dori, what I gotta do to make this up to you?”
“Agree to at least sit down, the three of us, and talk about this. We don’t have to decide right away, but we should soon.”
“We’ll just sit down and talk?”
“Yes.”
Kenny shrugged. “Okay.”
Then Dori set it up with Macy for the next evening.
&
nbsp; †
When he got home from work, Kenny jumped right into the shower. He couldn’t go meet their possible gestational carrier with sawdust in his hair, could he?
As he was drying off, thinking about what shirt to wear, he started feeling weird, almost like he was getting ready for a first date or something. To make matters worse, he was sporting a hard-on when Dori came waltzing into the bathroom. He tried to hide it under his towel, but she saw it.
“Looks like you and me were thinking about the same thing.”
He was nervous when he asked her what she thought he was thinking about. Then she touched him, and he knew it was all about her and there was nothing to feel guilty about. They backed up, kissing and laughing, until they tumbled onto the bed. When he moved himself against her and then slid in, he imagined they were making their own baby right then and there.
†
They got to Macy’s early, because Dori didn’t want to be late. Kenny was a little surprised when they went inside. He guessed he was expecting the place to be littered with kid stuff: toys not put up, report cards stuck to the refrigerator door. But it wasn’t like that. Everything was either put up or in neat piles on the kitchen counter or on the coffee table in the living room.
While Macy was getting them sodas, he nosed through a coloring book on the counter. Macy handed him his drink, and he gestured toward the picture and said, “Jeremiah sure is good.”
She let out a nervous laugh. “I did that one.”
Kenny had to smile at the image of Macy coloring.
“Jeremiah’s not really interested in that. He only does it to make me happy. Pretty pathetic, huh?”
“Where is Jeremiah?”
“I let Cam borrow my car to take him to play Putt-Putt.”
Nesting Page 13
