Nearly Wild

by Linda Seed

  “She didn’t want to go to Yale,” Will put in. He knew this wasn’t his business, wasn’t his family relationship to navigate. But he couldn’t just sit here and let Pamela continue to criticize and berate Rose. “She ran away with nothing but a car and the clothes on her back to avoid going to Yale. That suggests to me that she really didn’t want to go. A high-status school isn’t everything.”

  “Said the Stanford man,” Pamela observed dryly.

  “Stanford is great,” he acknowledged. “But Cal Poly meets Rose’s needs. They’ve got the program she wants in the location she wants. And, they’re reasonably affordable.”

  Pamela scoffed. “Affordable. She’s buying an education, for God’s sake, not a used car.”

  “Well, at this point, I won’t be buying either. Now, let’s just enjoy this nice meal Will made for us. Can we? Please?” Rose demonstrated enjoying the meal by putting a forkful of potatoes in her mouth and saying, “Mmm. Yummy!”

  “Rosemary.” Rose’s mother gave her the Pamela Glare. “Will says you’re finally going to college, and now you say you’re not. Which is it, dear?”

  Rose put down her fork and plopped her hands in her lap in defeat. “I’d like to go, but I can’t afford it. Okay, Mother?”

  “Well, but, I’m encouraging Rose to look into financial aid opportunities,” Will added.

  “Financial aid!” Pamela said it as though Rose would be panhandling with a sign that read, WILL WORK FOR TUITION. “That’s for inner city, blue collar, working class—”

  “I am working class!” Rose exclaimed.

  “Well, that was your own decision, dear.” Pamela delicately patted her mouth with her napkin.

  “Yes, it was, and I don’t regret it. At all.” Rose stabbed a piece of chicken with her fork as though she were defending her life against it.

  “Viticulture,” Pamela mused. “To do what? Become a sommelier? Because that’s just a glorified—”

  “No. A winemaker. I want to make wine. I’d like to eventually have my own label.” Rose said this quietly, almost timidly, without her usual verve. That’s what made Will understand how much it really meant to her.

  “Hmm,” Pamela said.

  Will hadn’t known Pamela long, but he could almost hear her thought process. A sommelier might be a glorified bartender, but a winemaker? That had a certain cultured, upscale cachet. That was something she could tell her Connecticut friends about.

  “Pamela,” Will said, attempting to change the subject. “I’m sorry you’re finding your stay in Cambria to be disappointing.”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that.” Pamela lifted her wineglass and took a sip of chardonnay.

  “You didn’t?” Rose asked.

  “No, dear. I can quite see the appeal, actually. Did I tell you that I awoke this morning to find a family of deer on the lawn? Charming. Just charming.”

  Rose stared at her mother, her mouth half open.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  On the drive back from Will’s place, Pamela glanced at Rose from her place in the passenger seat.

  “You know, you might have asked me if you needed money for college.”

  “I might have. I also might have pounded nails into my skull. But I didn’t do either of those things because they’re both painful and self-destructive.” She said it in a bright, conversational tone, as though they were discussing movies or fashion trends.

  Pamela scowled. “Rosemary, don’t be dramatic.”

  “If I took money from you, the first thing you’d do would be to ask me to dye my hair,” Rose pointed out.

  “Well, naturally, I—”

  “But it wouldn’t end there. After you got me looking the way you wanted, then it would be my house. And my job. And my boyfriend.” It was the first time she’d referred to Will that way, even mentally, and it jolted her. But then she rallied, and continued. “And then you’d want me to take my shiny new degree and move back to Connecticut. Don’t say you wouldn’t.” Rose cut off her mother as she began to speak. “Because we both know you would.”

  “Well.” Pamela straightened her cashmere cardigan. The lack of reply was likely the closest Rose would ever come to being told she was right.

  “And so,” Rose continued, as though she had never expected a response, “I didn’t ask you, and I didn’t even mention it, and now we’re both going to pretend Will didn’t mention it, either.”

  Pamela made a grumbling noise, mumbling under her breath as she rearranged her purse in her lap. “It’s beyond me why you persist in making your life so much more difficult than it has to be,” she said when she was speaking intelligibly again.

  “I don’t make my life difficult, Mom. I make it mine.”

  Pamela’s eyes widened, and she blinked a few times. Somehow, Rose got the idea that finally, finally, something she had said had gotten through.

  Rose dropped Pamela off at the rental house. She’d intended to leave Pamela in the driveway and get the hell out of there. It was still early, and she could scurry back to Will’s place as fast as her wheels would take her, so they could have an evening of reality-altering sexual bliss.

  But she parked and got out of the car after she realized she’d left her cell phone inside the house when she’d picked Pamela up at the start of the evening.

  “I’ve just gotta grab my phone, and then I have this … this thing I have to do … I … um … I told Kate I’d—”

  “When you return to Will’s cottage, please tell him thank you for dinner,” Pamela said, eyeing Rose sternly.

  “Ha. I will.” Rose would have thought that a lifetime of lying to her mother would have made her better at it. But, no.

  She followed her mother into the house and grabbed her phone from the kitchen counter. Then, as she came out into the small living area on her way to the door, she found her mother in the Barcalounger with her shoes off and her eyes closed, the chair in full recline.

  Rose gaped at her mother, stunned.

  “You’re sitting in the Barcalounger,” she said when she had recovered slightly.

  “And?”

  “And … I just didn’t think it was your style.” Rose felt as though she were stating the extremely obvious, like Water is wet, or The sky is up.

  “Yes, well,” Pamela said without opening her eyes. “It may lack style, but it actually is quite comfortable.”

  Rose stared for a moment longer before letting herself out of the house and getting back into her car.

  First the charming family of deer, and now this. Was Pamela going to turn warm and maternal soon? Rose doubted it. But she supposed anything was possible.

  “Have you told Will yet?” Lacy demanded the next morning at Jitters when Rose went in to get her caffeine fix before work.

  “Told him what?”

  “You know.” Lacy pantomimed an explosion with her hands and mouthed the word, Boom.

  “Lacy, we’ve been over this.” Rose leaned her elbows on the counter while Lacy made espresso. “There’s nothing to tell. Yet.”

  “That was, what, almost two weeks ago? There should be something to tell by now. Unless … you know. You already know that there’s nothing to tell.”

  “Well,” Rose said, slumping slightly against the counter.

  “Well what?” Lacy pulled a shot of espresso, added steamed milk, and passed it to a customer who was waiting a few steps away from Rose.

  “Well …” Rose leaned over the counter toward Lacy and said in a stage whisper, “I’m late. But I have PMS, so … you know. Everything should be fine.”

  “You’re late,” Lacy repeated.

  “Yeah. But, PMS.”

  Lacy crossed her arms over her chest and looked at Rose sternly. “What PMS symptoms are you having, exactly?”

  “You know.” Rose tossed her arms into the air. “The usual. My pants are too tight, my boobs are sore, and this morning I cried because I ran out of toothpaste. Classic PMS.”

  Lacy leaned toward her and hissed, “Y
ou idiot, those are also classic signs of early pregnancy!”

  Rose blinked at her. “They are?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oh.” Rose must have known that, somewhere in her brain, but she’d pushed the information aside in order to interpret her symptoms in the most favorable way possible.

  “You need to take a test,” Lacy said. “Right now. Go over to the pharmacy and pick one up, then you can come back here and pee on the stick.”

  “I don’t want to pee on the stick,” Rose pouted. “I don’t need to pee on a stick.”

  “I think you do,” Lacy said.

  The customer who had just received her latte, a middle-aged woman in a sundress and flip-flops, put a hand on Rose’s arm. “I really think you should. It’s better to know.” The woman picked up her latte and walked out onto Main Street.

  “Well, there you go,” Lacy said.

  Buying a pregnancy test in a town as small as Cambria presented certain problems. Everybody knew Rose, and everybody knew Will. Therefore, if Rose was seen buying a pregnancy test, people were going to look at Will funny because it meant one of two things: He was about to become a father with a woman he’d only just started dating, or that woman might have become pregnant with someone else. Either way, the likely result was pity or, at the very least, curiosity.

  Since Rose had no intention of telling Will about any of this—and with luck, it wouldn’t be necessary anyway—she couldn’t just parade into the pharmacy and pick up a First Response box.

  Thinking quickly, she ducked out of the coffeehouse, saw the tourist in the sundress gazing into a shop window, and sidled up to her.

  “Psst.” Rose hissed at the woman as though they were secret agents at a midnight rendezvous.

  “Excuse me?” The woman looked at her curiously.

  “Could you do me a favor?” Rose whispered the question out of the side of her mouth.

  “Um … I guess so.”

  When Rose explained what she needed, the woman was eagerly on board. Rose handed her a twenty dollar bill, and a few minutes later, the woman passed her a pharmacy bag containing a Clearblue digital pregnancy test.

  Rose walked back into Jitters and gave Lacy a knowing look as she went toward the back of the shop and into the ladies’ room.

  About three minutes later, Rose was still sitting on the toilet with her pants down around her ankles as she stared at the results window of the test stick.

  PREGNANT.

  She felt like she was having an out of body experience. She couldn’t feel her hands or feet, and she seemed to be hovering about five inches above her own head.

  Gradually, she got herself together, put down the stick, fastened her clothes—and then promptly turned around and hurled her breakfast into the toilet bowl.

  Well, that wasn’t usually a PMS symptom.

  Lacy made an emergency round of calls, and she, Kate, and Gen all arranged to meet Rose after work for dinner. Rose had been planning to see Will that evening, but she couldn’t see him until she knew what to do. And she couldn’t know what to do until she’d talked things over with her friends.

  One of the cruel ironies of an unintended pregnancy was that just when you needed a drink the most, you couldn’t have one. In solidarity with Rose, the whole group opted for water or iced tea over dinner instead of their usual wine. Lacking the comfort of alcohol, Rose opted for junk food instead.

  They were at Kate’s house, gathered at her dining table around an array of Chinese takeout boxes. When they’d arrived, they’d all given Rose hugs hard enough to threaten her ability to breathe. Now, with the initial shock out of the way, they were scooping food onto plates and launching into the debriefing.

  “Okay. So.” Kate lifted noodle-laden chopsticks and led off the discussion. “What are we thinking here? Because, honey, you know we won’t judge you if—”

  “I’m keeping it,” Rose said. “I might not know much about what I’m going to do yet, but, yeah. Definitely keeping it.”

  “Okay.” Gen nodded. “So that leads us to another set of questions. Do you want to raise this baby with Will? Or alone? And if you’re going to do it with him, how will that work? And if you’re going to do it alone, how will that work?”

  “Those are the questions, all right,” Rose agreed.

  “Well, the first thing you have to do is tell him,” Lacy said. “Then, the way he responds will help you know what to do.”

  Rose shook her head, her hair a vibrant red this month. And, oh God, was that another thing she’d have to give up for the pregnancy? Was hair dye bad for the baby? “I can’t tell him,” she said.

  “Of course you can!” Kate insisted. “You have to.”

  “No. I really don’t.”

  The others stared at her as though she were speaking Mandarin.

  “Honey,” Kate said, and put a hand on Rose’s arm.

  Rose pulled her arm away from Kate’s grasp. “Look, you’re all being judgy right now, but that’s because you’re not seeing it from my side of things. If I tell Will, one of two things is going to happen. Either he’s going to run like hell—which, let’s face it, a lot of guys would do at a time like this—or he’s going to feel a sense of duty and become this committed partner. But he’d only be doing that because I’m pregnant! And I would never know whether he was in it because of me, or … or because it was the right thing to do!”

  Lacy looked thoughtful. “I want to argue with you, but I kind of can’t. You want to see if he wants you for you, and this is going to screw with that. No way around it.”

  “Right!” Rose tossed her arms out toward Lacy. “You get it!”

  “As much as we might understand your point,” Gen said, “it’s not the kind of secret you can keep forever. At some point, he’s going to notice.”

  “Right, but by then, we’ll have had more time to see where things are going. Just between the two of us. Without offspring.”

  “He has a right to know,” Kate said.

  “I know that. I know it,” Rose said. “And he will know. Eventually.”

  “Have you told your mom yet?” Kate asked gently.

  “My mom! Oh, shit. No. She already thinks I’m … Oh, God. I’ll just … I’m just not going to deal with that. She’s going back to Connecticut in a couple of weeks. I’ll tell her after the baby’s born. Or when he’s in preschool.”

  Somehow, it was that thought—the image of her growing child being sent off to preschool, probably with a tiny backpack and a snack—that finally broke the dam of Rose’s hormone-fueled emotions. First she teared up slightly, a sensation she felt as a heat behind her eyes, and then, before she even knew what was happening, she was boo-hooing into her hands as her friends watched helplessly.

  Kate dashed into the bedroom to grab a box of tissues, Gen hurried to get a glass of water, and Lacy sat beside Rose, alternately patting and rubbing her back.

  And that was when Jackson walked in.

  He stood inside the front door, watching the crying, the tissue-bringing, the back patting, and looked like a guy who wanted to be anywhere else but here. Prison, maybe.

  “What’s going on?” he asked tentatively, as though he maybe didn’t want to know the answer.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” Kate asked, her voice sounding a little harried.

  “Slow night. I’m working extra hours for that private party on Tuesday, so …”

  Rose sobbed and hiccuped, a wad of tissues in her hand.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Jackson offered.

  “No.” Kate went to him, put a hand on his bicep, and said, “Rose is having … Well. It’s a personal issue.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Will?” he wanted to know. “Do I have to go kick his ass?”

  The thought that Jackson would kick Will’s ass for her was unbearably sweet, and that sent Rose into another burst of tears.

  “No,” Gen said. “Will didn’t do anything wrong. No ass-kicking required.�
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  “Okay. Well … I have to do something to help. Can I … Rose? Do you want a glass of wine? Or something stronger? I’ve got whiskey.”

  “No!” three of them shouted at once.

  Jackson stood there, helpless.

  “It’s a girl thing,” Kate said. “We’ve got this.” She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Maybe just kind of … you know. Make yourself scarce for a bit.”

  He looked so relieved it was almost comical. “Okay. Then I’ll just …” He hit the door not exactly at a run, but at a brisk walk.

  “He’s gonna figure it out,” Lacy said once he was gone.

  “Oh, he is not going to figure it out,” Kate insisted. “He’s a guy. Guys see a crying woman, they don’t think pregnancy. He will not figure it out.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Of course, he figured it out.

  Will was certain that Jackson knew more than he was telling as the two of them sat at a table at Ted’s a half-hour later. Jackson had called Will once he’d been ordered to get out of the house, and the two had met for a beer.

  “The women are at the house,” Jackson said once they were settled in with mugs of beer in front of them. “There’s something going on. It’s … Kate said it was girl stuff.”

  “What kind of girl stuff?” Will wanted to know.

  “I don’t know.” But Jackson was avoiding his eyes.

  “Baking? Crocheting? Flying kites and talking about feminine hygiene?” Will joked. But Jackson didn’t even crack a smile, so he knew it had to be serious.

  “Rose is upset,” Jackson said.

  “Wait, Rose? What about?” Will felt a surge of dread, of concern.

  “I don’t know,” Jackson said again. “But … she was crying. And the others were trying to calm her down. And … and when I offered her a drink, they all yelled at me.”

  “They yelled at you?”

  “Yeah. And they told me to leave. Not that it was a burden to get the hell out of there, with all that girl emotion going on.”

  “I’ve got to go find out what’s happening.” Will got up from his chair and grabbed his jacket.