“I didn’t say that.”
“No, because I said it for you. Well, for your information, my life is not perfect. No one’s is.”
“I know that.”
“I have challenges, too.”
“I know you do. It’s just that—”
“It’s just that because you’re pregnant you think the world revolves around you. Well, it doesn’t. Millions and billions of women have babies every day. It’s nothing special, you know.”
Cordelia stopped short. She felt bad about that last remark. It was childish and mean. “I’m sorry,” she added quickly. “I didn’t mean that, about it not being special.”
Sarah put her hand to her middle, a gesture that had become habitual. “Don’t you care at all about my baby?” she said.
“I don’t know your baby!” Cordelia cried in frustration. “But I do know you, and I care about you, of course I do. It’s just that I need you to care about me, too.”
“I do care about you!”
“Sorry. Sometimes lately it doesn’t feel like you do.”
Sarah sighed. “I’m doing what I can. I’m doing my best, I am.”
“I know.”
“Wait,” Sarah said after a moment. “Didn’t you say you wanted to show me something?”
“Did I?” Cordelia shrugged. She slipped her iPhone back into her bag. “I forget.”
“Oh.”
Cordelia got up from the bench. “It doesn’t matter. We should get back to the shop.”
Chapter 66
Sarah was manning the counter at The Busy Bee. Her mother and Mrs. Kane were also at the shop. At the moment they were deep in discussion about some aspect of her baby’s quilt.
Luckily business was slow that morning because Sarah’s mind was not on her job. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Cordelia had said about her being self-focused. She guessed that she was self-focused, but how could she not be? It wasn’t like she could forget for even one minute that she was pregnant.
Sarah almost laughed aloud. Cordelia had claimed that her life wasn’t perfect. But really, what did she have to complain about? She wasn’t the one who was pregnant. She wasn’t the one facing a totally uncertain future. And Cordelia always got everything she wanted, from new clothes each season to a manicure once every two weeks to every new app that caught her fancy. Cordelia wasn’t the one who had to work for her pocket money. All she did was bat her eyes at her father or use her little girl voice with her mother and pretty much anything she wanted was handed over to her on a silver platter!
Well, okay, Sarah admitted, maybe not on a silver platter. Still, where was Cordelia today while Sarah was working? On a road trip with her dad to the outlets in Kittery!
Sarah took a deep breath. She knew she was being childish. Mothers were supposed to be responsible adults, not emotionally erratic teens. But that was the very problem, wasn’t it? She was not an adult, and there was no use pretending to be. Pregnancy didn’t confer adult status, and it certainly didn’t guarantee mature thoughts and tempered behavior!
In fact, until this summer, she had never felt resentful or jealous of her friend. And Cordelia had done nothing to warrant such feelings of ill will. She, Sarah, was the one who had been careless. Cordelia hadn’t changed, and she wasn’t the one who had caused their friendship to alter.
“Sarah?” Mrs. Kane said, interrupting her unhappy thoughts. “Would you do a quick inventory of the pattern books on the shelves?”
Sarah grabbed a pad of paper and hurried out from behind the counter. “Sure, Mrs. Kane.”
Better to bury herself in the doings of The Busy Bee than to moan and groan about how badly she had screwed up.
A few minutes later, the bell over the door tinkled. Sarah looked over her shoulder to see a woman in her sixties or seventies. Her hair was a stiff halo of a suspiciously dark, flat brown. Her eyebrows, too, were obviously dyed, and shaped into pointy arches not normally found on a human face. Her lips were heavily lined with a dark pink pencil and filled in with a lighter, glossier lipstick. She wore what looked like a pants suit preserved from the seventies, polyester or some other hot and itchy-looking fabric, in a sickly yellowish hue.
Sarah bit back a smile. There was something so clownish in the woman’s appearance, something almost to be pitied if not laughed at. Sarah immediately felt bad for thinking this. No one should be laughed at, no one. And maybe the woman was a very nice person. What she looked like shouldn’t matter at all. Still, Sarah found herself hoping the woman wouldn’t notice her.
But her hope was in vain. The woman’s eyes widened when she caught sight of Sarah, and she hurried toward her.
“So you’re pregnant!” she cried. “Congratulations!”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “Thank you.”
“So, honey, when are you due?” the woman asked with an eager smile.
Sarah mustered an answering, though less eager, smile. “Late August,” she said.
The woman winked at her. “You must be very excited.”
“Um,” Sarah said. “Yes.”
“So is it a boy or a girl?”
“A boy.”
“I knew it! I can always tell. There’s something about the shape—” The woman reached out a hand covered in gaudy rings and placed it on Sarah’s middle.
She didn’t know why the gesture repulsed her. So many other women had done this before. But now, Sarah jerked away from this woman’s thoroughly unwelcome intimacy. “Don’t touch me!” she cried.
The woman withdrew her hand as if it had been burned. Her eyebrows shot up even farther as her face, under its heavy coating of makeup, registered shock.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said hurriedly. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . .” But more words were lost to a sudden flood of tears and Sarah scurried off to the little kitchen at the back of the store. From there she was able to overhear her mother and Mrs. Kane rush to soothe wounded feelings.
“I’m so very sorry,” Mrs. Kane said. She was using what Sarah thought of as her professional voice, calm, clear, slightly conciliatory, and pitched a bit lower than normal. “I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it.”
But I did, Sarah thought. I’m not public property!
“My daughter is a good girl, really,” Cindy added. Sarah cringed at her mother’s pleading tone. “She’s just very tired.”
There was a moment of silence before the woman said, “Hormones! They play nasty tricks on us all. I remember when I was pregnant with my first son. Lord, I thought my husband would murder me!”
Sarah waited in the kitchen while the woman purchased some thread and then left. When she had gone, Sarah emerged from her hiding place.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kane,” she said. “Really. I shouldn’t have snapped at her.”
“No need to apologize,” Adelaide said promptly. “Why don’t you take a break, Sarah? Walk down to the beach, get some fresh air.”
“Oh, I’m okay, really. I’ll get back to taking inventory of the pattern books.”
“Are you sure?” her mother asked, concern etching her brow.
Sarah nodded and turned to the bookshelves on the left-hand wall. She felt a whirring in her stomach that had nothing to do with the baby. She was scared. She could not afford to let her mood swings affect her behavior at work. If her boss had been anyone other than Mrs. Kane, she might already be unemployed.
The bell over the door announced the arrival of another customer. Sarah kept her eyes on the pattern books and hoped it was someone who hated babies.
Chapter 67
Adelaide was sitting at her desk in the den. She opened her laptop with the intention of doing some further research on the commercial value of Cindy’s quilts. She had put out some feelers to colleagues across the country and already many of them had responded with questions and suggestions and quotes that in some cases were astonishingly high—too high for The Busy Bee to afford.
Heavy footsteps sounded from the hall. Time and again Adelaide had a
sked Cordelia not to clump through the house, but she continued to clump and Adelaide suspected that she was fighting a losing battle. Not that Cordelia was consciously defying her mother. She just couldn’t seem to keep simple requests in mind.
Unlike Sarah. Adelaide felt bad about what had happened at The Busy Bee. Sarah was trying so hard to prove that she was a hard worker and a good person. It was inevitable that she would occasionally break under the strain of all that self-imposed discipline. For the rest of the afternoon, after the departure of that carnival-like woman, Sarah had worked especially diligently, even taking the trash out back to the bins, a task that ordinarily was not hers.
A crash from the kitchen made Adelaide jump in her seat.
“Sorry!” Cordelia yelled. “The broom fell out of the closet. I forgot to put the latch on the door.”
Case in point. Cordelia and responsibility were not necessarily in sympathy. God forbid it were Cordelia who was pregnant, Adelaide had no doubt that Grandma would be shouldering most of the day-to-day burden.
What a mean-spirited thought, Adelaide thought, shaking her head. Still, it did make her think about how Cindy and Sarah would divide the decision-making regarding the baby. She suspected they were in for a power struggle no matter how close they had always been. What was that old saying, something about there not being enough room in a house for two women in charge. Well, some might find that sexist, and it probably was, but there was some truth to it, as there always was in those old adages.
What would happen while Sarah was in class for eight hours a day? Cindy would be the one making the moment-to-moment decisions, some of which Sarah might resent or disagree with. Would Cindy become, in effect, a nanny, subject to Sarah’s rules and demands? Or, and this seemed somehow more likely, would Cindy naturally assume the mother’s role, be more parent than grandparent? Only time would tell, but Adelaide foresaw a degree of messiness.
Well, the entire situation was fraught with messiness. Adelaide thought about the time just before finals in June when a girl in Sarah’s grade had called her an appalling name. Jack had been sick about the incident. For one, he had worked very hard in a campaign against bullying of any sort on the school’s premises and it was always a severe disappointment when an incident did occur. And, in this case, there had been something more personal at stake. In some ways, Sarah and Stevie Bauer were the Kanes’ surrogate daughters. Adelaide and Jack had known them for most of their lives, had watched them grow alongside their own daughter. They had attended their birthday parties and school plays and had taken the girls on excursions to Funtown Splashtown and the aquarium in Boston.
Jack had managed to keep the incident quiet; even Cordelia didn’t seem to know about it. If she had been a witness to the incident, well, Adelaide had no doubt her daughter would have gone in with guns blazing to protect Sarah.
Adelaide’s cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number but as she used the phone almost exclusively for business purposes she answered.
“Hello? Yes, this is Adelaide Kane. Oh, you’re calling about the quilts. Yes, they’re still for sale. Really?”
Adelaide felt her heart race. Just wait until she told Cindy about this!
Chapter 68
Cindy arrived at The Busy Bee to find Adelaide beaming. And when she beamed, she reminded Cindy a wee bit of a human lighthouse. The fact that she was wearing a red blouse added to the impression of exceeding brightness.
“Good news!” she cried. “We got a very generous offer for your family’s quilts from the Museum of Americana.”
Cindy’s stomach fell. “Oh.”
“They’re a small museum in Tennessee, only ten years old, and intent on building their collection. The man I spoke to, someone in the acquisitions department, was ecstatic to have found us. Isn’t it wonderful?”
Cindy braced herself for what might very well be an understandably angry reaction from her friend. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have said something sooner. I’ve decided I just can’t part with the quilts.”
Adelaide nodded promptly. “I understand.”
“You’re not going to try to talk me into selling?” Cindy asked. Adelaide’s reply had truly surprised her, particularly after her earlier show of great enthusiasm. “After all, you did all the research to determine a price. And you spoke with this person from the museum. I feel as if I’ve wasted your time. I feel as if I’ve put you in an awkward position.”
“No, of course I’m not going to try to convince you to sell,” Adelaide assured her. “And assessing the quilts’ value wasn’t a waste of time at all. I learned a thing or two.”
Cindy felt enormously relieved. “Thank you, Adelaide,” she said. “Really.”
“Actually, Cindy, I know why you were considering a sale, but frankly, I was surprised. Those works of art are a tangible part of your family’s history. If I had something like that from my ancestors, even if it was a really amateurish portrait painted by some great-great-great-grandmother I’d barely heard of, I don’t think I’d ever be able to part with it.”
“You might if you really needed the money.”
Cindy thought that Adelaide seemed a little embarrassed by her comment. “Yes,” Adelaide said after a moment. “Well.”
“I hope I’m making the right decision,” she said.
“I suspect that you are,” Adelaide said, her tone reassuring. “And if someday you come to decide it’s time to part with them, you can easily put them back on the market.”
“Right,” Cindy said, but she knew now there would never be a time when she would be able to part with the quilts. That was okay. Money could be made in other ways.
“I’ll take care of the museum people,” Adelaide said then.
“Thanks. I hope they’re not going to be mad.”
Adelaide shrugged. “Oh, I doubt they’ll be mad. Maybe a bit annoyed and certainly disappointed. But they’ll survive. And I bet you they leave the door open for a future sale. The quality of those quilts is outstanding.”
And, Cindy thought, Adelaide was an outstanding friend. “The girls will be by at the end of the day to work on the baby’s quilt,” she said. “I thought maybe I’d treat everyone to takeout Chinese.”
Adelaide laughed. “You’ll find no argument from Cordelia! And I’ll pay for half.”
Chapter 69
Cordelia was lying on her bed. Pinky was standing, somewhat lopsidedly, on her stomach, his round, blue, plastic eyes staring at nothing from the sides of his head.
“Pinky,” she said. “I’m tired of feeling grumpy.”
Ever since her last confrontation with Sarah, Cordelia had been feeling bad. Okay, Sarah was being self-centered but maybe that was normal and maybe it was even necessary. What was really important was the baby after all, and if Sarah needed to focus entirely on herself in order to be a good mother, well, Cordelia—and everyone else—was just going to have to tolerate her behavior.
Besides, Sarah wasn’t always going on about herself. It was only on occasion.
Cordelia sighed and glanced over at her dresser, on top of which sat a pile of colorful cotton cloth, her less than perfect contribution to Sarah’s baby’s quilt. She knew that she shouldn’t have lost her temper with Sarah. She really should work on being more patient. A new pair of sneakers, even really awesome ones, didn’t compare in importance with having a baby. Still, Cordelia just couldn’t imagine trading her interest in—well, in everything!—to concentrate on having a baby at the age of sixteen!
Frankly, she wasn’t even sure she ever wanted to have children. The thought of childbirth frightened her; she wasn’t a fan of pain, even a splinter sent her howling, and she regularly fainted at the dentist before Dr. Horutz even touched her, and they said you never got your body back after you had a baby, and her own body was big enough already, thank you very much! And, more importantly, she suspected that her maternal instincts didn’t exist. At least, they certainly hadn’t made themselves known. Maybe they never woul
d and she would never have to deal with morning sickness and sore breasts and nasty things like an episiotomy. Cordelia felt faint even saying the word in her head.
How could she be so vastly different from her best friend? Sarah was so weirdly calm about the prospect of giving birth. Unless she was pretending. But why should she lie? Well, why did anyone lie? For a million, billion reasons that often made sense only to the person lying and sometimes, not even then.
Cordelia put her finger on the tip of Pinky’s velvety horn. Her mother had told her what had happened with Sarah and that woman at the shop the other day. Poor Sarah. She must feel so embarrassed about losing her temper. And really, Cordelia couldn’t blame her. Strangers shouldn’t touch each other!
Yes, she would make it up to Sarah as soon as possible, apologize and do something nice for her to show Sarah that she still loved her and that she would always love her no matter what happened or how weird she acted.
“Any ideas, Pinky?” Cordelia asked.
Pinky just stared.
Chapter 70
It was about nine thirty in the evening. Sarah’s parents were in their bedroom. She was on her way back from the bathroom to her room when the sound of their voices caught her attention. She had never eavesdropped on her parents before, but now she stopped and held her breath.
“I’ve gone over the books again,” her father was saying. “What with Dave Johnson postponing his renovations until next year, maybe the one after that, cash flow’s going to be a problem. Again.”
“Maybe we should talk to the bank about a bridge loan,” her mother said after a moment. “Just something short term. Or a personal line of credit.”
“I don’t want to get into debt if we can help it, Cindy.”
“Of course not, neither do I. But there’s got to be some way. . . .”
Sarah had heard enough. She hurried back to her room and carefully shut the door behind her.
Cordelia had been absolutely right when she had accused her of being self-centered. Having this baby and keeping him was the height of selfish behavior. Something had to be done, and she was the one to do it.
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