When in Doubt, Add Butter

by Beth Harbison

  These thoughts didn’t come without melancholy, of course, and they never came without thoughts of the last pregnancy. Hopefully, that would change when this baby was born and the reality superseded the memory and imagination, and sadness if not regret, that had been brewing all these years.

  “Good night, Gemma.” Charlotte threw her pipe cleaner arms around my neck and hugged me.

  “Good night, baby.”

  My eyes met Penny’s, and she nodded.

  She knew.

  Mother-to-mother, she knew I was struggling with the past I’d let go and the future I was facing now.

  * * *

  Absentmindedness. That was another thing I remembered from being pregnant. I had gone all the way to Mr. Tuesday’s to make his dinner, and I’d forgotten the key.

  I stood at the door and rang the bell. No answer. Of course. So instead I sat down on the hall floor with my back against the wall and took out my phone to call him and find out if one of the neighbors might have a key, or the doorman, or someone.

  As soon as I’d dialed, a man got off the elevator, his cell phone ringing.

  A very familiar man.

  “Mack!” His name exploded from my mouth before I could stop it. Then suddenly everything hit me. What was he doing here? He had lived here all along? Had I been strolling past his door this whole time, oblivious of the fact that he was right there behind it?

  Then the heavier stuff set in. I was pregnant. My heart sank. I was pregnant.

  There was a child here now, someone who would grow to adulthood, be a force in this world for far longer than I would. As hard as it was to fathom now—since now, pregnancy simply felt like a medical condition—I was responsible for a new human being coming into the world.

  And so was Mack.

  This man I was looking at, whom I didn’t know. My God, what did I know about him beyond that he was charming and hot in bed? Was he married, for instance? I didn’t even know that for sure. Was he a good person or not? Was he the kind of guy countless women had sobbed over, gently patted by their best friend’s hands amidst reassurances of He’s not worth it!

  Who was the father of this baby?

  And how would I ever know? Now any chance of normal interaction or playful coyness was out the window.

  I pushed END on my phone.

  At the same time, he glanced at his phone and pushed the DECLINE button. “Applesauce,” he said, tilting his head and smiling. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to meet one of my clients.” I slid up the wall and straightened out my clothes. I pulled in my stomach a little. I knew I wasn’t showing yet, but still. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here.” He gestured vaguely at the door behind me.

  No way.

  But yes way. Of course.

  The phones.

  I hung up on him, he declined me, all so we could talk to each other. It was too much—too coincidental to be true.

  “You live … where?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  Then something washed over his face and he took a deep breath. He glanced to the door behind me. “Gemma?”

  Despite the obviousness of what was currently happening, I had to stifle the urge to ask how he knew my name, since I remembered distinctly that it had somehow been overlooked by both of us on that fateful night.

  But the answer was obvious.

  “Are you … Paul’s brother? Mack—McMann—it makes perfect sense.” I shook my head and stared at him.

  He looked at me curiously. “Wh—? No. I am Paul.”

  Chapter 18

  The floor seemed to fall away beneath my feet. This made no sense. It was impossible to comprehend. “What?”

  He pointed at himself a little self-consciously. “Paul McMann.”

  “G-Gemma Craig.”

  “Why would you think—?” He tilted his head. “Okay, this is too weird.”

  “But you said your name—”

  “Mack.” He nodded. “I was with a couple of buddies from college that night.” He gave a crooked smile. “I didn’t want to tell you I was Paul and then have them call me Mack all night and make me look like some creepy liar.”

  We both stood there in silence for a few moments. Finally, he snapped out of it and walked hazily toward his door. “Come … come in.” He paused and gave a dry laugh. “You have a key. You could have let yourself in.”

  “Yeah … um … I forgot it. There’s … stuff … on my mind.” Too much. Too too much.

  He nodded and unlocked the door.

  I walked through and then turned. “But if you’re Paul, who was that the other day?” The guy I’d chatted away at as if he knew exactly who I was and I knew exactly who he was and we’d known each other—at least on some level—for more than a year.

  “Who?”

  “The guy who got here when I was leaving the other day.”

  “My brother.” Then, with a small raise of his eyebrow, he said, “Oh, that’s why you thought I was him.”

  “Well.” I shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “He told me you were beautiful.”

  “Oh, did he?” I responded automatically.

  “Yeah. I had no idea how right he was.”

  “Ha.” My legs felt a little weak. I sat down in the chair I knew well to be behind me.

  He started to take off his coat, then froze. “But you must have known it was me—you had my number.” He looked like he was trying to figure out a puzzle.

  I remembered his instructions to listen for the phone the other day, and felt a little hot. “I knocked over a bottle of water the morning … um … after we…” I looked sheepishly at him and he nodded. “And I didn’t even notice the note until it was ruined. I couldn’t read it.” I shook my head. “God, it’s just unbelievable.”

  “I know. The grocery store—”

  “Right, and you were on the phone and it was obviously important and I couldn’t just stand there, waiting like an idiot.…”

  “Right.”

  I felt an uncomfortable cramp in my stomach as I thought of everything. The notes, the banter, the sex—it was all him.

  The baby …

  He cleared his throat. “So … how’ve you been?”

  I laughed. “Well, you pretty much know that, don’t you?” Except for the baby. “We talk every week.”

  He shook his head and raked his hand through his hair, his gesture perfectly reflecting the confusion I was also feeling. “We do. It’s true. You’ve been in my house every week.”

  Yes, his baby and I, walking around, doing domestic stuff in his place, never realizing. I didn’t know what to say. In fact, there was so damn much to say that I couldn’t say anything.

  He broke the silence. “We could probably stumble over how strange this coincidence is all night.”

  I laughed. “I’m ready to.”

  “Or we could skip that and pour some wine and get to know each other.” He smiled. “I don’t know how to make those drinks you were having at No Plans.”

  “Yeah, I’m really not that big a drinker,” I said, the words heavy with meaning now. “Particularly when I’m on duty.”

  “Gemma.” He smiled and my heart skipped. There he was, the guy who had caught my attention that night, and who had monopolized my imagination ever since then.

  The guy Penny would call my fate.

  “As of now,” he said, “you are officially off duty for the night.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure what to do with that. On the one hand, I was used to being his employee, so it was hard to break that habit, but on the other hand, we had a whole new relationship going here.

  “I think we have a lot of catching up to do,” he said. “So start at the beginning. Tell me who Gemma Craig really is.”

  It was a long, leisurely evening of talk. Everything just flowed so easily. We talked, we laughed, we agreed, several times we said the same thing at the same time.

  It was like the silliest old
romantic movie come to life, with every piece falling into place like a stack of blocks in Tetris.

  For a couple of glorious hours, I thought maybe It was finally happening. Fate had taken a strange course, baby in the baby carriage coming first, but maybe fate thought I was just so thickheaded that I wouldn’t get it otherwise.

  Mack, I thought, might be the One.

  Then he sprang it on me.

  “The timing of this all just couldn’t be worse,” he said right after we had marveled, again, at the coincidence of me having been in his home every week for so long with neither of us knowing what we could be together.

  For a crazy moment, I thought he was referring to the pregnancy, but of course he wasn’t. He had no idea.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, foolishly expecting a simple answer along the lines of, We could have been having so much fun together this past year.

  But no.

  “I’ve taken a new job,” he said. “I’m going to be a partner in a huge firm in Seattle.”

  “Seattle,” I repeated. Was there a Seattle, Maryland? Seattle, Virginia? Was Seattle the name of some small enclave of D.C. I didn’t know about?

  Please please please let it be anything other than Seattle, Washington.

  No hope springs as aggressively eternal as desperate hope.

  “Ironic, huh?” He looked grim. “I couldn’t get much farther away in the States without actually going to Hawaii or Alaska.”

  My stomach tightened. “So … it’s definite? This move?”

  “As of today, yes. I was going to call and let you know, anyway. So you could get more work.”

  Work. I wasn’t even thinking about work. But if he had called, if we had had this conversation without knowing who each other was, it would have been a devastating blow.

  This was even worse.

  “When do you leave?” I asked, and my voice sounded thin and limp.

  “Next month. Four and a half weeks, actually. I spent the afternoon on the phone, getting a broker to sell this place and arranging for a moving company to come haul it all away.” He looked into my eyes, and my stomach flipped. “I would love to keep seeing you, to get to know you better, but the long-distance thing … that’s not fair for me to ask.”

  Ask, I thought. Please ask. But what could I say, really? How could I do that? I had maybe two months before I would be showing obviously. Six months before travel would become prohibitively uncomfortable.

  This could never work.

  I had to take the moments I had right now, get to know as much about him as I could so that someday, I don’t know, I’d have at least a little background for this child if he or she had questions about his or her father.

  That was the best I could do.

  * * *

  “So you didn’t tell him you were having his kid, then?”

  Penny had been listening enraptured to my story over the phone, but it was obvious I hadn’t given her the ending she wanted.

  I moved the phone from one ear to the other. “No. I couldn’t find an easy way to tell my client-slash-one-night-stand that I’m carrying his child. It didn’t seem the right time.”

  “But you’ll have to tell him! There’s never going to be a right time.”

  The guilty knob in my throat hardened. “Actually, you’re right. I don’t think there is. He’s moving. To Seattle.”

  “What?”

  “I know. He’s got some great job lined up out there, it’s all official, and if I tell him about the baby … I don’t know … I think it would make him feel conflicted. For all the wrong reasons.”

  “Wrong reasons? Give me a better reason than a baby!”

  “Oh, Penny, come on. There are scores of people out there who stayed together as long as they could—right up to the moments their relationships got threadbare and horrible—because they thought they needed to keep it together because of the kids. I know far more people who were fucked up by terrible marriages than by single parents.”

  “You’re right. But he has the right to know.”

  I sighed. “I just don’t know how to reconcile that. What I do know is that he’s leaving in a month, and that gives us a month to get to know each other a little better without the additional weight of this responsibility on the relationship. Then—” I paused. Then what? “—then we’ll see.”

  “You’re going to tell him eventually, right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, but did I mean it? What if things fizzled three weeks from now and he moved and, under normal circumstances, it was one of those things where we’d move on and never see each other again?

  Did we really need to be in the awkward position of coparenting then?

  How many single women had gone to great lengths for artificial insemination in order to have babies by themselves when they reached a certain age and didn’t want to compromise? Couldn’t this just be, basically, the same thing?

  “You want to keep seeing him, though, right?” Penny asked. “Maybe do the long-distance thing until one of you moves to the other if things work out?”

  I took a bite of the brownies I’d swung by Giant for, then went and flumped down on my sofa. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, come on! I can hear it in your voice right now! You’re totally into the guy. You were when you met him, or when you thought you met him, and you’ve been really fond of him as your boss, too. You’ve been into him two different ways, and you didn’t even know it! If that’s not fate, I don’t know what is!”

  It was a compelling argument. But. “All I can say is that I’ll play it by ear. This is a huge element to add to a small relationship.”

  I could practically hear her raise her eyebrows. “Well, it seems clear to me that it was meant to be. I mean, for all intents and purposes, you’re already practically his wi—”

  “Don’t”—I actually held my finger up in the air even though she couldn’t see me—“even say it.”

  “All right, but I’m just saying that you have a foundation most people don’t have at this point in a relationship.”

  I knew very well what Penny was saying. It was like being a wife. A very June Cleavery wife. There was a small, crazy part of me that thought it didn’t seem that bad an idea. It was like standing on top of the high diving board and thinking, I could just … I could just do it. Just jump in.

  But this was different. It wasn’t just a dive for me. It would be a big one for him, too. If only I could press PAUSE on my whole baby situation.

  “Gemma?”

  I’d been quiet for too long. “Yes, sorry. Um. What were we saying?”

  “I’m saying—”

  My phone beeped. I glanced at the screen. MR. TUESDAY was still his designation in my phone book. “Oh my God!”

  “No way! See? It’s a sign!”

  “I’ll call you back, Penny.” I switched over. “Hell—hello?”

  “Gemma. It’s … Paul.”

  “Hi, Paul.”

  “Hey. So, I know earlier was sort of awkward and I wanted to make sure you felt okay with everything.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry.” For what? Turning out to be me?

  “No, no, it’s no one’s fault. I mean, it’s a good thing. I was just very surprised.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Well, I just wanted to apologize. I feel like I should have known or figured it out or tried harder to find you or something.”

  “No, don’t worry about it. We couldn’t have known.” Or could we? Should we somehow have known?

  He paused. “This is bizarre, right? I mean, what are the odds?”

  “I was always bad at math.”

  “Maybe you don’t need to be that good at math to put two and two together.”

  I paused, thinking, then just went ahead and said it. “I’m sorry, I don’t know which four you’re referring to.”

  He laughed. “I’m not sure I do, either.”

  Call me a crazy romantic, but hearing him say it made my heart pound. “Do you
think we might ever—?” How could I finish that without sounding needy and grasping?

  This was such a strange position to be in, not knowing if we knew each other or not. Not knowing if we were already halfway there or, in some ways, further apart than strangers.

  “Arguably, we have a head start,” he said, as if reading my mind. “I mean, I already know your worst qualities.”

  I recognized the humor in his voice. “Uh-huh—do you, now?”

  “Yup. Your weapon of choice is a pepper grinder, and you don’t know when to stop with the garlic.”

  “Right. Good thing I know yours, too.”

  “I have no bad qualities.”

  “A, you don’t write in waterproof ink,” I said, as if he hadn’t spoken, “and B, you have trust issues.”

  “Trust?”

  “As in, trust me, you like all that garlic.”

  “Right,” he said, and I imagined that smile.

  “And C,” I went on. “You’re moving across the country.”

  He hesitated, but I could imagine him shaking his head in resignation. “That’s the truth.”

  “No way around that.”

  “I guess not.”

  A moment of silence passed, so long that I almost laughed at my complete inability to come up with something clever to say.

  Finally he spoke, “But it’s late. We can’t figure everything out right now. My primary concern was that you weren’t feeling too uncomfortable with … things.”

  I had to smile to myself. “No, I’m not too uncomfortable with things. Are you?”

  “No. They could have gone smoother, of course, but I’m kind of liking things.”

  “Good. Me, too.”

  “Moving thousands of miles away seems like something of a hindrance.”

  “It does,” I agreed. “So we’ll have to fake our way through that until it makes sense.”

  “Is that your usual MO?”

  “When I don’t know what else to do, yes. Better that than forcing an issue into something unrecognizable.”

  “You’re a pretty cool chick, you know that?” He laughed.

  “You have no idea,” I said. “So sleep on that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”