The Second Time Around

by Marie Ferrarella

  The doctor answered her question with a question. “Would you change anything if you could?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Just for a second, Dr. Kilpatrick moved back into the room. “If you could erase one of your sons, go back and not have him, would you?”

  Laurel didn’t even stop to think. “No.”

  It was obviously the answer the doctor had expected. “Then how do you know you won’t feel that way about this one?”

  Laurel shook her head. Things were getting jumbled, twisted. “Because with this one, I’ll be forty-five years old. Because with this one, I won’t be able to run and play.”

  The doctor opened her chart and glanced down at the notation she’d made earlier. “You still get in a game of tennis now and then, don’t you?”

  It had been an exaggeration. Wishful thinking on her part. She was too busy with the demands of her career and personal life to spend much time on the courts. “More then than now.”

  The doctor closed the chart again, accepting the correction and going from there. “Running is not a requirement with children.”

  The hell it wasn’t, Laurel thought. “I guess your kids were less active than mine. Mine were born running.” At least it felt that way. “I get tired just thinking about it.” And then it suddenly dawned on her. “Is that why I’ve been feeling so tired lately? Because I’m pregnant?”

  Dr. Kilpatrick’s smile filtered into her eyes. “That would be my diagnosis.”

  One mystery cleared up—and she wished with all her heart that it’d had an easier solution. “I beat you to it. That means you can’t charge me.”

  “All right,” Dr. Kilpatrick agreed, tongue in cheek. “I’ll just bill you for the urinalysis. And the friendly advice.”

  She could use some advice, Laurel thought. Real advice. “Which is?”

  “Enjoy.”

  Laurel rolled her eyes as she crossed her arms before her. “Easy for you to say. You don’t have to face a man who’s stockpiling tons of brochures on summer cabins from three different states.”

  “He’ll be thrilled,” the doctor promised.

  “He’ll be in shock,” Laurel countered. Real concern began to set in. What if the news was too much for Jason? “Got any smelling salts I can take with me?”

  Dr. Kilpatrick opened the door. “You have my number. Call if you need me.”

  Laurel laughed. “That’s all Jason needs. An ob-gyn attending to him.”

  Laurel’s smile faded the moment the door was closed again. She slid off the table, trying to stay one step ahead of the numbing shock that threatened to completely swallow her up.

  This was absurd.

  Unreal.

  How in heaven’s name could she be pregnant? Weren’t eggs supposed to dry up at her age? She slipped on her underwear, then hooked her bra. Wasn’t that what the whole ticking-biological-clock thing was all about? Having babies before it was too late? Before she couldn’t have any? It looked as if she could go on having babies until she was an octogenarian.

  Laurel pulled her turtleneck sweater over her head, then punched through her arms.

  “This breaking news,” she mumbled to herself in disbelief. “Eighty-seven-year-old Laurel Mitchell has just given birth to her twentieth baby. Someone stop this woman for the good of humanity.”

  With her panty hose still in her hand, Laurel leaned her hip against the table and sighed. How had this happened? She knew how it happened, she upbraided herself, putting on first one leg, then the other. She’d gotten lax. At the end of last year, she’d given in to Jason’s pressure and finally stopped taking her birth control pills. He thought it wasn’t too much of a risk.

  Well, guess what, big guy, we’re pregnant. How’s that for a risk?

  She was on the cusp of menopause, experiencing her own personal heat waves while others were bundling up in sweaters and jackets. She’d assumed that her birthing years were over. That any occasional romp she enjoyed with her husband was deemed safe for all concerned.

  Well, you deemed wrong, Laurie old girl.

  Old girl.

  God, she was too old for this. Too old for morning sickness. Too old for prenatal vitamins and too old to be chasing around after a toddler.

  Yet, here it was, happening.

  She spread her hand out over her as-yet-flat stomach. There was a teeny-tiny occupant inside now, no bigger than a speck. But he was growing. Growing by the moment. Frowning even as she stood here in this nice, pastel-colored room, agonizing over it.

  Him, she corrected herself. Agonizing over him. All she’d ever managed to produce was boys. There was no reason to believe this newest passenger would be any different.

  Oh God, this was different.

  She was forty-five, for crying out loud. What was God thinking, letting her get pregnant?

  “This isn’t funny,” she murmured, looking up toward the ceiling. “Not funny at all.”

  And the one who would be laughing the least would be her husband.

  Slipping on her shoes, she closed her eyes. How was she ever going to explain this to Jason?

  CHAPTER 2

  Pregnant.

  She could remember the first time she’d ever heard that word applied to her. She and Jason had been married just a little over a year. Jason had graduated from UCLA just that past June and she was set to get her liberal arts diploma that coming June. They felt empowered, as if nothing could stop them. The whole world was wide open for them and they were going to take advantage of it. Right after they took a little time off to do some traveling. That had always been the plan: graduate, then travel a little bit before settling down to a job and starting a family.

  The best-laid plans of mice and men…

  When Dr. Kilpatrick had told her she was pregnant, her reaction had been bittersweet. Being pregnant meant closing the door on being young and carefree. It meant opening the door to parenthood, which was something both of them wanted and anticipated with relish—sometime in the near future, but not right at that moment.

  “So we’re a little ahead of schedule,” Jason had laughed when she’d told him the news.

  She’d come home with a loaf of French bread and candlesticks, intent on creating as much of a romantic setting as she could before telling him. Jason had gotten the news out of her within ten seconds of her closing the door to their tiny furnished apartment.

  He’d hugged her, lifting her off the ground. He’d stopped short of spinning her around when she’d protested, saying her stomach contents were threatening to revisit the outside world.

  “What about the road trip?” she’d reminded him when her feet were firmly planted back on the floor again. She knew he’d had his heart set on it and had spent weeks planning it, in between going to work. There were maps littering every available flat space in the apartment, many of them with red lines marking possible routes to take.

  With a wide grin, he’d shrugged it off. “Plenty of time for a road trip once this little fella makes his debut.” He’d patted her stomach, then suddenly dropped to his knees, resting his cheek against her abdomen and talking to her belly button as if it was a direct connection to the baby within. “Don’t give your mom any trouble, now. She really doesn’t look very good in green.”

  She’d loved Jason so much at that very moment, she’d thought her heart was going to burst. “We’ll go on that road trip as soon as the baby’s old enough to travel, honey,” she’d promised him with feeling.

  Jason rose to his feet, a dazed, happy look of disbelief on his face. “It’s a date.”

  And then he’d gone on to seal the bargain with a deep, amorous kiss that had made her recall just how it was that she’d gotten into this state to begin with. Because Jason had undone her so quickly, she had completely forgotten all about taking any precautions against this very thing.

  But as soon as Luke—named after Jason’s late father—was old enough to take on the overdue road trip, Morgan was more than just a gleam in Jason
’s eye. He was a bump in her stomach. A rather large bump.

  Christopher came two years later.

  Within a few months after her twenty-fifth birthday, Laurel found herself the harried mother of three children, all under the age of five. Her own mother presented her with a large eleven-by-fourteen book meant for the elementary-school set entitled, Where Babies Come From.

  Her mother’s idea of a joke, Laurel had thought at the time. “I know where babies come from, Mother,” she told the woman who had only given birth to two children herself. “They come from heaven, holding a small piece of it in their chubby little hands when they arrive.”

  And she’d meant that with all her heart. Because holding her babies in her arms was like holding heaven.

  But that didn’t mean life was peaceful by any stretch of the imagination. Her three, overactive boys had each been a trial in their own unique way, sending both her and Jason to the edge of their tempers and to the center of their ability to love.

  It was, all in all, a trial by fire. Three trials by fire. But there wasn’t a minute of that hectic, insane life that she would have eliminated—with the possible exception of when Morgan had brought home that jar of black widow spider eggs and they had hatched overnight. The babies had gotten loose, crawling out of the holes he’d punched in the top of the metal lid.

  Frantic, envisioning them all dying of spider bites in their beds, she’d almost insisted that they move out of the house. Jason had her agree to a compromise by getting an exterminator at a moment’s notice.

  But even the black widow spider incident had had its upside. Because of that, when she’d gone to the local real estate agent, she wound up getting friendly with the man who ran the agency. So much so that she began to seriously think about getting a part-time job selling houses as a way to bring in extra money. True to his word, Ed Callaghan signed her up with his agency the very day she passed her course and received her real estate license.

  She found that she was good at finding just the right house for people. And just like that, Laurel had a career. A career she still had and a livelihood she could easily count on. When the last of her boys had gone into the first grade, she began to put in more hours. Now she had three plaques on the wall of her cubicle proclaiming her to be the saleswoman of the year. Jason called her his go-getter.

  Go-getters didn’t go get pregnant. Not if they didn’t want to be, she thought glumly as she drove onto the main drag within the city she’d called home for the past twenty years. Once upon a time Molten Parkway had been nothing more than a two-lane road that went from one end of the town to the other, the only path to either of the two freeways that went through Bedford. But now they were a city, not a town, and Molten was a major thoroughfare with three lanes whizzing by in either direction.

  Whizzing, that was, in the off hours. During peak hours, the road was clogged with cars either intent on taking one of the two freeways back to wherever it was they came from each morning or returning home from some other region. Molten Parkway found itself the scene of the eternal Southern California shuffle of vehicles. And it was getting worse with each passing month.

  Laurel had seen Bedford, like her family, grow over the years. Often she found herself wishing that Bedford would finally stop growing and stay the way it was.

  She never thought that she’d find herself wishing the same thing about her family. Certainly not at this stage of her life.

  She remembered right after she’d brought Christopher home from the hospital and she and Jason had captured a quiet moment to themselves after Luke and Morgan had collapsed into a fitful sleep.

  The two of them had stood over the baby’s crib, absorbing the fleeting, rare silence, watching the brand-new third addition to their family sleeping.

  And then, suddenly, Jason had broken the silence. “Three,” he’d said.

  The single word had come out of the blue, surprising her as much as it confused her. She’d looked at him, puzzled, waiting for an explanation. When none came, she’d asked, “What?”

  Jason had turned to her and then lightly kissed her forehead, his lips barely touching her skin. Tingling her soul.

  “Three,” he repeated. “I like the number three.” And then, in case she didn’t get the reference, he added, “Three sons.”

  She’d cocked her head, trying to discern something she thought she’d detected.

  “Is that finality in your voice?” she’d asked, recalling how he’d talked about having a houseful of kids while they’d been in school.

  “It is,” he replied, nodding his head as if reviewing his own thoughts and finding them good. “Any more and we might not be able to provide them with everything they’ll need.” He leaned over the crib, tucking the blue blanket around his small, new son. “Might not be able to give them enough of ourselves, either. Not if equal shares are being handed out.”

  She’d laughed then and kissed his cheek. As always, he was the soul of reason. And she agreed with him. Three was a good number, even though it was one more than she had hands.

  “I do love you, Jason Mitchell.”

  He’d put his arm around her shoulders then, pulling her closer to him as he murmured, “Yes, I know,” into her hair.

  “We’ll have that road trip someday soon,” she’d promised.

  She sighed now.

  Someday just got a little further away.

  CHAPTER 3

  Laurel’s already overworked heart rose up to her throat as she pulled up before the two-story Colonial house that highlighted their steady rise in the world. It was their third house in twenty years. They’d lived here for a little over seven years now.

  It felt like home. More so than the other two, smaller houses.

  But it wasn’t sentiment that had her heart lodging itself in her windpipe. It was the sight of Jason’s navy-blue sedan. The sedan he’d been talking about trading in for a sportier two-seater. He’d been talking about doing this since Christopher had gone off to UCLA almost two years ago. She thought it was her husband’s way of coping with empty-nest syndrome. Hers was to look forward to the next visit from one or more of her sons.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon. What was her husband doing home?

  Damn.

  That wasn’t the word that usually came to mind when she thought of her husband. But she’d counted on having more time to pull herself together, to figure out what words to use in order to break the news to Jason—that there would be a baby in their future and it wasn’t because one of their sons had accidentally dropped his guard and gotten a girl pregnant.

  How could this be happening to her?

  Laurel pulled up into the driveway and left the car parked next to his—she had no choice since he’d taken up every square inch of the garage with his train layout. After a deep, fortifying breath, she got out of the vehicle. She took her time locking the door and activating the antitheft alarm.

  Of course, she was stalling. Eventually, she was going to have to go in and face the music.

  For the time being, Laurel decided to table the “big revelation” in favor of finding out just what Jason was doing home in what amounted to the middle of the day. He rarely came home before six o’clock, usually closer to seven. It seemed to her that the higher up he went in the advertising agency where he worked, the less time he actually had for himself. For them.

  Which was why he’d sounded so wistful lately when he talked about chucking everything and taking an early retirement.

  Still moving in slow motion, Laurel unlocked the front door. Her hand on the doorknob, she paused to take another deep breath before turning it. She might have leaned on it a little too hard. The next thing she knew, she found herself pitching forward into the house, thrown off balance because the door was being opened from the inside.

  “About time you got here,” Jason declared, catching her.

  He was grinning the grin that transformed him from the forty-six-year-old ad executive to the young man she’d fa
llen so hard for the first time she laid eyes on him. He’d been grinning then, too. But at Bernadette O’Hara, who wore her sweaters so tight everyone in high school used to wonder how the five-foot-five dark-haired girl managed to keep her circulation from being literally cut off. At least, all the girls wondered. The boys were all too dazed to be able to put together more than three words into a semicoherent thought without drooling.

  All except Jason, she’d discovered, much to her delight.

  Jason was deeper than that, deep enough not to be taken in by such superficial things as overdeveloped mammary glands and the underdeveloped material that strained to cover them.

  With his hair a deep chestnut-brown as yet unassaulted by any stray gray hairs, Jason was still as boyish looking as he’d been back then. Still as trim and muscular, too, even though a few more pounds had found their way onto his torso. They’d settled in across his chest and biceps, not his waist. She still bought all his pants from that same small section marked “size 30 waist.”

  Won’t be able to say that about you pretty soon. You’re going to be size elephant.

  “I didn’t realize you’d be here,” she told him now, slipping off her coat. She tucked it into the hall closet, leaving it on a hook. Right now she didn’t think she could handle something as complicated as a hanger. “What are you doing home?”

  “Waiting for you.” Jason brushed his lips against hers. It was then that she realized he was holding a bottle of champagne in his hand. Backing up, he held it aloft like the first rider across the finish line at the Kentucky Derby. “I almost started celebrating without you.”

  “Celebrating?” she echoed.

  He knew?

  Laurel tried not to sound as nervous, as unsettled, as she felt. It took effort to keep her voice calm. “What are you celebrating?”

  There was a smattering of disappointment in his eyes, as if he was surprised she could have forgotten, what with all the hours he’d put in and all the Saturdays he’d spent in his office at home, trying to make things come together for him.