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The bell over the door jingled again, drawing their attention. To their surprise, their other best friend and cousin, Phae, walked through the door.
Phae, the former owner of the shop, sold it to Sylvie for a couple of good reasons. Other than the fact that she wasn’t too interested in cutting hair for a living, she was a newlywed and recently announced that she and her husband Kent were expecting.
The whole family loved Kent and they all were excited for Phae. That included Sylvie. She loved seeing how happy Phae was these days and was thrilled that her boys would have a cousin to grow up with just like she had grown up with Neesa and Phae.
Some of her favorite memories of her childhood were sitting at her kitchen table, talking and laughing with her cousins while Momma stuffed them full to bursting with her homemade chocolate chip cookies.
“Thought I’d find you both here,” Phae said with a wide smile.
Sylvie wasn’t sure if Phae was even aware that she had put her hands on her belly and was absently rubbing it. It was one of the first overt signs of pregnancy, and one that Sylvie remembered fondly.
She had loved every minute of her pregnancy with the twins. Well, almost every minute, if you left out the morning sickness, the aching feet, the hurting back, the constant peeing, the … yeah, so maybe she hadn’t loved every minute, or even close to it.
Neesa looked forlornly at Phae’s slightly rounded tummy. Phae was just finishing her first trimester and with her tall, athletic form, she barely even showed.
“I want a baby too,” Neesa said in a familiar refrain.
“Oh, trust me, you don’t want to go through any of this,” Phae said. “It seems like Kent has to hold my hair back out of my face every time I turn around so I can throw up, and I’m so bloated I can’t stand it. I can’t keep anything down, even though I’m starving all the time. I look hideous. This is definitely no picnic.”
Sylvie hid her smile behind her hand. Phae didn’t know even half of what she was in for. It was all worth it, though.
Phae might complain that she felt unattractive, but her inner glow made her even prettier than ever. Her handsome husband fell all over himself to make sure she was comfortable and happy.
It was still odd for Sylvie to watch their interactions. Phae had always been the fiercely independent one of their trio, and then she had attracted a man who had finally softened her up; in a good way.
Sylvie wouldn’t have expected Phae to be the first one of them to settle down either. Sylvie couldn’t help but wonder if she’d change like that once she found the one, too … if she ever found the one.
“I don’t care that it’s not a picnic,” Neesa said. “You can’t get something so wonderful for nothing, you know.”
“The twins should be here any minute, Neesa. I would think spending this much time with them would take care of some of that baby craziness you’ve got going on in your head,” Sylvie scoffed. “Enjoy the fact that you still get to sleep through the night uninterrupted. I’d kill for a full eight hours of sleep.”
“Not a chance. They’re sweet as can be, and you know it, Sylvie. Being around them just makes me want a baby more. I can’t believe the two of you are going to be moms before me! Neither one of you even liked babysitting when we were kids,” Neesa said.
That much was true. When anyone in the family had been on the lookout for a babysitter, Phae and Sylvie would conveniently find a way to make themselves scarce. But that was more because they knew that Neesa loved doing it.
She saw a shadow fall across the big bay front window of the shop. She recognized the hat before she even got a clear view of the man wearing it. “Oh no. I see we’re about to get more company,” she said with a sigh.
Although Sylvie sounded slightly snarky about it, secretly she loved having her family around. Even after the shop closed for the night, that didn’t stop any of her relatives from stopping by and saying hello.
Case in point, another one of her cousins, James, walked through the door a minute later. James was the sheriff of Zeke’s Bend. He could also always be counted on to act like an overprotective big brother to the three girls. It was a role he took seriously, sometimes too seriously.
“Evening ladies,” James said with a tip of his hat.
Sylvie often thought it was a shame that James was still single. He was a great man, and fine looking, too. If he found a girl of his own to settle down with, she thought he might stop butting into her business. She loved her cousin, but his meddling ranked right up there with her mother and brother on the side of extremely annoying.
“What’s going on, Sheriff?” Sylvie asked. She spun around in her chair a little bit and tried to crane her neck to see further outside the window. She was anxiously waiting for the arrival of her boys.
“I’m glad I caught you here before you closed down for the night, Sylvie,” James said. “I wanted to let you know that I saw Alan strutting around town showing off a brand-new sports car. I caught him speeding on the highway heading out of town toward Rollinsburg. I had to give him a ticket, and since that’s the third one this year, it’s going to be a pretty steep fine. He wasn’t thrilled about that.”
Sylvie, Phae, and Neesa all laughed as James regaled them with the story of Alan’s outrage and how he threatened not to vote for James in the next election.
What was so hilarious about that was that no one ever bothered to run against James. He was the most popular and effective sheriff the town had ever had, and everyone knew it. Even Alan.
Meg walked out from the back room and asked what all the chatter was about.
“James gave Alan a speeding ticket,” Phae said. “Serves the jackass right. I still can’t believe he left you high and dry. He hasn’t come around to see the boys once since they’ve been born. What kind of man walks around ignoring the fact that he has two kids living in the same town? Has he offered even a cent of support?”
Sylvie’s laughter died instantly. The conversation had wandered into dangerous territory.
Although she had come home from Chicago fully expecting to tell her friends all about her wild adventure as the escort Kassy, for some reason she had held the story back. Later, when she missed her period and found out she was pregnant, she was glad she’d kept her one night fling a secret.
How would she have explained that to her family? They had all been so thrilled by the news that she had broken up with Alan. At least, her mother had been thrilled until Sylvie told her she was pregnant. Then the tables quickly turned to guilt and overbearing, unwanted advice about her unwillingness to include Alan in everything having to do with the babies.
“If Alan wants to spend his money on a fancy new car, that’s totally up to him. I haven’t spoken to him since I dumped him, and that’s fine by me.” Sylvie didn’t want to talk about Alan anymore. It was a regular argument with her family that was wearing thin.
“Well, not only did he buy a new sports car, he was tooling around in it with that blonde bimbo that he says is his new assistant,” James said with an outraged expression finishing his story with a flourish.
The other women groaned. Sylvie still didn’t quite understand exactly what it was about Alan that was attractive to the opposite sex. Over the last year since she had dumped him, she’d come to the realization that she must’ve been temporarily insane to stay with him as long as she had.
She thought it had been the evening with Heath that had really opened her eyes to how bad Alan was for her, even though Phae and Neesa had been trying to tell her just that in the nicest way possible for years.
Now Sylvie knew she deserved someone better. She had briefly experienced what that could be like, and it was something she wanted again. But it would have to be with someone who liked kids because that point was non-negotiable.
Sylvie was so caught up in listening to James’s story that she didn’t hear the squeak of the wheels of the stroller until they were right behind her. She realized that Momma and the babies had snuck in the back
door, and, by the expression on Momma’s face, she had heard at least part of the Alan story, too.
Momma spoke in her usual haranguing tone that set Sylvie’s nerves on edge. “I can’t believe you are just fine with letting that man make a fool of you. You don’t think people are talking about it all over town?”
Chapter Ten
EVERYONE IN THE ROOM FELL quiet. Instead of letting herself be drawn into an argument that had been debated to death, Sylvie knelt down to look at her baby boys in the stroller. A wave of calm washed over her just seeing their faces. They looked like angels, and her heart warmed.
Ignoring her mother, she leaned over and brushed both of their foreheads before giving each of them a small peck on the cheek. She was hesitant to wake them, but she wanted to spend some time with them.
The time from after the shop closed until they went to bed, and in the morning before work, was really the only time she had with them during weekdays, and she hated to waste a moment. She sure wouldn’t waste any on a distasteful topic like Alan.
“I’m not going to get into this discussion with all of you again,” Sylvie said finally, knowing they were all waiting for her to speak. “Whatever was between us is over now. I don’t need him to be involved, and I don’t need him to take care of the boys and me. I can do that on my own, and I guarantee it’s better for all of us.”
“Amen, sister,” Phae said. “But it wouldn’t kill him to kick in some bucks, especially since you won’t let any of the rest of us give you anything.”
Sylvie scowled at her. “I said I’m not going to discuss it.”
“It isn’t right for a man to not take responsibility for his children,” Momma said.
Damn. It was the beginning of a litany that Sylvie had listened to ever since she’d told her mother she was pregnant. Sylvie understood that the reason her mother was so adamant about the topic went back to her first husband abandoning them all those years ago. Clearly, her mother had never gotten over it.
