“Be right there,” Barry said as the man walked past. Then, to me, “I’ll call you later.”
When it became clear that Barry wasn’t going to move until I did, I started walking backward away from him, waving my phone in my hand as I went.
“Bye,” he said.
“Yep.” I nearly ran into the door on my way out.
As phones are known to do, mine was constantly watching me, and I knew this because my targeted ads and social media feeds all were tuned into the fact that I was pregnant, probably from all the googling I did. While eating lunch with Kate that day, both of us scrolling quietly on our phones as we finished our food, I saw a woman pregnant with triplets on Instagram. Thirty-three weeks, she said, which was only seven weeks further than me, and I was horrified. She held her belly with both hands, it stuck out like two feet from her body. Totally great that she can grow three people, pregnancy is cool, magic of life, whatever, but it was also terrifying because with three people in her, how did she have anything left for herself?
I showed the video to Kate and she just said, “Wow the beauty of the human body,” as if it wasn’t like actual science fiction body horror on the screen with fifty thousand likes.
The beauty?
“You’ll look like that soon. Sort of.” She laughed at whatever face I made. “Only sort of.”
I glanced down at my stomach, which already felt like a basketball, but still had fourteen weeks to grow bigger. Woof.
“There’s no world where I’m actually growing twins but the doctors just missed it somehow, right?”
I immediately started scrolling through my photos app to find the last ultrasound pictures to zoom in on.
Kate laughed again.
“They would know,” she assured me, but now I wasn’t sure. I typed “pregnant with twins and not know?” into my search bar and felt relieved to see that I could be almost one hundred percent sure I was only having one baby at this point.
I put my hand on my stomach, where I knew the one baby was. She didn’t kick all the time, but I could definitely feel her moving around throughout the day, sometimes more dramatically than others. Kate, Mom, and I spent a good twenty minutes pressing around my belly marveling at the tiny baby’s movements against our palms last week. It felt a little bit like magic.
Kate was back to looking at her phone, no doubt responding to Harvey Janitorial inquiries or organizing various lists in her notes app. Kate managed the fuck out of Harvey Janitorial but never cleaned unless she had to. Sometimes she went in for me if no one else could, which was helpful for the first thirteen weeks when I was sick constantly and the the usual cleaning supplies made it worse.
There’s not a doubt in my mind that Dad is praying nightly that Kate will want to take over the company, and I suspect she will. She does practically everything: scheduling, ordering supplies, interviews, whatever’s needed. I helped on marketing sometimes, wrote whatever ads needed writing, helped throw together copy for a new website last year, but Kate is the real heavy hitter when it comes to HJ admin needs.
I used to feel jealous about all the responsibility Dad let her take on, but she was the responsible one, after all. I was the cooler, younger, disorganized one. Well, for now. I was working on it.
A text from Barry showed at the top of my screen asking if we could meet tonight. I dodged his last two calls, texting to saythat I needed to nap after the early shift, even though really, I was just watching TV.
I put the phone face down on the counter and focused on the lunch Kate brought—tuna sandwiches, apple slices, carrots with hummus, and Cheez-Its because I’d complain if she only got healthy stuff. I took a bite of a carrot before turning to Kate.
“I saw the baby’s father today,” I said.
“Oh?” Kate was still looking at her phone so I knew she hadn’t processed it. I stayed quiet until her chewing came to a halt and she slowly turned to look at me.
“What did you just say?”
I took another bite of carrot. “He works at the practice facility as of today.”
“He lives in Utah?”
“As of this week, he does.”
“Doing what?” she asked.
I took a long, deep breath to prepare for this one. After the trip, I told her about Barry, the nice stranger from New York; I never told her he was also Barry Wright, a man who was famous to a select group of sports-enjoying people.
“Well.” I shrugged. “Playing.”
Kate’s mouth hung open, but I pushed her bottle of water toward her, and she drank.
“He’s a fuckinghockey player? On the team?”
