18
Sophia
There were two coffees on my counter. I’d made his without thinking — black, no sugar — my hands having learned it somewhere in the last week without troubling to consult me.
He was upstairs in my shower, the pipes knocking above the kitchen, a sound the cottage had never made for anyone before him and made every morning now.
He hadn’t moved in. But he’d been here every night since the first night he stayed, a week ago now, and the mornings I came in off a shift he was on my porch before I was, two cups going cold in his hands because he’d come out too early. The truth neither of us said out loud — because saying it felt like too much, too soon — was that neither of us much wanted to be anywhere the other one wasn’t.
I hadn’t felt like this in longer than I could remember. Relaxed wasn’t the word; unclenched was closer — off-duty in my own life for once, the way you only get when somebody else is quietly minding the part of you that does all the minding. I was happier than I’d been in years and trying not to look too hard at why, because looking too hard is how a person talks herself out of things.
By halften I’d driven Stephy across town and parked us in the waiting room at the OB’s, under a poster of a cross-sectioned uterus I had professional opinions about and was keeping to myself.
She got herself into a chair in stages, one hand under the full curve of her, and pinned me with a look before I’d even sat down. “So,” she said. “Nobody’s seen you at the ranch in about a hundred years. Daisy’s started writing letters. Liam’s a breath away from filing a report.”
“I’ve been busy,” I said.
“Mm.” Her mouth twitched. “Busy. There’s a word.” She let it hang exactly long enough. “Busy with something that lives across the road and rides a very loud motorcycle, maybe. Busy getting?—”
“Stephy.”
“…busy?” She came apart on the word, both hands flying to her belly, wheezing, pleased with herself past all reason. “Oh, your face. Sophia. Your whole face just went up like a struck match.”
The heat climbed my neck and into my cheeks before I could send it anywhere useful, which she clocked, which wound her higher. “I hate you,” I said, with enormous warmth.
“You love me. You’re scarlet.” A nurse put her head round the door and called Stephy’s name before she could do any more damage, which I have never in my life been so glad to hear.
In the scan room she had her phone propped against her bag before the gel was out, Liam’s face filling the little screen at a bad angle, a motel curtain behind him. “Can you see?” She aimedthe phone at the ceiling, then her own chin, then finally herself. “Liam.”
“I can see your nose real good, babe.” My brother’s voice came tinny off the speaker, and under the static was a man who had plainly told somebody he could not get back across the state line in time and then built his whole morning around a curtain and a phone sooner than miss this. “Hey, Soph. Thanks for being there.”
“Where else would I be,” I said, and meant it the way I always mean it.
Renata — the tech, brisk and kind — ran the wand low through the gel, and the screen turned from snow to shape, and there it was: the curl of a spine, the quick flutter of a heart going far faster than a grown one, the small impossible profile of a person who hadn’t been anywhere in the world a year ago. Stephy’s hand found mine without her looking away from the screen. I gave it.
“Measuring right on,” Renata said. “Maybe a hair ahead.”
“A hair ahead.” Stephy dropped her head back on the paper pillow and addressed the ceiling. “Renata. Straight with me. On a scale of grape to watermelon, what are we looking at.”
“We’re not at watermelon,” Renata said.
“We’re at watermelon. I can feel it. I am growing a whole watermelon, and come February you people are going to stand around expecting me to give birth to it.” She lifted her head and fixed me with a look of pure betrayal, which was the worst part. “Soph. You’ve seen things. Be honest with me. Is it not going to be exactly like trying to—” she did not lower her voice for the phone in the slightest “—shit a watermelon clear across the room?”
The sound the tech made was not a professional one. I lost it completely. And on the phone, tinny and helpless, my brother was laughing the helpless way he only ever laughs at his wife,like he still couldn’t believe she was the one he’d ended up with, and through it, fond and wrecked: “That’s — Steph. That’s our baby you’re calling a watermelon.”
“Our enormous baby,” Stephy said, serene, and squeezed my hand, and we all stayed put a beat longer than we needed to, watching that small heart go.
Dottie’s was halffull and smelled of coffee and bacon grease and the vinyl of a booth that’s held the whole town’s backside since 1974. Dottie came at us before we’d sat — four foot eleven of opinion in an apron — and set two waters down. “What’ll it be, and don’t tell me a salad.”
“Mac and cheese,” Stephy said, with feeling. “And a chocolate milkshake the size of my head.”
“Now that’s a woman growing a person.” Dottie wrote nothing down — she never does, never once been wrong — and swung the whole weight of her attention onto me, and something knowing came up slow in her face, like a sunrise I wasn’t going to enjoy. “And how’s Mad Dog these days?”
There went my neck. My whole face. I felt it go and there was not one thing to be done. “He’s — fine. Good. I wouldn’t really know, I just?—”
“Mm-hm.” Dottie’s eyebrows went up to the rafters and stayed. “Milkshake the size of your head for you as well, sweetheart. You’ve gone a color.” And off she sailed, supremely satisfied with her morning’s work.
Stephy waited until she was out of range, then folded her arms on the table and beamed at me. “It’s not funny,” I said.
