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“You’re welcome,” she says returning to the kitchen with Ivy. “We’re going for a walk. Do you want to join us?”
It’s a beautiful day and after a morning spent clearing out the cottage, a walk sounds good. “Yeah, sure.”
Outside, I watch as Vanessa secures Ivy into her stroller. When she’s done, I offer to push it and she agrees. I used to take a lot of walks when I first moved into the neighborhood, and I forgot how serene and cool it is with the road shaded by towering trees.
Ivy grips a squishy toy that makes a noise every time she squeezes it, giggling as if it’s a surprise each time. When she giggles, I find myself laughing along.
“She likes you,” Vanessa says.
It makes me feel good to know that babies don’t automatically hate me. “Does she wake up at night?”
“She used to until a month ago. Now she sleeps all night long,” Vanessa says.
I glance at her in admiration. She does the mom thing so naturally while looking completely hot and feminine. “Is it difficult being a single mom?” I’m full of questions this morning. I’m super curious about her.
But only because we’re friends.
She shrugs. “Not really, no. I kind of already had the experience. I helped my sister raise Luna for the first year.”
I imagine myself raising Emma and I become cold all over even though the sun is warm on my skin. I would be a terrible father, with no experience and no one to show me the ropes.
“You just do your best because kids don’t come with a manual. You just need lots of common sense,” she says.
When she puts it like that, it sounds doable, but the commitment is a whole different issue. Having a baby means committing to raising them until they’re adults. I can barely commit to a relationship let alone raising a kid for eighteen years.
Ivy drops her squishy toy and I stop the stroller to pick it up, wipe it on my shirt and give it back to her. I resume pushing the stroller and seconds later, the toy drops again, and I repeat the process. Vanessa giggles and I don’t understand why until Ivy drops the toy again and stares at me with amusement.
“Ah,” I tell her. “Now I get it. So that’s how you want it, huh? Fine. We’ll see who gets tired first, sweetheart.” The endearment slips out of my mouth, and I glance quickly at Vanessa to gauge her reaction.
She’s doubled up in laughter. “I wondered how long it would take you to realize that she’s deliberately dropping the toy.”
I grin. Ivy and I continue the game and after several more drops, she grows bored of it when she sees that I’m not getting tired of it or reacting.
“I’ve learned something new today,” Vanessa says. “My plan is usually to hide the toy which of course makes her cry.”
“That’s mean,” I tell her.
She laughs. We walk for a few minutes in companionable silence. I’m not sure whether to ask the next question I have or not. Fuck it, I will. We had sex last night. That kind of entitles a person to ask a few personal questions.
“How is it that a gorgeous woman like you doesn’t have a boyfriend?”
She seems surprised by the question but answers it after a moment of thought. “I guess my experience with Ivy’s dad sort of put me off relationships and men.”
“What happened?”
“He was married but never thought to mention it when we were in a relationship,” she says, her voice devoid of bitterness, which makes me admire her the more.
“What an asshole,” I say. I may have a bit of a reputation as a player, but I never cheat on the woman that I’m dating.
“Yeah, that is an apt description of him,” she says.
“Does he see Ivy?” I ask, feeling a bit of a hypocrite as I do so, after all, I have a daughter whom I’ve only seen once since her birth. But my case is different, I tell myself. I didn’t know about Emma until after she was born. I wasn’t given the chance to mentally prepare for it.
It’s not easy to wake up one morning and get a phone call informing you that you are now a father.
“No,” she says and then adds softly. “He doesn’t even know about her.”
I’m so shocked that I grind to a halt but quickly realize how dramatic that seems and I walk on. “You haven’t told him that he’s a father?”
“No,” she says, a defensive tone in her voice.
Is it something that women do these days? It’s so wrong to keep such information from someone.
“I was going to tell as soon as I learned that I was pregnant. I even went to his house, and this was less than two months after we broke up. Another woman opened the door and he showed up behind her in a robe. Kind of hard to tell someone after that. No one wants to feel so easily replaceable,” she says.
