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“Hey, princess,” he says.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Yeah, why?” He sounds distracted. There’s noise in the background, but I’m not sure where he is.
“You missed the shower,” I say.
There’s a hiss of breath on the other end and then some commotion. A door closes, and the background is quiet.
“Shit, I’m sorry, baby. How was it?”
His response throws me. I don’t know why. He sounds genuine. Like he really is sorry. But he doesn’t explain it either. I suppose I thought he’d have a reason, or that he would tell me what happened.
“It was nice,” I say, finally. Bee frowns at me as I bite my bottom lip. “We, uh…” Bee points at the stroller and I turn around. “Lots of diapers.”
“Diapers are good,” he says, but again, he sounds distracted.
“Are you sure everything’s okay?” I ask.
He’s quiet for a moment. As if he’s trying to decide what to say, whether to tell me something. Then he clears his throat.
“Yeah, I just, uh, lost track of time. I’m sorry I missed it.”
I feel my heart beating faster, but not in a good way. It feels loud, too loud, as if it’s hammering away in an empty cavern, its own echo deafening.
“Well, I’ll let you get back to….”
“Yeah, I should probably go.”
In the background, I hear a man with a loud, slightly slurred voice, shout, “What are you doing out here?”
“I’m coming,” Derek says as if trying to muffle the speaker on the phone.
“Next round’s on you!” the voice says.
My stomach feels unsettled and my bottom lip quivers.
“I’ll call you tomorrow?” He doesn’t really ask it though. He just says it.
“Yeah, sure,” I say.
Then he hangs up.
I stare at my phone. I don’t know what just happened. That didn’t sound like work. It sounded like a bar.
He was at a bar, getting drunk, instead of being at my baby shower.
“Everything okay, Megsy?” Bee asks, her voice soft and gentle. The same way she talks to me when we’re talking about my mom.
I shake it off. “Yeah, it’s fine,” I say. “Let’s just make some room in the corner for that.”
“Maybe we take it out of the box?” she asks.
I start to shake my head, knowing Derek would say we shouldn’t open anything until the baby is born. That we shouldn’t jinx it. But then something flutters in my stomach. No, not flutters—it kicks.
“Was that what I think?” Bee says with a wide grin as she falls to her knees in front of me.
I nod as she reaches for the spot on my belly where the baby just kicked.
