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The moment he got out of the car she mowed him down. She clobbered him on the grass and rolled him around. This was perhaps the downside of a tall girlfriend. He laughed as she kissed him all over the face. She stuck her hands under his shirt. His joy was unstinting, even after all this.
At last she let him sit up. Eventually she even let him stand and look around. “This place is beautiful. Where are we?”
“This is the farm Brian and Tibby bought before she died.” She shook her head, letting some of the sadness in, keeping most of it out for now. “I have so much to tell you.”
“Please tell me.”
She led him toward the icehouse. She would have wanted to introduce him to Bailey first, but Bailey was napping, so she led him directly through the tiny house to her porch. This was where she thought such a talk should take place.
They sat down on the creaky daybed. “I will tell you everything, and it will take a while. But first I have to tell you one thing that won’t.”
“Okay.” He looked a little nervous and unbelievably dear to her. She’d thought she knew how much she missed him starting after she’d hung up the phone last night, but looking at him now, she realized she’d missed him even more than that.
“Okay.” She was nervous too. “Okay, the thing is …”
He looked terrified. She prayed he wouldn’t look more terrified after she finally got the news out. She touched the ends of her hair, wishing it weren’t in disastrous condition. She squeezed her eyes shut. She swallowed down a vast amount of saliva. “I am, we are, having a baby.”
“What?” For a moment his face was unreadable, and then it all started to open up. “What?”
“I’m pregnant. Around twenty weeks, I think. More, even. It must have happened the night before I went to Greece.” She was talking quickly.
He seemed to be following her lips as though he were hard of hearing and not quite getting all of it. “You are pregnant?”
“If I stand, you can sort of see it.” She demonstrated and put his hand to her belly.
He seemed to regard her belly and his hand as though they were both deeply unfamiliar.
“That ring I had on my cervix must have worn out and I forgot to get a new one. That’s what the nurse thought happened.”
“The nurse?”
“At Planned Parenthood. In Sacramento. That’s where I found out.”
Eric nodded slowly. He was staring not at her stomach, but at her face.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before this. I really am. I should have, but I couldn’t. I was scared and I didn’t know what to do.” She felt teary and suddenly unsure of him. “Even now it’s not too late to … not do it,” she said quickly. No, that wasn’t true. It was far too late for her not to do it. “Or I guess I should say, I won’t put any pressure on you to be part of it if you don’t feel—I mean, I would understand if you aren’t ready for something like this—”
The way he watched her face, he knew her. He knew this hadn’t been easy. She realized he was being careful. So careful he barely swallowed, barely moved. He was easier with his feelings, but he was like any other person in not wanting to see them get destroyed. “How do you feel about it?” he asked soberly.
“I feel like we are its parents.”
“And is this something you are sure you want?”
Tears had been building up and she let them fall. “Yes. It really is.” She couldn’t remember not wanting it. The person who hadn’t wanted it was a stranger. “I’ve had a while to think about this, and I admit I didn’t take to it right away. But I know, I know it’s what I want.” She wiped her eyes and gathered her hair in a bunch. “The question is, is this something you want?”
He moved toward her on the creaky daybed. He put his arms around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. He pressed her hard against his chest. He put his face in her neck.
“This is something I want,” he said, and she could hear the emotion in his voice. “This is something I’ve always wanted.”
When Lena stepped off the plane from London in JFK airport in New York City, the first face she saw was his. He’d somehow managed to talk, bribe, or wrestle his way all the way up to the gate to wait for her.
She saw Kostos walking toward her in long slow-motion strides, his gray tweed coat flapping open. His eyes were steady on her face. He wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t look sorry. He looked serious, like a serious man would look doing a serious thing.
Here we go. She walked toward him and he toward her, as far as he could come, into the throng of the departing passengers and past the gate attendant, who seemed to be annoyed with him and calling out to him. But he didn’t say anything back or even turn his head. He kept his eyes on her and she didn’t look away. She didn’t feel self-conscious or nervous. She didn’t need to smile or ask silently for reassurance. She was sure.
She didn’t see any of the people around her as she went. She saw the determination in his face and she felt it too. She found herself thinking, Well, this is it, and knew she was walking into the rest of her life without another pause or question or even a glance to either side. I choose you, she thought. Come what may, you are what I choose.
She didn’t stop until he was right in front of her. They just stood there staring at each other for a moment. She wasn’t sure what happened after that. He put his arms around her, she put hers around him, she was up off her feet and he was squeezing her against him as hard as he could have without knocking the wind out of her.
People streamed around them and the gate attendant continued carping at them and he put her back on her feet and they kissed like they had been waiting to do that and only that for a dozen years.
At some time after the people were gone and the gate attendant had given up and moved to straightening the desk, they broke apart and looked at each other again.
He took her hand and they started walking toward the baggage claim. They didn’t say anything to each other. They swung their held hands like little kids, like they believed anything could happen, like they might take off soaring into the air. All the things you wanted to happen could happen. Why not?
She looked over at him and he was smiling. How she loved the British Airways terminal.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s someday.” He said the last word in Greek.
Country roads,
take me home.
—John Denver
Carmen crept along the bewildering roads in a rented Ford Focus certain she was lost. She’d flown from New Orleans to New York the night before last and stayed long enough to meet Jones at their loft and tell him she didn’t want to get married. “Not now, or not ever?” he’d asked.
“Not ever,” she’d said as gently as she could manage. She wasn’t sure if he was more disappointed by that or by the earlier revelation that she’d come home from New Orleans four days prematurely and without a contract.
He wasn’t so bitter, really, except when he told her he was keeping the loft. He seemed to think she was going to fight him over it, but she said fine. She hadn’t wanted to stay in it anyway. She had never loved it the way he had, and even the third of the rent she paid was honestly more than she could afford.
He sat on the bed for the first hour and watched her pack. He told her she was making a big mistake, and she nodded even though she knew she wasn’t. He told her single girls over thirty in New York City never found husbands, even if they were beautiful, and she nodded, though she found it frankly insulting. He told her magnanimously that he wouldn’t let this tarnish any working relationship they might have, and she nodded even though she didn’t believe him.
She packed one big suitcase to last a couple of weeks and arranged to have the rest of her stuff boxed up and sent to her mom and David’s house. There was nothing keeping her in New York until August, when her show resumed, and that was assuming she got picked up again.
She spent the night in a comfortably untrendy hotel in Midtown and rented the car in the morning.
It was a strange feeling, driving out of town with her suitcase in the back. She had no apartment, no fiancé, and no idea where she was going. Really no idea. She’d veered off the map, which was supposed to take her to an unknown place in rural Pennsylvania.
Tibby’s note had said she wanted Carmen to meet someone. What was that about? Who could Tibby want her to meet at this point? She hoped it wasn’t some kind of blind-date situation. That would be seriously uncomfortable. Granted, Tibby hadn’t liked Jones any better than Lena or Bee had liked him, but still.
Damn. She pulled over and studied the map. Why was she trying to get to Belvidere, Pennsylvania? Why was being on the right road to get there any less lost than being on the wrong road to get there?
But she turned herself around and persevered anyway. The evidence gave her no reason to believe she even knew who Tibby had been during the last two years, but she still trusted her. She couldn’t help it. And if nothing else, the landscape was quite beautiful, with forests and farms and valleys glowing with the yellow-green of early spring.
A little past noon she turned into a driveway. She saw the street number on the white fence post. She eased up the lane very slowly, taking in the pretty clapboard farmhouse, the shaded yard, and the handful of buildings surrounding it, including a classic red barn.
