AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Sit back down, Carl, we’ve got it,” Rob said.
“If I don’t get up now, I’ll end up here for the night. My back is shot, and this couch is murder if I’m on it for too long.”
My sister said that they’d probably be going, too, and then my mother complained for a minute that we were all leaving too soon. She tried to convince Meg and Jason to stay for more cookies, maybe another cup of tea.
“I’m too tired,” Meghan said. “I need a nice long shower and my bed. And my pillow.”
“Pillow?” I asked.
“Jason got me this pregnancy pillow for Christmas. It’s an amazing giant snake that you wrap yourself around while lying down. I was hesitant at first. But I slept with it last night and it changed my life. I’m not even joking.”
Jason laughed. “It’s almost as big as our bed. Between how demanding she is about the bloody blankets and now this giant pillow, I’m going to have to move into the spare room soon.”
Meghan pointed to her stomach. “Making a human being in here. That trumps your petty beefs. The spare room’s all yours, baby.”
“It’s a good thing that bed is comfortable, or I might already start resenting both you and my unborn child,” he said.
“That wouldn’t be the first time, or the last.”
It was hard to tell if my sister was joking or if she was airing her grievances with Jason. Sometimes I wondered if they even liked each other’s company or if the familiar patterns of being together since they were young had simply overtaken their drive to make a change and redefine their lives without one another.
Meghan had always taken comfort in the familiar. She made friends fast and held on to them, even when it might have been better to let go; she hoarded trinkets, letters, cards, any kind of evidence of her life, perhaps just to prove that she had turned out okay despite everything our mother had put us through; and she was loyal, doggedly so.
Happy, unhappy—it didn’t matter as long as she was being faithful to the version of herself that she had defined against our upbringing. She needed to be different from our mother. If that meant proving she could get married young and stay married, then she would stay married until the bitter end. My mother had lectured us constantly about how hard it was to have kids. I had listened but Meghan had made up her own mind. What kept her life going was striving for constancy—a consistent address, a phone number that never changed, a steady job—and it was all tied to proving to our mother that Meghan had turned out okay.
And she had thrived—now she was having a baby. She would be a wonderful mother because she was caring in a way that I never was, and that’s what helped her survive the emotional wreckage.
As Rob packed up the car, I sat on the stairs and waited, feeling lazy and self-indulgent. My sister sat below me with her head resting on my legs. I checked my phone. No message from Garrett. I looked at my ring.
I asked her quietly, “Do you really like being married?”
Meghan lifted her head. “I do. We’ve been together so long, I don’t know what my life would be like alone. I’m not sure I want to find out.”
“Are you happy?”
“I don’t think about it that way—honestly, I don’t. I think about what I’m building and what I have and where I want to go. Those are more important to me than day-to-day happiness. Jason annoys the crap out of me sometimes, but we’re in a great place right now. We’ve worked out the kinks.” She yawned. “You don’t have to get married just to get married, or just because he asked, or, like me, because you like the security of a relationship. You can take a cue from Mom’s book and find another way.”
“You hated how we grew up.”
“I did. But that doesn’t mean that you do too. Or that you have to—or need to—resent our mother for, well, being our mother.”
“Iamexcited about being an aunt.”
“You’ll be an awesome aunt. You’ll spoil the kid rotten and ruin him or her for me forever. And as long as you babysit whenever I want, no questions asked, you can buy this baby anything you’d like—appropriate, inappropriate, I don’t much care.”
“Do you feel sick? I mean, all the puking and stuff that’s supposed to happen, morning sickness?”
“It’s the worst. And taking the subway? It’s awful. But mainly I’m fucking tired. I can barely raise my arms to get a glass for water, I’m that tired. Wait, you never told me what happened with Garrett.”
“It’s not the time. I’ll call you later, tomorrow, maybe. I’m overreacting. It’s nothing.”
“Crushes are okay, you know,” Meghan said. “There was a dude who temped at the daycare last year, and man he was smoking hot. He was a trainer part time, all buffed and tattooed—my brain was overworked with him in it for months. He even had a man bun. Imagine having a crush on someone with a man bun.”
“You sure that’s Jason’s baby?”
“Ha.” Pause. “Yes. Don’t even joke about that.”
Laughing, that was how we had survived most of our childhood; with imaginary worlds and inside jokes, but I could see the quiet tension overtaking her—the worry, the anxiety about the baby, about it all. There was always potential in the future, but any path you took had the ability to make life better or worse. Still, deep down I questioned whether a future like Meghan’s was for me, whether Rob wasthe one. Garrett’s voice echoed through my mind on refrain, “Don’t marry that guy.”
