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He shrugged. “Yeah, well, Cindy didn’t have to carry her coach-sized pumpkin around with her. It carried her, as I recall.” He slid the other shoe on, tied it and got to his feet.
“Last week I could reach,” she said.
“Maybe next week you’ll be able to reach again.”
She closed her eyes fast, turning her head slightly. But not before he saw what flashed through her expression. “Hey,” he said. “It’s okay to be nervous about this. Hell, I’m nervous and I don’t have to do anything.” She didn’t say anything. He caught her chin, tipped it up. “Are you? Nervous?”
For a long moment she stared into his eyes, and then she said, “I’m scared to death, Caleb.” Her hands went to her belly. “I mean, what if I can’t do it? One baby is hard enough. I went to the hospital one day just to check out the maternity ward. And I heard some woman screaming in the delivery room. It sounded like a Halloween horror movie on high volume. I thought she was being murdered in there.”
He swallowed hard. “Did you talk to your mother about it? I mean, she’s been through it so many times.”
Maya lowered her head. “I don’t want her to know how scared I am. Mom’s…she’s the strongest woman I’ve ever met. She thinks I’m like her.”
“I think you are, too.”
She shook her head. “I can’t tell her I’m terrified of something as natural as giving birth. She’d be….”
“Disappointed?”
Maya nodded.
“Don’t you think she was afraid the first time? Hell, I’ll bet she was afraid every time, Maya. But your dad was there with her, right? And maybe that made it easier.”
Maya sighed. “No. Dad wasn’t there for her at all. Not for any of us. Mom…she gave birth five times, all by herself. Daddy…well, his job kept him traveling a lot. Or…that’s what we all thought at the time.”
Frowning as he helped her to her feet, Caleb asked, “But…it wasn’t really his job that kept him away, was it, Maya? It was…his other family.”
“Yeah,” she said, smoothing her blouse, turning her back to him and shrugging into her coat with his help.
He waited, but she said no more.
“Will you tell me about it sometime?” he finally asked.
She shrugged. “I already told you about it, that night at the bar.”
“You told me the facts. Not how it affected you or your mother or your sisters. I’d like to hear how you felt about it, when it all came out. How you feel about it now.”
She shook her head. “It’s irrelevant. It’s in the past.”
“Then will you tell me?”
She gave a shrug. “Maybe.”
He nodded slowly, taking her elbow, steering her out the door, through the waiting room and into the parking lot where her van waited. He opened her door for her, helped her get in, then went to the driver’s side.
After he started the engine he sat there for a minute. Then he said, “Tell me this much. What happened between your dad and your mom—is that why you don’t trust men very much?”
“Who said I didn’t trust men?”
He shrugged. “No one. No one had to, Maya. You’ve been suspicious of my every move, word and deed since I showed up here.”
“Well, who wouldn’t be?” She shook her head. “But for the record, it’s not that I don’t trust men. It’s that I don’t want to get hurt like my mother did—but, uh, by the looks of things, I didn’t miss it by much. I mean, you didn’t break my heart, but I sure as hell did end up with a pair of babies and no husband around.”
He licked his lips and told himself not to blurt the words he blurted next. “That could be remedied, Maya.”
Her eyes got wider than the rings around Saturn, and she stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “You’vegotto be kidding me.”
“No. No, I wasn’t, as a matter of fact.” Starting the van, he drove it into the road, and carefully back toward Big Falls.
