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“Of course, I go with them!” he laughed again. “You know you’re actually going to get authentic food from someone’s grandma. And that’s never going to be the same. The sunset will always look like a sunset, but everyone’s grandmother prepares the signature regional dish a little differently. And that’s why I love traveling. Seeing people. Eating their food. Hearing their stories.”
“I wish I could go with you.”
He turned his head, looking into her eyes again.
“Why can’t you? What’s keeping you here?”
Her voice stuck in her throat, uncertain of what she was supposed to answer.
“I already told you, I’m not sure why you want to have a baby so badly when I’m right here, an actual baby. I can barely tie my shoes.”
She laughed in outrage, gasping softly when he caught her lips in an upside-down kiss.
“I’m not on any shots, Moriah. Youarechanging me, your cycle is changing me because now I think about you talking to some rando at the grocery store, and I want to break their fucking legs, but . . . I’m not taking any magical shots. The way I feel is just the way I feel.”
When she woke with him in her bed the following morning, sprawled out with his legs hanging over the sides and his face pressed to her ribs, she knew she would not be going back to the clinic. She never thought the words would be easy to say, but she repeated them, encouraged by Despina’s wide smile.
“I don’t want to have a baby right now. I want to see what happens with this relationship because I really like him. And I deserve it.”
* * *
Lowell
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THE CALL HAD COME THROUGHthe previous evening. Lowell wasn’t even sure what he had been doing when his phone had rung — cooking her dinner, kissing her thighs, wheezing against her neck as her core clenched around him, her hand in his hair and her soft cries clouding his brain — it could have been any of the above.
The missed call was from an unfamiliar number, and premonition made his skin prickle as he tapped the icon for his voicemail .
Nonhuman airlines were resuming service, not in all countries but in most. He would need to show up for health screening and take new photographs and fingerprints, but he could get back to work as soon as the following month if he returned their call that day.
He didn’t know what to do. Lowell hated making decisions, particularly for anything important, and this was perhaps the biggest decision he’d ever had to make in his life. He didn’t know what the right thing to do was, didn’t know how to say goodbye to Moriah, if he even could, and found the thought of saying goodbye to his family harder than he had anticipated.
He barely slept that night, and before it was fully light outside the following morning, Lowell was pulling himself out of bed, too anxious to even pretend to sleep. He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to decide, and at length, realizing he was not going to come any closer to an answer by fidgeting his way through his brother’s house, he decided to seek the counsel of the one man who dispensed advice to the entire town — his father.
Jack Hemming’s office was on the top floor of a building that had housed Cambric Creek’s theater house at the turn of the last century. The building’s facade had undergone significant modifications since its construction more than one hundred and fifty years earlier, but the golden cupola at the roof’s peak had remained an unchanged part of the town’s skyline since those early days. The crystal chandelier, visible from the street where it hung suspended over the stately building’s foyer, was similarly a part of the original interior. Lowell had marveled over the chandelier as a child, gripping his mother’s or elder brother’s hand as they made the trip to visit his father in the middle of the afternoon, staring slack-jawed up at the massive, glittering light fixture, mesmerized by the rainbow prisms it cast upon the walls.
His eyes raised instinctively as he crossed the street now, taking in the chandelier and feeling himself shrink, a clumsy, tongue-tied child once more, seeking his father’s counsel.
Dedication of the Cambric Creek Public Theatre
August 11, 1878
Commissioned by and gifted to the town
by J. Edmund Hemming III
He’d passed the plaque at the building’s front doors a hundred thousand times in his lifetime, giddy at the sight of his own surname when he’d been very small, needing to stop and point, announcing to anyone within earshot that it washisname on the wall.
He hadn’t realized then that it wasn’t; that it was someone else’s legacy and burden to shoulder. It was exciting to him when he was very young before he truly understood. It was far from the only plaque in town, the Hemming name inescapable as he would pass the bank and town hall, dodging around corners and up back alleys in an effort to avoid his father’s office as he cut class as if his mere presence on the sidewalk would be enough for his father to choose that moment to look out the window.
There were no other Lowell Hemmings, his mother had explained when he’d been in grade school, throwing tantrums every time he sat on a bench with Grayson’s name upon it, or entered a building bearing a plaque bearing Jackson’s. It wasunfair.Heshould have a building or a bank or a bench, why wasn’t he special enough?
“Because you’re one of a kind, sweetheart. You’re the only one who gets to say you’retheLowell Hemming. But if you want, you can make a plaque and we’ll hang it on daddy’s door at the office. How does that sound?”
Owen had been holding her other hand at the time, as they crossed the busy intersection, and had been unbothered at the lack of benches and plaques bearing his name.
He’d been embarrassed by the excess of his family’s generational largesse as a moody adolescent, and increasingly chafed by the Hemming name as he grew older. The sight of his family name on the walls had made him desperate — desperate to escape the plaques and inscriptions and oil paintings all over town; the expectation that he would besomebody, somebody of worth, of importance, for the town to hold up as another shining, golden example of the Hemming family, and not an impulsive, needy screw-up who couldn’t even decide if he wanted to go back to work or not.
