Blame it on Cupid (32 page)

She had.

“Dad,” Cooper remarked lazily, “you missed the turn.”

He glanced up. He had. Missed. The. Damn. Turn.

“Look, Dad, you can't let women problems tear you up so bad. Just think of a way to make it up to her, and get it over with.” Kicker, the Don Juan of the tenth grade, seemed to see himself as a sage coach.

Hell. Maybe the kid
was
qualified to coach him. Jack was in the right, all the way, but being in the right couldn't seem to save him from feeling like a heel. A heel with mud stuck to his boots. A miserable heel with mud stuck to his boots.

“I
STILL DON
'
T GET IT
. Why you're letting me skip school.”

“We're not skipping school. At least not exactly.” Merry glanced at Charlene but only for a millisecond. Her hands had a death grip on the steering wheel. Driving 95 veering onto 395 on a Friday was as much fun as, say, welts from poison ivy. All the drivers acted paranoid and manic. Maybe it was the D.C. politics? “You're getting all As. Even some A-pluses. And I wouldn't say spending the day at the Smithsonian is really skipping. It's tons of extra education really…”

A long black limo threatened to cut her off. Frankly, she took it as a personal insult to her Mini Cooper, but what could she do? She could hardly honk at some high-powered somebody.

Her heart was stuck somewhere in her throat, and not because of the crazy traffic. She hated not telling the total truth to Jack, but when she'd thought up this Smithsonian idea, it seemed an honestly super thing to do for Charlene. And if it worked for Cooper, that that was all the better.

Everybody was happy but her.

“You're going to have to help me navigate,” she said to Charlene, in a voice showing vibrato talents she'd never had before.

“Merry. You need more than help.”

“You're awfully lippy for a kid getting out of school today.” She thought it'd all be better when they got off the freeway, but no. Wouldn't you think the Smithsonian was one building? Instead, Charlene's map claimed it was a dozen or more. And that they were all located in that “mall” place between Independence and Constitutional Avenues, only didn't anyone think it'd be nice to provide parking? Somewhere closer than five million miles away?

But the Natural History Museum had an exhibit about mothers. Well, actually it was about some really old dinosaur eggs, and the eggs showed that the unborn little dinosaurs didn't have teeth, and that was supposed to illustrate that the parent dinosaurs must have been caring mothers.

Okay, so Merry fully realized that was the hokiest excuse since boys asked girls out to watch the submarine races. But she needed a fresh way to talk about moms and mom behavior with Charlene.

Besides which, there was some kind of engine exhibit at the Arts and Industry part of the museum, which Charlene was guaranteed to love. Merry didn't have a clue how long either thing would take, but both places opened at ten.

“Merry—you can't fit in that parking place.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's about six inches too small.”

“So maybe we could go up on the curb just a little bit.”

“Maybe you'll get a little hundred-buck ticket if you do that.”

A mere detail, Merry thought. Eventually it all came together, the parking, the walking, the fee, getting maps, ignoring the maps, and then, maybe an hour later, getting to the infamous dinosaur egg exhibit. Charlene, thankfully, was all about it, giving Merry a perfect excuse to zoom into her spiel.

“The big deal about this, I guess, is that people had no idea dinosaurs were good mothers before this.”

“Yeah.” Charlene was sort of listening. She loved the place—no surprise, since she loved anything to do with science. She looked a little rough this morning, a cap pulled tight on her head, hands slugged in her pockets, her khakis fraying at the cuffs. Merry thought she resembled Dakota Fanning trying to look tough.

“You know about the pandas in the D.C. zoo?”

“Sure. Everybody loves our pandas.”

“Well, the moms tend to give birth to twins, but they almost never raise both babies. They see if there's one that's thriving. Then if it's doing well, they tend to neglect the second one. Give all the attention to the biggest, strongest baby.”

Charlene frowned. “That sucks.”

“I guess the idea is that the mom's trying to up the odds of at least one child surviving. So she chooses one to give it every advantage she can. And then there are penguins—” It's not like Merry hadn't been up all night studying this.

“I love that movie,” Charlene interrupted.

“Me, too. But with Magellanic penguins, the mom lays two eggs and lets them both hatch, but then she gives all the food to the biggest chick and lets the other one starve. And then there are pigs—”

“How'd pigs get into this conversation?”

By then they were both starved and had settled in a crammed cafeteria-sized place with sandwiches and chips. “The thing is,” Merry explained, thrilled to use more of the research she'd looked up, “that pigs are born with these little eyeteeth that stick out sideways. They use the teeth to stick their brothers and sisters, so they can get to the mom's milk better. Unfortunately, that means that the littlest one in the litter tends to get all sliced up, besides which, he can't get enough milk.”

“Eeeeuuu. Gross. And mean, too.”

“That's what I thought. It's weird. I always thought moms were just naturally nurturing and loving. That unless something happened to screw them up, that's how it was. Only that's not always true. Like with chimpanzees…”

“I love chimps.”

“Yeah, me, too.” She looked around for a waste bin to stash all their paper. “Human moms sometimes abandon their babies—but ape moms never do. Only if a chimp mother is somehow unable to feed her baby—like there isn't enough food because there's a famine or something like that—then she won't hurt her own baby. But she'll kill the baby of another mom chimp.”

Charlie screwed up her face. “Ugh. Double ugh.”

“Yeah, I know, but it just goes to show…we all seem to count on a mother to be perfect, don't we? But they're not. Nature didn't set up any mom to be perfect. At least not like we'd want them to be.”

“Yeah.” Charlie chewed on her sandwich, then chewed some more. “Kind of like your mom. And my mom. Right?”

Merry was afraid to breathe. Her baby was getting it. Exactly what she'd hoped. “Right. You and I were both especially stuck with moms who disappointed us. But what are we going to do, let that affect our whole lives? It's just the way it is. We can't fix how other people behave. Cripes, they can't seem to fix themselves, half the time.”

She thought,
Now, Charlie. Tell me about the phone call.

“You know what I think?” Charlene asked.

“No, what?” More not breathing, but Merry kept thinking
now now now.

“I think I don't want to be a mom. When it comes down to it, I think it'd just be a lot easier to be a boy than a girl altogether.”

Eek. That wasn't how this was supposed to go. “Just because we had moms who let us down? But Charlie, think about it. When you're a mom, you can do it the way you believe is right. In fact, maybe because we had absentee mothers, we'll never do the same things they did.”

“Yeah, but…” Charlene dusted her hands. “You know what happened on the bus?”

“What bus?” Merry wasn't sure what a bus had to do with the subject—at least with the subject she wanted Charlene to talk about.

“The bus to the spelling bee a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, that one. What?”

“This girl in my class. She went down on an eighth grader in the back of the bus.”

“Oh, that. Goodness, I hoped that wasn't true.”

“Well it was. And if she'd been a guy, she'd never have felt she had to do that. Guys have the power. Guys don't have the same things to be afraid of.” She looked at Merry and rolled her eyes. “Come on. Chill. Quit hyperventilating. You had to know stuff like that goes on.”

“Not at
eleven,
for Pete's sake!”

Okay, Merry thought, that part of the day had turned into a failure. Not for Charlene—who loved every exhibit and probably could have rented a cot to sleep in the Smithsonian, she was that happy. But Merry couldn't stop being upset about the bus story; she still hadn't heard a confession about the mystery phone call, and she was completely out of ideas how to coax the information out of Charlene now without forcing it.

Still, there was lots of room for the day to get worse, and it did.

Cramming two tall teenage boys in the back of the Mini Cooper was possible, just a lot like squishing sardines in a can. She picked them up at their school before five. She only needed one look at Cooper's face to feel her heart go clunk. He looked waxy pale and stiff as straw.

“Do you guys want to go straight home, or are you hungry?” she asked.

Naturally, all three kids affirmed they were starving.

“Well, how about if we call your dad and tell him we'll be a little late? The thing is that the rush hour traffic's horrendous, so if you guys are hungry anyway and don't mind stopping for a bit…”

Kicker called. Jack gave the okay. Charlene prattled on about the things she'd seen in the museum. Kicker hunched forward and breathed down her neck. Kicker and Charlene navigated.

Cooper didn't say a word.

The vote was for burgers and fries. Merry pulled in to the parking lot, and coaxed Kicker and Charlene to go in to order the food. It was the only way she could think of to corner Cooper, and she did, the instant the other kids piled out of the car. “Okay, Coop. You look miserable. So…she's pregnant.”

“No, she's not. That part's okay.”

Merry frowned in confusion. She was so certain the pregnancy news was positive, because that was the only thing that could have caused the beaten-up posture, the devastated quiet in Coop's expression. “So what's the deal?”

A dull red seeped up his neck. “I thought I was her first,” he said lowly. “Seems not. Seems like she's been all over town and then some. Seems I had to get tested for an STD.”

“Oh,
damn,
Coop.”

“I won't have the results until Monday. The doctor didn't think it was a problem, but still said I should be tested. I asked him what happens if it's a yes, that I've got this STD. He said I just take a certain antibiotic. It's pretty cut and dried as long as I don't ignore it. That's what he said.”

“So that part's good.”

“Yeah, that's okay, but that's not the point. She
lied
to me. I thought we were tight, you know? I thought it was a first for both of us. I thought I loved her. I thought she loved me.” Cooper thrummed his fingers on a knee. “Well, I'm through with that love crap now. The doctor told me not to mess around until the test comes back. Like I would. I don't need to be around another girl for a long, long, long time.”

“Kicker's the one who's usually big on going out, isn't he?”

“Yeah. Exactly. That's how he likes it, seeing a lot of girls. Not me. I never got the big urge before, until I met her. And then finally, I got what all the fuss was about. I couldn't wait to be near her. Couldn't wait to be with her.” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. Apparently she couldn't
wait
to be with all those other guys either. I was just one on a really long list.”

“Aw, hell, Coop. That so sucks.” She'd have wrapped her arms around him, but even if the Mini allowed for that kind of acrobatic move, Kevin and Charlene abruptly bounded out of the fast food place, bearing bags and drinks.

“Forget it. It doesn't matter,” Cooper muttered, and then sunk back—as much as he could sink back in the tiny backseat—and stayed quiet the rest of the trip home.

Or most of the way home.

Even wasting almost an hour on dinner and messing around, the traffic around D.C. was still like a major blood clot, impossibly slow going. Being Friday night didn't help. Still, after they finally left the city in the dust, Merry hoped they could zoom the rest of the way home.

They were a short fifteen minutes from home when the car suddenly gave a little…lurch. And then the engine coughed.

“It's okay, baby, we're all tired,” she told her car.

The boys cracked up at her talking to the car. Charlene, used to it, just rolled her eyes. But they weren't teasing with quite so much hilarity when the car suddenly just…quit. Right on the freeway. As they were driving. With a zillion and a half vehicles trying to run them down.

“It's okay, it's okay,” Merry sang out reassuringly. She managed to pull over to the shoulder, her heart beating louder than a freight train, her stomach pitching panic. “Nothing ever happens to the Mini Cooper. She just probably didn't feel well for a second. She'll be okay. We'll be okay. Just relax, everybody….”

The sun wasn't going down as fast as it did midwinter, but by then, it was after seven. Dusk hazed the landscape. Car lights were turning on. The temperature was dropping faster than a stone, and when Merry climbed out of the car, the sudden snap of cold made her shiver.

“Merry, what are you doing?” Charlie asked.

“You stay inside!” She didn't have a clue what she was doing, except that she didn't want three kids outside with all the cars zooming by. She searched for some clear problem. The tires all looked fine. The car had a little road grime. There was no smoke or steam or anything horrendous that would give her a clue why the car was so unhappy. The baby had never given her a lick of trouble, so it wasn't as if she had some past pattern to work with.