What Came First (20 page)

“Three for lunch,” I tell her. “We’ve got one more person coming; I don’t think he’s here yet.”

She gathers menus. “Right this way.”

I say, “The third member of our party is a young man. Well, youngish. Five foot eight. Brown hair. Blue eyes. If you see him, can you . . .”

“Of course.”

“My last name is Cahill,” I say. “If he asks.”

As we follow her up green-carpeted stairs and onto the upstairs patio, Ian whistles (a new skill; he’s very proud) and I scan the space for a lone diner. It is chilly today, and there are plenty of empty tables, so it doesn’t take long to see that the only gentleman eating alone is at least seventy. Eric Fergus has not arrived.

The waitress leads us to a table pushed up against the Plexiglas railing. “If you’d like something bigger, I can seat you at a middle table.”

I pull out my wicker chair. “Oh, no—we’ll take the view.” The panorama of the vast white sand, beach, the pier, and the Pacific Ocean is breathtaking, though I’m too nervous to enjoy it.

At 11:56, Eric Fergus still hasn’t arrived. He isn’t in the downstairs dining room either; I checked. Twice. The waitress has brought our drinks, unsweetened iced tea for me, a Sprite for Ian. It’s freezing up here. I should have requested a table near a propane heater. But the patio has suddenly filled; all the warmer seats are gone.

“You cold?” I ask Ian.

“Uh-uh.” Bent over the soda, he chews on his plastic straw and gazes at the ocean. The sun glints harsh diamonds on the water.

“Your eyes hurt?” I ask. “You want to borrow my sunglasses?”

“Uh-uh.”

It is 11:59.

Music blares from loudspeakers overhead. It puts me on edge. Even more than I already am, that is.

My chair faces the stairs. Three blond women in denim come in, followed by a heavyset young couple with a chubby baby. Next to be seated is a young couple, dressed very casually: him in a ratty T-shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops, her in a short, low-cut sundress that lets it all hang out, as they say.

Ian looks away from the view. “Do you think he forgot?”

“No, of course not. He’s—I’ll call.”

He answers on the second ring. “Yeah?”

“Eric? It’s Laura. Laura Cahill.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.” I wait for him to explain himself. When he doesn’t, I say, “We expected you at eleven-thirty.”

“Oh. Yeah? I couldn’t remember if you said eleven-thirty or noon.”

Breathe in. Breathe out. Do not yell.

“Are you coming?”

“I’m here. I didn’t see you . . . oh, wait—”

Startled, I scan the patio. But, no—that can’t be right. The only other person on the phone is the guy in the ratty T-shirt, the one with the half-naked girl. He is half out of his chair, peering around. When he sees me, he raises his hand in greeting. He gets up from the table, closes the phone, and heads toward us. The woman in the revealing sundress follows, her mouth grim.

There has been a terrible mistake. Maybe this is the wrong Eric Fergus. Or maybe the DNA company switched Ian’s results with someone else. There is no way,
no way
that this scruffy guy is the overachieving medical student I chose to father my child. Of course, he doesn’t look like the man in the dream (I realize, with a start, that I’d been expecting him), but he doesn’t even look like Ian. He’s attractive enough, but his features are sharp, almost hungry. Eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, chin: there isn’t a single hint of my son on his face.

He’s at the table now, standing right next to Ian, who stares at the man with a mixture of wonderment and anxiety. He crouches down, looks my son in the eye.

“Hi, I’m Eric. You must be Ian.”

They look at each other. They bite their lips. They smile.

Their grins are identical.

This was a horrible idea. Seriously, what was I thinking?
You should meet the kid. Because if you don’t, you’ll always wonder about him.
I actually said that!

Like now that Eric knows what the kid looks like and sounds like he’ll never think about him again? Already I’m staring (I shouldn’t stare) at the little boy’s face (he’s seriously cute) and trying to imagine what he’ll look like at twelve and sixteen and twenty. Shit!

The mother looks up at me. “Hello.”

Eric says, “This my girlfriend. Vanessa.”

“Fiancée,” I say.

The table is small and square, with one side pushed against the clear railing and wicker chairs on the other three sides. The little boy and his mother face each other. It’s like we’re interrupting their perfect little lunch. There’s no room for us here. No room for me, anyway.

The little boy has streaky hair, a lot like Angie and A.J.’s oldest, Ty, except this kid is lighter all around. Even his eyes are light—blue or green, it’s hard to tell with the sun in my eyes.

I should have brought sunglasses. The mother has them. Of course she does.

Damn. She just said something to me, but the music is really loud. I go, “What?”

She goes, “Think of it as cozy.” And she sort of smiles but not really.

I don’t think I can say “What?” again without sounding like a moron. So instead I go, “Yeah.”

She goes, “If you’d like.”

Now I don’t know what to say. It’s like I’ve entered this whole other universe where nothing makes sense. I’m the queen of Stupid World. I break eye contact so I don’t have to talk to her anymore. To make things worse, it’s cold here in Stupid World.

It doesn’t help that I’m hardly wearing any clothes. When I asked Eric where he was going to meet the kid, he said, “We’re going to go to the beach and grab something to eat.”

He didn’t get that I was asking him so he’d invite me, but then, like a half hour before he left, he goes, “You want to come?”

Well, duh—of course I wanted to come. I mean, when else will I get a chance to feel so out of place? But I wasn’t thinking about that then. I was just thinking about how bad it would feel if I got left behind.

I pretended to think about Eric’s invitation, like I hadn’t been waiting and waiting for it. “Yeah. Sure. Okay.”

Like I had nothing better to do. Which I didn’t, but whatever.

I threw on a bikini (not one of my smaller ones—I get credit for that) and a beach cover-up that fit perfectly last year. Now I’m thinking it must have shrunk in the wash. Or I got fatter. I’m voting shrinkage.

Anyway, it was all good until we got to the end of the promenade, but instead of going on to the sand Eric turned into this restaurant.

I said, “I thought we were going to the beach.”

“Well, yeah—a restaurant at the beach.”

“But I’m in my bathing suit! Didn’t you notice?”

“You’re in a dress. It looks nice. And, you know, maybe after lunch we can jump in the ocean.”

For about ten seconds, I considered going back to the car, but then I figured that was retarded. But now that I’m standing here, having a nonconversation with the kid’s icy mom (if I’m the queen of Stupid, she’s the queen of Perfect), I wish I was in the car.

“Would you like me to get one for you?” the queen of Perfect asks.

“Uh, sure,” I say—because I don’t know her well enough to say, “I was distracted and the music’s loud and I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

She stands up—damn, she’s tall—and walks to the other table, takes a chair, and carries it over. She’s dressed like a mom in an old black-and-white sitcom, in a tan skirt and white blouse and—swear to God—pearls. She’s got one of those haircuts that’s shorter in the back. The frosty front pieces come just to the edge of her jaw. She doesn’t look like a real lawyer—more like one on a TV show who seems all prim and proper but then has dirty after-hours sex on her desk when everyone else has left for the night.

“There you go.” She puts the chair down and gives me a tight sort-of-smile. Then I get it. She’d been suggesting I drag over a chair since my dumb-ass boyfriend obviously wasn’t going to do it.

Is it too late to go back to the car?

Eric sees the chair, says, “Oh, thanks!” and sits down at the one that was already there. I squeeze into the new one, slightly back from everyone else, between Eric and the lawyer. The mother of his child.
One
of the mothers of his children.

The waitress comes barreling past us holding plastic baskets of food and almost rams right into me. “Excuse me, excuse me . . .” I pretend to scoot closer to the table, but there’s just no room.

Eric and the little kid are talking.

“Chickens,” Ian says. At first I think he’s figuring out what he wants for lunch, but then he starts talking about names and personalities. He has chickens as pets. Got it.

That? Is weird.

The lawyer lady says, “The chickens have been a wonderful tool for fostering a sense of responsibility.” No, seriously. She says that.

“Plus they’re probably cool,” Eric says to Ian.

Ian lights up. “They’re awesome!” He’s looking at Eric with big eyes and a bigger smile—Eric’s smile. It’s exactly the same.

And just like that I can’t take it. I have to get out of here.

I stand up. The chair doesn’t push back the way it should, and I stumble. “I’ve gotta pee.” Score another one for the queen of Stupid. “I mean, the ladies’ room. I’m going to go.”

Eric glances at me and kind of smiles. The queen of Perfect looks at me like I just pissed on her petunias. I scoot the chair back.

The bathroom is downstairs. Shut into a stall, I sit on a toilet and hyperventilate. Then I pull out my phone and text Melva.

My face hurts from trying to maintain a neutral expression, and perspiration soaks my blouse—not just under the arms now, but along my back and chest as well. I’ve never been much of a drinker, but I could really use a shot of tequila right about now. Maybe two.

I wasn’t expecting the girlfriend—fiancée now, apparently. Even if I had known she was coming, I wouldn’t have been prepared for such a distracted, sullen, half-naked young woman. All I did was offer to get another chair, and she looked at me like I was insane—or maybe condescending or stepping on toes.

Is that the kind of girl Ian will bring home someday?

Once the girl—Vanessa was her name—flees to the bathroom, it is easier to focus on Eric Fergus. He seems nice enough: easygoing, affable. Behind the scruffiness (you’d think he’d have shaved for the occasion), his face is kind. Handsome too. Well, handsomeish, anyway. There’s a magnetic quality to his blue eyes, which, I see now, with the sun shining on them, are speckled with green.

Ian says, “They like yogurt, but not peach flavored. Except for Rusty. That’s his favorite. They all like peas, and they like salad as long as it doesn’t have ranch dressing on it. Which is too bad because ranch is the only kind of dressing I like!”

Eric seems genuinely intrigued by Ian’s chicken stories. I hope he takes them as evidence of a happy, healthy home . . . one with room for another child.

The waitress comes to take our order. Without opening the menu, Eric asks, “You have macaroni and cheese? Or plain pasta, maybe?”

“No—sorry.”

“How about grilled cheese? On sourdough?”

“We can do that.”

I catch Eric’s eye and motion toward the bathrooms—toward Vanessa. “You want to order for your . . .”

“She can do it when she comes back.”

I hand the waitress my menu. “California citrus salad, please. And more iced tea.”

She pokes her electronic pad with her electronic pen and gives Ian a big smile.

Ian sits up extra straight and speaks clearly, just as I’ve taught him. “May I please have the chicken fingers?”

“Of course!” The waitress’s smile grows even bigger. She pokes at her electronic pad.

“Thank you,” Ian says.

“You’re very welcome!”

I beam with pride at my polite little son. Clearly, I have raised him right. Clearly, Eric Fergus made a good decision when he donated his sperm all those years ago.

Once the waitress leaves, I turn to Eric and prepare to launch into some of the questions I prepared last night.

He is staring at me with something like horror. No, it’s not like horror—it
is
horror.

“Chicken?” he says.

Oh God.

“Chicken fingers aren’t really chicken!” Ian says. “They’re just called that! Chickens don’t have fingers.”

Eric stares at me. Everything rides on how I handle the chicken issue. Everything.

I fold my hands on the table in front of me. “Actually, buddy, I guess I always assumed you understood . . . the thing is . . .”

Confusion flickers across Ian’s face until it hardens into a terrible kind of knowledge.
“Are chicken fingers . . . chicken?”

“Uh—yes.”

I look from Ian to Eric and back to Ian. I can still fix things—show Eric what a good mother I am.

I clear my throat. “You see, buddy, there are different kinds of eaters. Carnivores eat just meat. Herbivores eat just plants. And then there are omnivores, which eat both.”

“I
know
that,” Ian says.

A bead of sweat slithers between my breasts.

I say, “Humans are omnivores. That’s where we are in the food chain. We need to eat both plants and animals—meat—to get the nutrients we need to live.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” Eric Fergus says, helpfully.

“You are?” Ian says.

“Do you work in the medical field?” I ask—abruptly, yes, but I am, after all, desperate to change the subject. Besides, I have a long list of questions to get through, a whole heap of rapport to build before I can ask for another sperm donation.

Eric blinks at me. “What do you mean?”

“It’s tough to get into medical school. You must have had a strong science background. Biology and physiology and whatnot. So even though you decided not to be a doctor . . . I just wondered if you took some other medical path.”