What Came First (38 page)

Days later, Harrison and Sydney throw fits when we tell them we are moving to Michigan. Well, when I tell them. Darren just sits there as Harrison kicks and Sydney screams. They don’t want to leave Arizona. They’ll miss their house, their pool, their school.

“You hate school,” I remind them.

“We might hate the new one even more!” Sydney shrieks. I can’t argue with the logic, even as I think,
How much worse can it be?

“We’ll get to spend time with Gammie and Pop-Pop,” I say. “We’ll even get to live with them until Daddy comes out.”

That last bit is directed at Darren, a reminder that he’s coming too. As soon as he finds a job in Michigan, we’ll be a family again. Or: we’ll be a family at last. If I say it enough times, maybe it will make it true.

“I’ll miss my friends!” Harrison says (yells).

“What friends?” I say, by which I mean: “Which of your friends will you especially miss?” I swear I do. Instead, it comes out sounding like: “You don’t have any friends.” Which I’d never say.

Fortunately, Harrison takes it at the first meaning. “Dodie.”

Dodie. Uh. Amazing how much you can despise someone who doesn’t exist.

“He can come with us,” I say.

Harrison shakes his head. “He lives here.”

“I can ask his mother.”

He shakes his head. “He doesn’t have a mother.”

“His father, then.”

“His father will say no.”

“I bet he’ll come with us anyway.”

I try to catch Darren’s eye—to share a moment, a smile, something. But he is far away, deep in his head.

“I don’t want to go without Daddy,” Sydney says, more a whine than a shriek.

“Daddy will come out soon. Right, Daddy? Right?”

Eric doesn’t exactly sneak out after our night together, but he might have if the jangle of his keys hadn’t woken me. It is early, just the slightest shades of gray creeping around my blinds. Even the chickens are still asleep.

“Sorry,” he whispers, seeing me stir.

“It’s okay. I had to get up soon, anyway.” Is he apologizing for something besides waking me?

He tugs his T-shirt over his head and carries his shoes and socks into the bathroom, closing the door with the faintest click. My clothes lie in a puddle next to my bed. It isn’t like me to leave them there, but then, nothing I did last night was like me. I can’t remember the last time I slept so well.

Once I pull on yoga pants and a T-shirt, I head to the kitchen to start the coffee. While it brews, I poke around in the cabinets and refrigerator, pulling out everything vaguely breakfastlike: cereal, granola, yogurt, fruit, juices, English muffins. Should I let him help himself or offer to serve him? It has been so long since I’ve been in this situation.

Eggs! Of course! I should scramble some of our home-laid eggs!

Hands shaking, I yank open the refrigerator and pluck two brown eggs from a bowl on the top shelf. As I turn around, Eric walks into the kitchen, startling me. I drop the bigger of the two eggs, which smashes on contact, bright yellow fanning out from the delicate brown shell.

Eric yanks some paper towel from the mounted roll near the sink. “Let me help you.”

I put the unbroken egg on the counter and join Eric on the floor with my own wad of paper towel.

“We’ve got plenty more eggs.” We are so close, I can smell the now-familiar faint vanilla musk of his skin.

“Thanks, but I should get going.” Eric pushes himself up from the floor and scans the room for a trash can.

“Under the sink,” I say.

He throws away the paper towel. I wait for him to move out of the way before I pitch mine.

“You want some coffee?” I ask, trying—and failing—to meet his eyes.

“Thanks, but I’m good.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and shifts his feet. “Thanks,” he says again. “For last . . . for dinner. And—you know.”

“Right.”

At the front door, he finally looks at me and starts to say something before changing his mind.

“It’s okay,” I tell him, not sure I believe it myself.

He nods, brushes my arm, and drives off into the pale gray morning.

As I drink my coffee and eat my cereal (I lost interest in the eggs), I wait to feel hurt, cheap, and abandoned. Neither of us pretended that our encounter was anything more than a once-off; for that I am grateful. Guilt at having bedded another woman’s boyfriend nibbles at my conscience, but they aren’t married and clearly never will be.

All in all, it is a night best forgotten. I know Eric Fergus is gone from my life forever. Why, then, do I feel . . . hopeful? Is it just the reward for a deep, dreamless sleep?

Finally, it hits me. After all that time and money spent tracking Eric down, after all the pain and expense of undergoing artificial insemination . . . I just may have gotten pregnant the oldfashioned way.

I pour the rest of my coffee in the sink and make a note to pick up some folic acid on the way home from work—or maybe even on the way to work. I’ve got plenty of time, after all.

It is just barely daylight when he comes home. Six o’clock, sixthirty—something like that. The sound of his key wakes me up. I didn’t think I’d sleep, but I guess I did.

I think,
He came back
.

But for how long?

I’m afraid to get out of bed. Afraid to look at him. To hear what he’s going to say. I was stupid to push him like that. To test him. Stupid to think that would make him love me.

He is in the doorway. I can feel him. Hear him breathing. My face is wet. I feel like a little girl again, lost and alone.

I clutch at the bedspread and look up. He looks so sad. And older, somehow.

He opens his mouth.

“No,” I say.

He waits for me.

“I don’t want you to say it. Whatever it is, I don’t want to know.”

He closes his mouth. Closes his eyes. Nods.

My body forgot how cold Michigan could be in the fall. I’m wearing a bulky sweater over a thick turtleneck and chain-drinking coffee in my parents’ kitchen, and still I can’t stop shivering.

“How are you going to handle January?” my mother asks, handing me a section of the paper.

“I’ll be used to it by then. Not sure about the kids.”

“Children are adaptable.”

In truth, I’m not so worried about how the kids and I will handle a Midwestern winter. I’m more concerned that we will still be living in my parents’ house. The children—and my parents—believe that Darren will move out as soon as the Arizona house sells because that’s what I told them. I didn’t tell them that there are very few jobs for aerospace engineers in Michigan. I certainly didn’t tell them that the day we put the house on the market, Darren said, “I’m not sure I want to be married to you anymore.”

But as long as I don’t think about what comes next, I’m okay.

I sip coffee and open the newspaper. Cold or no, this is my favorite part of the day. The kids are in school, having eaten a nutritious breakfast (that I didn’t cook). My dad is running errands. My mother and I are just hanging out, chatting. Everything feels right—even as I know that moving in with my parents at this stage of my life should feel very, very wrong.

It’s just temporary.

Dodie didn’t come with us. The day we left, Harrison spent an hour in his bedroom, saying his good-byes, and then, forlorn, he walked out to the front yard and slumped on the stoop.

“Dodie can hang out with Daddy until the house gets sold,” I said. In the house, there would be more imaginary people than real ones, but then, maybe there always were.

An hour before school lets out, my cell phone rings.

Without bothering to say hello, my new friend Pat starts talking at her usual double speed.

“Gus wanted to know if Harrison could come over after school to look at his new Pokémon cards. He bought a whole bunch with some of the Target gift cards he got for his birthday because he only had like three thousand cards and that wasn’t enough. But anyway they could do homework together, if they have any, and Sydney can come too, so Tillie doesn’t drive me crazy.”

“They’d love that,” I say. “I’ll have to get them kind of early, though, like four-thirty. My sister is flying in from Texas.”

Harrison has a new best friend. Gus is much nicer than Dodie and also has the distinct advantage of being real. Gus is loud and twitchy and given to intense obsessions (Pokémon) and aversions (any food that has touched any other food). Gus’s mother, Pat, is my new best friend—the first I’ve had since Sherry Plant. Astonishingly enough, Gus’s twin sister, Tillie, is one of Sydney’s
two
new best friends, the other being a My Little Pony fanatic named Kaleigh. Three is always a bad number, and I have a feeling things won’t end well, especially since Tillie keeps asking Sydney to choose between My Little Pony and Polly Pocket.

But that’s just one more thing I try not to think about.

“So nice you found a family just like yours,” my mother says when I get off the phone.

Luckily for the rest of humanity, there is no family exactly like mine, but Pat’s comes close-ish. A couple of years older than me, she went through similar infertility torture before becoming impregnated with donor eggs fertilized with her husband’s sperm. Weirdly enough, Tillie and Gus look more like Pat than her husband. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t seem to bother her that they don’t carry her DNA.

Does Darren feel closer to our children now that he knows that half of their genes come from a man I’ve never met—and never want to meet? Of course, it might be easier for him to leave us if the children were the product of my infidelity.

When our Arizona house sells, we will use the money to buy something in my parents’ school district. It will have to be small or a fixer-upper or both for us to afford it. The Arizona real estate market took a real hit in the years since we bought. If Darren hasn’t found a job in Michigan by then, he will rent an apartment near work and visit us for holidays and occasional long weekends.

That’s the official line, anyway.

“How’d it go?” I ask Pat when I show up at four-thirty. Her house is a mess, but it always is, and it doesn’t seem to bother her.

She shrugs. “All four are still alive, so I figure I’ve done my job. Your sister who’s coming—is she the one with the perfect kid?”

“That’s her.” I roll my eyes. “Her husband is out of town for a couple of weeks—some business thing in China—so Tracey and my niece Jade are flying in from Texas. Tomorrow they’re going to the museum because Jade wants to learn more about the Impressionists.”

“Impressionists? How old is she?”

“Four.”

Pat howls. For the moment, at least, I feel like everything is going to be okay.

“Oh!” she says. “I keep meaning to tell you. Gus and Tillie’s piano teacher says she has openings. I’ll give you her number.”

Once we’ve said our good-byes and the kids are strapped into their seats, I say, “Your cousin Jade will be at Gammie and Pop-Pop’s in about an hour. Promise me you’ll be good? And you’ll play with your cousin?”

“Four’s little,” Sydney says.

Harrison kicks the back of my seat. “Before, you said she was three.”

“She was three. Now she’s four.”

“She told us she was four,” Sydney tells her brother.

“Did not.”

“Did so!”

“If you don’t fight, you can have Oreos when we get home,” I say.