Mother Load (7 page)

“Yes, I’m the deluxe, all-purpose model, available wherever fine women are sold.”

Anna chuckled and nuzzled her neck. “How was court today?”

“Split decision.” Lily finished loading the dishwasher and wiped down the kitchen sink as she brought Anna up to date. “So if Miguel misses two visits, he forfeits the kids for good. I predict that will happen within six months, and Maria’s troubles will be over.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the counter. “I’ve been representing Maria in family court for seven years. I can’t even imagine what I’ll do with all my free time once it’s over.”

Anna had a suggestion, one they had talked about several months ago, but Lily hadn’t been keen on it at the time. Perhaps she would feel different now that their baby was on the way. “Maybe you’ll decide to stay home with the baby after all.”

Lily gave her a pointed look and she threw up her hands in instant retreat.

“Not that I’m saying you should, just that you could.”

“The last time I left the law clinic it took me almost two years to get my office back,” Lily said sharply, a reference to her suspension for an alcohol-related incident over three years ago. The anger in her voice seemed to come from nowhere.

Anna didn’t dare chalk it up to hormones—at least not aloud. “Honey, I wasn’t saying I thought you should. You know you can do whatever you want and I’ll back you a hundred percent.”

“Mom!” Andy called from the family room.

Lily threw the dishtowel onto the counter and muttered as she walked away, “Why don’t you stay home with the baby? At least you can be gone as long as you want and still come back as the boss.”

As Anna absorbed the tirade, she weighed her options. Something told her it would be best not to go chasing after her in order to smooth things over, as that might only prolong the quarrel. Instead she went into the family room to play with Andy, who had already emptied the contents of his toy box onto the floor.

“Is Mama mad at me?” His sad voice almost broke her heart.

“Of course not. She just isn’t feeling well right now, but she’ll be better soon.”

After thirty minutes of playtime, they straightened the room and went upstairs to find the door to the master suite closed. Anna helped Andy through his bath and into bed, but held off on reading his bedtime story.

She found Lily sitting on the bed, still fully dressed, paging through a stack of old magazines. “Andy was worried that you were mad at him. I thought you might want to read him a story just to let him know things are okay, but if you’d rather not I’ll go back in there and do it.”

Wordlessly, Lily tossed her magazine aside and walked out of the room. It wasn’t a gracious response, but at least she was making amends with Andy. Anna returned to the family room and cruised the television offerings before settling on the Lakers game.

Soon after, Lily appeared in the doorway. “I did it again, didn’t I? Flew off the handle over something silly.”

Anna was glad for the admission, since sweeping it under the rug made it more likely to happen again. She wondered how much of it was hormones, and how much was resistance to staying home once the baby was born. “It isn’t silly to want to go back to work. This is your career and you’ve worked hard to get where you are.”

Lily slumped in a heap at the far end of the couch and swung her legs up so they intertwined with Anna’s. “It wasn’t even about that, really. I was just picking a fight because I was in the mood for it. If it hadn’t been work, it probably would have been something else.”

“That’s really unusual for you,” she said teasingly. “Could it be that you’re…I don’t know, pregnant?”

A gentle kick was her answer. “How come you don’t ever lose your temper?”

“I’m perfect. Haven’t you noticed?”

“I have. It’s very intimidating.”

“Come here.” Anna held out her arms and Lily backed into the embrace, resting against her chest. “We’ll manage just fine if you want to go back to work. Hiring a full-time nanny to keep the house and be here when Andy gets home from school is probably a good idea.”

Lily sighed. “Do we really want nannies raising our kids?”

“We’d still raise them. We just have to find someone who understands our values, somebody Andy really likes.”

“I don’t know, Anna. Maybe it isn’t fair to the kids for both of us to work all day. We’ll miss half their lives.”

She couldn’t tell if Lily was truly conflicted or still in her contrary mood, but now was just as good a time as any to air their thoughts. “Your mom worked full-time, and so did mine. We turned out okay.”

“That’s not a fair comparison, though. My mom was a teacher at the same place where I happened to go to school, so I was with her all the time. And you grew up at the car dealership. I can’t very well take the kids down to my office.”

“Okay, so you could go back to work part-time, like when Andy first came to live with us. And you’re right, I’m the boss. If I want to set up a playpen in my office for little…Ruby…I can.”

“Ruby?”

Anna found herself grinning. “Yeah, what’s wrong with Ruby?”

“Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know. I just said it. Ruby Kaklis.”

“What if it’s a boy?”

“Then you get to name him.”

“Ralph.”

“Anything but Ralph.”

Lily gently trailed her fingernails along Anna’s long arms, and finally lifted her hands to kiss the backs of her knuckles. “I’m sorry I went off on you. Beth said all the hormones would settle down after the first trimester.”

“It’s okay. I’d rather be on the receiving end of an occasional tantrum than having my emotions go haywire or throwing up every day like you.”

“You left out having to pee every six minutes.”

Anna tightened her embrace and rested her chin on Lily’s shoulder. “I love you for all the things you’re going through for us. I wasn’t sure I’d be a good mom, but Andy came along and showed me how easy it was. Now I can’t wait for this baby.”

“And I can’t wait to see you be a mom again.”

“Ruby.”

“Ralph.”

Lily blinked and tried to move, vaguely aware that her arm was pinned by a small body draped across it. Andy had come to her bedside at two a.m. after a bad dream, and when he couldn’t get back to sleep in his own bed she had brought him to theirs. Anna had barely stirred until Lily nudged her awake to slip into her nightshirt.

The pamphlet Beth had given her warned that she wouldn’t have much energy while her body adjusted to pregnancy. Truer words were never written, but she took it as a welcome sign her pregnancy was proceeding normally. Naps had become her guilty pleasure—before dinner, after dinner and at any given moment over the weekend when she managed to get in even a semi-horizontal position.

Inch by inch she worked herself free of Andy and sat up to see him pressed against Anna’s back, his curly brown hair tickling her shoulder. It was a Kodak moment, but more than that it was an opportunity for her to escape downstairs for a few minutes of solitude.

Not complete solitude though, she remembered as Chester’s thud on the floor signaled his interest in breakfast. She picked up her slippers and tiptoed to the doorway, where she paused one last time to look back at the slumbering pair. It was unusual for Andy to sleep with them. He normally slept soundly in his own bed, but neither she nor Anna thought it was a big deal for him to join them once in a while. It always felt good to have him there, and he probably would outgrow the need long before they tired of it.

As she cinched her robe she was reminded of yet another first trimester side effect—breasts so tender she could hardly stand to button her shirt. At least she hadn’t suffered with morning sickness today. There were few things she hated as much as throwing up.

Chester rushed ahead down the sweeping staircase to sit by the back door, where he thumped his tail wildly.

“Hold on there, fella.” She lifted the panel of the doggie door and he disappeared through the hole.

On the kitchen counter was a packet containing Andy’s school pictures, adorable with his missing front tooth. She selected one and wrote a note in a greeting card to send it off. By the time she found the stamps in the drawer, Chester had reappeared and insisted she fill his bowl.

He was vibrant for an eight-year-old house dog, owing his reversion to puppyhood to Andy, who romped with him through the park, the neighborhood, and up and down the stairs. It made her sad to think of Chester leaving them someday, as he was a living, breathing reminder of her mother, who had been gone for three years. She would have given anything had her mom lived to see their baby. Eleanor Stewart would have made one terrific grandmother. Tears welled up as she envisioned the sight.

“Must have coffee.” Anna stumbled into the kitchen and caught her crying. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

The floodgates opened and Lily found herself bawling onto Anna’s shoulder. More hormones. In the last couple of weeks her anger had abated only to be replaced by uncontrollable sadness, or even just silly crying over laundry commercials. “Just wishing Mom was here.”

Anna shushed her gently and drew her into an embrace. They stood that way for several minutes until the sobs subsided.

Then as quickly as she had rushed into Anna’s arms, she stepped away and fanned herself with both hands. “All done. You wanted coffee?”

“I’ll get it.”

“What are you doing up so early? The way you two were sleeping, I figured I had time to go up Mount Baldy and back.”

“Andy was drooling on my shoulder.”

“At least he didn’t pee on you this time.” In fact, Andy hadn’t wet the bed for several months.

“So what happened last night? Did he have a bad dream?” Anna helped herself to a cup of coffee and topped off Lily’s mug.

“Something like that. Jonah told him there were mean old ladies that lived under his bed, so naturally the first person Andy thought of was his teacher.”

“Mrs. Dooley? Why is my nephew so ornery? Never mind, I’m sure he gets it from his mother. It was probably a good thing Kim and I didn’t meet until I was fourteen. Otherwise she would’ve ruined Santa and the Easter bunny.”

“Instead she tormented you for twenty years by talking about sex.”

Anna chuckled. “At least she knows all about the in vitro procedures so we won’t have to endure the questions about how we did it. But she’ll go nuts wanting to know who our sperm donor was.”

Since Andy’s father was of Mexican heritage, they had chosen a Latino man, a graduate student in the sciences who played competitive sports. They liked the idea that their children might appear to be siblings.

Anna picked up the greeting card. “Karen Haney?”

Karen was Lily’s birth mother, a woman she had despised until only recently. When the judge granted her and Anna’s petition to adopt Andy—officially ending Karen’s participation in his life—he had requested the parties work something out informally with each other. “School pictures,” she said matter-of-factly. That was all the discussion of Karen Haney she wanted. “Only three more days and we’ll have our first pictures of the baby. Hard to believe it’s eleven weeks already.”

“When did she say we’d know if it’s Ruby or Ralph?”

“Not till sixteen weeks. That’s almost Christmas. But Beth said we should be safe to start telling people we’re pregnant the week after Thanksgiving. I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces, especially your father’s.” George would be especially excited if their baby turned out to be Anna’s, though Lily had her doubts despite what Beth had said about the possibilities. From the moment she had learned she was pregnant, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that she was carrying a child of her own blood. As much as that thrilled her, it also made her sad it wasn’t Anna’s.

“How do you think Andy will react?”

“Considering he practically worships Jonah, I think he’ll be thrilled. Being a big brother gives them one more thing in common.” Lily filled their mugs again. “When do you think we should tell him?”

“Not until the last minute. Keep in mind that he told me everything I was getting for my birthday as soon as you two got back from the mall. There’s no way he’ll be able to keep this a secret.”

Lily dissolved into a fit of laughter, just as she did each time she recalled Andy’s exuberant shouts about what was in the bag as she tried to sneak into the house with Anna’s birthday gifts. It was understandable, though, since in his years in foster care he’d had little exposure to the concept of surprising someone. “You’re right. We should tell him about two seconds before we tell everyone else.”

“And then hold a hand over his mouth.” Anna opened the LA Times and spread out the advertising page for Premier Motors alongside that of her Orange County competitor. “Cleve Shaw’s swimming in debt. He called me the other day to see if I’d take some of his inventory, but I couldn’t help. I bet he sells out before the end of the year.”

“I thought you said the German cars were coming back already.”

“They are, but he owns a GM dealership too. It’s dragging him down.”

“Are you tempted to make him an offer?”

“With what? It’ll be two years before we’re able to pay down the debt on Palm Springs, and that’s only if this last round of cuts stops the skid.” She folded the paper and pushed it aside. “Not going to talk about work today. What’s on our agenda?”

“Nothing that takes a lot of energy, I hope.”

“Maybe when sleepyhead wakes up we’ll go do something fun,” Anna suggested.

Lily opened the ad section again. “Like drive around town and check out the minivans?”

The look of horror on Anna’s face was priceless.

Lily took a deep breath, hoping to quiet her roiling stomach. This time it wasn’t the morning sickness, which she now knew had nothing to do with morning. She had barely slept the night before in anticipation of their first sonogram, and she couldn’t keep her foot from bouncing as they waited.

In contrast to her own fidgeting, Anna was cool as a cucumber. There she sat, legs crossed and paging through a magazine as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

Though they were alone in the waiting room, Lily whispered, “How can you be so casual about all this?”