The Baby Wait

With that, she rang off, and I pressed the accelerator on the car a little bit harder.

“HEY, SARA!”

I turned from the open door of my Jetta in the direction of the call. I’d recognize that bellow anywhere.

Maggie stepped away from her SUV, closing the distance between us, white paper bags in her hands. “You best be glad you got here when you did,” she said with a swirl of her wild African-print dress. “I’d be one mad black woman if I’d had to go in that doctor’s office after you. You know I don’t do ob-gyns. But I would have if I’d had to.”

Maggie didn’t “do” doctors at all. Strong, brave, tell-it-like-it-was as Maggie might be, the only way she’d be caught with a doctor was if he were writing out her death certificate. I’d given up trying to convince her to go.

I opened my arms for a soul-fortifying hug, which she gave without hesitation. Hiding my face in the cotton of her dress offered me a chance to squelch a few tears and regain my tough act. When I stepped back, I said, “Okay. So you see I survived. I told you I would.”

She blew a raspberry. “Just for that, you don’t get your treat.”

“Treat?”

“I picked up salads at Ida’s Buffet. I thought we could eat by the track then get our walking in before we headed back. Grab your shoes.”

Now Maggie really deserved the hug—lunch and conversation. What more could a girl want? As we headed to the track near the county board office, some of the tension uncoiled from my shoulders. Maggie made talking easy; she didn’t require endless explanations and footnotes.

I’d known Maggie since the first day of kindergarten—when I pulled one of the dozens of pigtails she had caught up in pastel-colored plastic barrettes. She’d backhanded me, I’d stomped her foot, and the teacher had sent us to time-out together. Once the tears had stopped, we’d bonded against a common enemy, friends forever.

Under the shade of a willow tree, the two of us munched on our lunch in silence for a few minutes before she asked, “What took so long at the doctor’s office, anyway?”

“Oh, they just had every pregnant woman in Laurens County in there.”

A look of concern flashed across Maggie’s face, but I forestalled it with, “And a Cherie look-alike. Down to the belly button ring. A few years and she’ll have the tattoo, too.”

Maggie wrinkled her nose in disgust. “LaTisha wants a belly button ring. Ewww! See what you’ve got to look forward to with Meredith? They don’t stay cute little babies for long. Their souls get sucked out of them, and they turn into teenagers.”

“You have a good, levelheaded daughter,” I reminded her. “Even if she is fourteen years old. She’s on the honor roll, she’s not dating and she unloads your dishwasher. What do you have to complain about?”

“You’re obviously forgetting that mouthy attitude she’s got these days.” Maggie crossed her eyes in apparent memory.

“Oh, yeah, where on earth did she get that? It couldn’t have possibly been from her mother.”

Maggie rewarded my sarcasm with a dig in the ribs. “Not me, girl. She got it from that low-down sorry skunk of a man who donated his sperm for the occasion. What I ever saw in him…”

I left her to ponder her ex-husband in silence while I chased down the last baby-spinach leaf in my carryout bowl. A moment later the two of us made our way to the track.

As we walked, I gave her a thumbnail sketch of Ma, and her phone call, plus the trip to her apartment. Still, not even with Maggie could I confess my real worries—my worries about Joe.

“That mother of yours,” Maggie sympathized. “No doubt about it, Nora O’Rourke is a piece of work. It’s a wonder you even want kids after a childhood like yours.”

“Your parents.” I glanced down at the pedometer snugged up to the cell phone on my belt. “Hey, we’ve done a half mile. Want to quit?”

“Hell, yes. I wanted to quit even before I started. Damn crazy idea of yours. I haven’t lost a pound yet,” she grumbled. “What about my parents?”

We trudged toward the car, the grass swishing against our shoes. “Your parents are the reason I want kids. They made it work. Your dad—he saved my life. He was the daddy I never had. Where would I be if it hadn’t been for your parents? Some kind of trailer trash strung out on meth, probably.”

It was true. The bright spots in my childhood had been at the Boatwrights’ house. Their house had reverberated with laughter and squabbles and gospel spirituals…and love.

Maggie’s mom had provided more than her share of impetuous genes to her youngest daughter. Excitable, a little overprotective and paranoid when it came to her baby girl, Cecilia Boatwright was still a generous woman, generous enough to know a little dishwater-blond waif needed all the loving she could get.

I sat in the open door of my car as I switched back to my street shoes. “Thanks, Maggie. I really appreciate you doing this for me. It was just what I needed.”

“What we need is a girl’s day out, and maybe we’ll get it soon.” She paused a moment. “Joe called me.”

“What?”

“When you didn’t call him, he called me. Thought maybe something was wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You’d tell me, right? You’d tell me if…something was wrong? And…I don’t mean just about the cancer.”

I looked down at the white tennis shoe in my hand. I couldn’t lie to her, but I wasn’t ready for a tell-all confession. “I’d tell you. When I knew. If I knew.”

But did I know anything? Or were my worries about Joe just me chasing phantoms?

CHAPTER THREE

I’D JUST CLICKED MY Internet icon when the phone rang. I had five minutes before I left for work, and I’d intended to check if the current DTCers had finally got their babies. All of us on the adoption message boards had been gnawing our fingernails. This crop of DTCers should have received their referrals already. The delay in referrals had stretched from one week, to two and now to three, with no real explanation.

For a moment I thought about letting the machine get the phone. When I answered it, I wished I hadn’t.

“Sara? I gotta talk to Joe!”

Uh-oh. Cherie. And what’s more, Cherie awake before noon. It didn’t bode well.

“Cherie, Joe’s already headed out to the job site. You might catch him there.” I suppressed the urge to remind her some of us had to work for a living.

“He’s not answering his cell phone. And I’ve left, like, fifty-dozen messages. I gotta have that money, Sara! I really need it.”

I gave up on the computer and hit the shutdown button, trying to figure out what exactly to say. The azalea blooms outside the living-room window had withered enough to look tired and weary as April came to a close. That’s how I felt, too, talking with Cherie.

In the silence, she jumped first. “Hey, you’ll do. Can you lend me a hundred? That’ll help.”

For a moment, her offer tempted me as strongly as if it were the map to Blackbeard’s treasure chest. The idea that a hundred bucks could make Cherie disappear for a while was a siren song. But I knew, from all my dealings with Ma, it would only lead me to crash into rocky shoals. Cherie would keep coming back.

Not only that, but it would break mine and Joe’s cardinal rule: I didn’t give money to Cherie, and he didn’t give money to Ma.

“I don’t keep that kind of cash on me, Cherie,” I told her, honest enough, as my wallet was down to its last twenty. And I damn sure wasn’t going to go hit the ATM machine for her. “Talk to Joe. Or maybe you could ask your boss for an advance.”

“I quit.”

Now my temper started to boil in earnest. “You what?”

“Didn’t Joe tell you? That’s why I need the money.”