The Baby Agenda

She was trying very, very hard to think about the job site and the wiring and electrical and plumbing that would soon go in, about spring flowers and how she was meeting Gray and Charlotte for lunch later. Gray Van Dusen was her partner in Van Dusen & Cullen, Architects, and her best friend in the world. Charlotte had quickly become almost as good a friend.

Moira was doing her best to think about anything and everything except the fact that she was almost positive her period was late. At least a week late. Maybe ten days. She didn’t keep exact track, so she wasn’t sure. But…it should have come and gone.

Sickening fear rose from her belly to swell in her chest, as it did every time she let this worry creep through her defenses. She felt Jeb’s scrutiny and made a point of smiling again and asking about his oldest son, who was a senior in high school waiting to hear which colleges had accepted him.

Jeb’s face brightened. “Didn’t I tell you? He received early acceptance to Stanford. Can you believe it?” He wore a goofy grin. “My kid, going to Stanford.”

She laughed. “Your kid, your tuition bills.”

That didn’t wipe the smile away. “Worth every penny.” He slapped the top of her car. “Take care, Moira.”

“Yeah, thanks, Jeb.” She put the key in the ignition and closed the door as he walked away. Not wanting him to turn back and see her sitting here, she reversed then drove across bumpy ground toward the street. Meantime, her stomach churned.

Was it too early for a pregnancy test?

Once out of sight of the construction, she pulled to the curb and set the car in Park. Still holding on to the steering wheel for all she was worth, Moira let the fear wash over her. It sensitized her skin, set her to rocking, made her pant.

How could this be? He’d used the condom. She knew he had, saw him put it on.

Yes, but condoms had a failure rate a whole lot higher than birth-control pills. Which she wasn’t on. Hadn’t wanted to start until she was sure her relationship with Bruce was moving to that point.

She’d had sex once. Once! And they’d used a condom. Even if it had failed—had a hole, or leaked, or whatever went wrong—a woman shouldn’t get pregnant the one and only time she’d had sex in over ten years. Wasn’t there some justice, somewhere, that would keep her from being punished so severely for her foolish need to prove she was desirable?

And to make matters worse, she wasn’t even convinced she’d proved that much. Yes, he’d made passionate love to her. He’d said the right things. He’d touched her with such care, such longing, and his eyes had darkened to near black when he thrust into her. But…he had also left the minute she fell asleep, simply stole away.

And even though he’d said it would be only the one night… A part of her couldn’t help wondering why. Why, in the three weeks that had passed since then, he hadn’t made the effort to find out who she was, hadn’t called. She would have been easy to find, Moira knew, with her flaming red hair and freckled face. They’d known people in common; all he would have had to do was make a phone call or two.

But he hadn’t done that.

Please don’t let him be married, she prayed. Don’t let him have lied. I’d hate to have to live with that. Especially now, especially if…

If she was pregnant. Moira bit her lip so hard she tasted blood.

What would she do if she was pregnant? Would she track him down and tell him?

Still rocking herself, she thought, No. If this was anyone’s fault, it was hers. She’d asked him to make love to her. The condom was hers, so she couldn’t even blame him for using a defective one. He’d warned her that the one night was all he could offer, and she’d agreed. How could she now contact him and say, “Hate to tell you, but you’re going to be a father, so how do you feel about paying child support for, oh, say, the next eighteen years?”

That wasn’t the deal they’d made.

My fault, my risk.

And—oh, Lord—she didn’t know if she could face him anyway. Maybe the standards she’d grown up with in Montana were dated, but the closest she’d come to shaking them was sleeping with her college boyfriend. Having too much to drink followed by a one-night stand… She shivered. She’d all but begged him to have sex with her.

Moira was whimpering now, the fear swamping her. She felt like a drowning victim, going down for the last time, desperate for a hand to reach for her. But there wasn’t one. Wouldn’t be one. If she made Will Becker take responsibility, all she’d be doing was dragging him under with her.

It was a long time before she felt able to drive again. She’d made one decision: she would wait another week before she bought a home pregnancy test. Heck, maybe her anxiety was holding off her period. A watched pot never boils, after all. And…really, was there any advantage to knowing for sure this early? Abortion wasn’t an option for her, she knew that. She wanted to have children. She’d always assumed she would be married by the time she had a baby, that there would be a father in the picture, too, but hard reality was that she was thirty-four years old. Maybe she should be grabbing at any chance to have a family, even if it wouldn’t be the ideal one.

Moira wished she wasn’t supposed to meet Gray and Charlotte. Hiding her distress would be hard. And the truth was, if she really was pregnant, carried the baby to term and kept him or her to raise, Gray would pay some of the price, too, however unfair that was.

When he got the idea of running for mayor of West Fork, they’d had a long talk. He wasn’t married then, hadn’t even met Charlotte, so it was only the two of them making the decision. The mayoral job wasn’t full-time, or he wouldn’t have considered it. But he’d have to cut back substantially on how many architectural commissions he took. Unless they wanted their revenue to decline substantially, Moira would be carrying more than her share of the work.

She’d liked what he wanted to accomplish for this town that was now home for both of them, and understood why it mattered to him. Understood more, probably, than he’d be comfortable realizing. Gray was usually closemouthed about his deepest motivations, but they had been best friends in college. There’d been a couple of times when he’d had too much to drink and had told her things he had probably regretted—assuming he’d remembered the next day.

She knew he had had a twin brother who died in an accident when the two boys were ten years old. They had been riding bikes together, racing down a hill. Garret had pulled ahead, just a little. He slammed into the side of a car passing on the street that intersected the foot of the hill. Gray shot past the rear bumper. A split second one way or the other and it would have been different. Garret might have been fine and Gray dead. Or both fine. Garret went into a coma and never came out before dying two days later. In their grief, Gray’s parents pulled away from each other and ultimately divorced, his mother moving to Portland, his dad to Boise. They’d left behind the small-town life that in later years came to seem idyllic to Gray, who had also had to cope with the realization that he was a constant, aching reminder to both of his parents of the son they’d lost.

In coming to West Fork, Gray was trying to recapture everything he had lost. She knew that, and feared it was impossible, but had agreed to open their architectural firm here anyway. To her surprise, he seemed to have found what he was looking for. The satisfaction of shaping the town to suit himself, a woman to love, the start of a family.

But Moira wasn’t going to be able to keep her end of the agreement. Would she even be able to work full-time when she got near the end of her pregnancy? Didn’t most new mothers have to take some time off? And then, how many hours a day could she bear to leave her baby in day care? There was no way Gray would be able to continue serving as mayor, not if Van Dusen & Cullen, Architects, was to survive.

And that made her feel horribly guilty.

Fortunately, if she was quiet during lunch, neither Gray nor Charlotte seemed to notice. They talked some about their current projects, some about Charlotte’s pregnancy, which was starting to show, and some about Charlotte’s twin sister, Faith, who had recently married West Fork Police Chief Ben Wheeler and who was also thinking of starting a family.

Call her pathetic, but it made Moira feel even lonelier to imagine Charlotte and Faith both pregnant at the same time as she was, but the two of them having men who loved them and worried about them and hovered over them. While all Moira was doing by getting pregnant was screwing up her life.

Worry about it when you’re sure, she told herself.

A WEEK LATER, MOIRA BOUGHT a pregnancy test at a pharmacy in Everett where nobody knew her, and decided to wait until after dinner to use it. She should be hungry, but wasn’t. A part of her knew it wasn’t only anxiety, that the lack of appetite and faint queasiness of the past few days shouldn’t come as any surprise.

She peed on the stick, then sat on the edge of the bathtub waiting, staring at it. Maybe the watched pot wouldn’t boil. If she didn’t take her eyes off it, didn’t blink….

But she couldn’t help blinking, and the blue color first tinted the slot, then brightened.

Oh, God. Oh, God.

All of her fear poured back. She dropped the stick in the wastebasket and bent forward, holding herself as tight as she could as a hundred different emotions eddied and tumbled like flood waters, almost more than her body could contain.

In the end, all she could think was, I’m pregnant.

And now she had to live with it.

“LUNCH?” MOIRA SAID. “Um…sure. Now?”

Oh, heavens. She’d done her best in the two months since she realized she was pregnant to…not avoid Gray, how could she when they were partners and friends? She saw him every day, and she had dinner with him and Charlotte at least once a week. But she had tried not to spend time alone with him, not to let conversation become really personal. It hadn’t been as hard as she’d have thought. Mostly in the office they talked business, exchanged ideas, looked over each other’s preliminary sketches and made suggestions, offered solutions to jobsite problems. Lunch for Gray was usually fast food or a deli sandwich, snatched between city hall and their architectural office or a job site.

But today, he’d appeared earlier than she had expected him, and now stood in the doorway waiting.

“If not now, when?” he asked with his usual good humor.

She saved her CADD drawing and closed out the program, then took her purse from the bottom drawer of her desk. Gray stood back to let her out the door, then flipped the sign to Closed.

“The Pea Patch?”

“Fine.” Perfect, in fact. The small vegetarian restaurant used only organic, healthful ingredients, exactly what a pregnant woman should be eating. Gray had probably taken to eating there with Charlotte.

He didn’t say much during the short drive and found parking right in front. The main street of West Fork probably hadn’t changed much since the 1950s, with false-fronted buildings and small, locally owned businesses. The Pea Patch was relatively new, of course, as was the antiques store beside it, but the barbershop and hardware store could have starred in a Norman Rockwell painting. One of Gray’s goals had been to maintain the old-fashioned atmosphere of downtown and keep people shopping here.

Moira ordered the day’s special, a bowl of split-pea soup and a half sandwich, Gray a burrito. He glanced at her sidelong when she asked for a juice instead of the latte that had been her habit.