Marrying Daisy Bellamy

“Daisy, go ahead and tell me what’s going on.”

“I screwed up. I screwed up big-time.” Her voice sounded fragile, the words like shards of glass, even though he didn’t know what she was talking about. Whatever it was, he wanted to be there, wished he could put his arms around her, inhale the scent of her hair and tell her everything was going to be all right.

His mind scrolled through the possibilities. Had she started smoking again? Was she failing in school? He waited. She knew he was there. He didn’t need to prompt her anymore.

“Julian,” she said at last, a catch in her voice. “I’m going to have a baby. It’s due in the summer.”

The words were so unexpected, he couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He kept staring at Rojelio’s wife, now on her second trip with the grocery bags. Daisy Bellamy? Having a baby?

At Julian’s school, pregnant girls were pretty common, but Daisy? She was supposed to have, like, this privileged life where nothing bad ever happened. She was supposed to be his girlfriend. It was true, they’d parted ways in the summer having made no promises, but it was an unspoken assumption between them.

Or so he’d thought.

“Julian? Are you there?”

“Yeah.” He felt as if he’d been punched in the gut.

“I feel really stupid,” she said, crying now, sounding scared. “And it can’t be undone. The guy … he’s somebody from my school in New York. We weren’t even, like, together or anything. We got drunk one weekend, and … oh, Julian …”

He had no idea what to say. This was not the conversation he’d imagined when he’d picked up the phone. “I guess … wow, I hope you’re going to be all right.”

“I pretty much changed everything for myself. I told my parents, and they’re, like, in shock and everything, but they keep telling me it’ll all work out.”

“It will.” He had no idea if it would or not.

“Julian, I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize.”

“I feel terrible.”

So did he. “Look, it is what it is.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to see me again.”

“I want to see you.”

She breathed a sigh into the phone. “I still want to see you, too.”

“I guess we will at the wedding.”

“Right. So … enough about me.” She gave a weak laugh. “How are things with you?”

It didn’t feel right to share his news with her now. All the energy had been sucked out of him. He couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she was pregnant … and what she’d done in order to get that way.

“Everything’s fine,” he said.

“Good. Julian?”

“What?”

“I miss you.”

“Yeah,” he said, though he didn’t know what he missed. “Me, too.”

Four

“Hey, buddy,” said Daisy, perching on the edge of Charlie’s sandbox. “Guess what?”

Her son smiled up at her, green eyes twinkling in a way that never failed to catch her heart. “What?”

“You’re going to have a sleepover with your dad.”

“Okay.”

“Does that sound like fun?”

“Yep.” He went back to the trench he was digging in the sand.

The afternoon light filtered through the new leaves, glinting in his fiery red hair. “Silly question,” she said, pushing a toy truck along one of the roads he had paved. “You and your dad always have fun together, right?”

“Yep.” He filled a dump truck with sand. The backyard sandbox was elaborate, a gift from his O’Donnell grandparents for his third birthday. Charlie loved it. His grandpa O’Donnell claimed this was because shipping and transport—the O’Donnell family business—was in his blood, same as his red hair and green eyes.

He looked so much like Logan that Daisy sometimes wondered what part of her their son carried in him. Looking at Charlie felt like peering through a strange lens that took her back across time, to Logan as a child. Before she knew it, Charlie would be starting kindergarten; he’d be the same age Logan had been when Daisy had first met him. That was freaky to contemplate.

Logan’s mother, Marian, loved showing Daisy pictures of Logan at Charlie’s age. “It’s uncanny,” she would say. “They could be twins. Logan was always such a happy child,” Mrs. O’Donnell often added.

A happy child who had nearly ruined his life by the age of eighteen. Daisy suspected Logan had grown up under enormous pressure from his parents. He was the only boy of four kids, and his family was very traditional. Much had been expected of him. He was supposed to excel at academics and sports in school, and he had done so. He and Daisy had attended the same rigorous Manhattan prep school, where she’d watched him swagger through the halls with a twinkle in his eye. He came from a privileged background, and he’d been groomed to carry on the tradition—an Ivy League college, or at the very least, Boston College, his dad’s alma mater, followed by a position in the family’s international shipping firm.

Daisy looped her arms around her knees and watched Charlie, who was lost in a world of play. Why did parents saddle their kids with expectations, instead of letting the kid become whoever he wanted to be? Didn’t they know it made kids want to do the opposite?

It was a sports injury that precipitated Logan’s descent into drug addiction. A soccer championship was on the line, and Logan had suffered a knee injury. He discovered if he swallowed enough painkillers, he could keep playing.

Hide your pain and keep on playing. It was the O’Donnell family way.

Daisy pushed her son’s toy truck over a plastic bridge and silently vowed never to pressure him about anything. Ever. She wondered if her own parents had made that same vow about her. Didn’t every generation promise to be better parents than their own parents had been? How come it never worked out that way?

“Good, it’s all settled, then,” she said to Charlie. “A sleepover with your dad.”

“Because you’re working?” Charlie asked, scooping out a hole with a yellow plastic shovel.

That was the only reason she ever left him. To work. This time was different.

She paused her truck at the end of the bridge and took a breath. “This is not for work. I’m going to see Julian.”

Charlie didn’t stop digging and he didn’t look up. “Daddy-boy,” he said quietly.

“Okay?” she asked.