by Teresa Hill
Gretchen gave Kate funny looks all afternoon, but Kate was determined to ignore them and all calls from anyone she was related to. She did her work, kind of, and tried to put together a plan that would get her sisters into their new apartment as soon as possible. This weekend, hopefully. That would be good.
Maybe she wouldn’t have to tell them about her and Joe until they’d actually moved. That would be even better.
The clock said five o’clock, and Kate, who never left at five, found herself wanting to escape.
Go ahead, a little voice inside said. There’s no law that says you can’t leave at five, even if you are the boss.
Hmm. She supposed there wasn’t.
Gretchen would be shocked and even more curious, but some things couldn’t be helped. Kate shut off her computer, grabbed her satchel and her keys. She was halfway out the front door before Gretchen even realized what was going on.
“I’m taking off for the day,” Kate said. “Will you lock up?”
Gretchen frowned, as if Kate had spoken in Swahili or something. “But…”
“Sorry, gotta go.”
There it was.
She’d escaped.
Kate felt naughty and relieved at the same time, maybe something close to happy. And she was hungry. She’d been too upset to eat much that day. Suddenly her stomach was growling. She swung by the grocery store, whipping through like a woman who thought a grocery cart was a stock car in disguise, almost sending two unsuspecting shoppers barreling into displays, but causing no real disasters.
She got to the checkout lane and realized she’d bought nothing but ice cream and hamburgers to put on the grill. Kate frowned. Not the most nutritious dinner, especially for a woman carrying a baby, but there was protein in the burger and the ice cream had calcium, didn’t it? She’d do better tomorrow. She’d take Shannon out to eat at someplace extra nutritious to make up for it.
She was zipping along the road to her house when she heard sirens behind her. Good grief! How fast was she going?
Glancing in her rearview mirror, she saw someone she hoped was her brother, then hoped it wasn’t. She’d rather have a ticket than have to talk to anyone she knew right now.
Still, sirens were sirens.
She pulled over less than a block from her house, thinking if working up tears could get her out of this, it wouldn’t be too hard at the moment. Glancing back, she saw it was indeed her big brother, Jax, climbing out of the car. Great.
“I cannot believe this.” He talked as he walked to her car. “My sister would never break a rule, not even one about speeding. And yet, you look exactly like my sister. I can’t be sure, because I didn’t run the plates, but this looks just like her car.”
“Just write me the ticket and be done with it,” Kate said.
“Hey, you sound just like her, too,” he said.
“Smart-ass,” she mumbled.
“Oooohh, but she doesn’t swear. That does it. You must not be her. Got some ID, lady?”
“Jax!”
“Of course…maybe…” He felt her forehead next, then frowned. “Wow. No fever. I thought you might be delirious and racing to the hospital.”
“I am not delirious. I’ve never been delirious in my life. I’m just mad.”
“Want me to go beat somebody up for you?”
He could do it, too. He was a thoroughly fine example of manhood, just turned thirty and more gorgeous than any creature had the right to be. Women flocked to him like bees to honey, and had his entire life—something he’d always accepted as simply the way of the world. He wasn’t stuck-up, just very, very happy with his life. Tall, muscular and supremely confident, he could have taken care of anyone she asked him to with no problem.
Melanie Mann came to mind, but Jax would never hit a woman.
“Maybe…your fiancé?” he suggested.
“No.”
“Well, if it’s not him, the only other possibility I know about is this mysterious priest you’re hanging out with, but honestly? My sister and a priest? No way. You’d be in major rule-breaking territory then.”
“He’s not a priest,” she informed him. “And I’ll have you know, I broke a rule yesterday, and I just broke another one today. I was speeding. Write me a ticket!”
“What did you do yesterday, Katie?”
“I didn’t get pregnant, if that’s what you’re asking. Not that you have any room to talk, the way you’ve flitted from one woman to another your whole life—”
“Hey, I never—”
“Which has got to be an absolute miracle, considering all the girls you ran around with.”
“And this isn’t about me, anyway. This is about you. What’s going on?”
“I…I…” She got distracted by a car driving past her at superslow speed. Someone’s grandma. Maybe her best friend from third grade’s or someone she babysat for when she was twelve. The woman gawked at Kate, wrinkling up her nose and squinting to get a better view, maybe.
Add one more thing to the growing list of gossip about Kate.
Now they’d probably say she’d been arrested for something.
“Come on. Tell me,” her brother said. “And maybe I can head off Kimmie and Kathie before they swoop down and demand to know everything.”
“Oh, please, Jax. Don’t let them do that.”
“Tell me,” he said.
“Okay, but…this is not an announcement for the general public or even the family yet, okay?”
“As long as I get to know, okay.”
“Joe’s in love with someone else,” she said.
Her brother’s expression grew thunderous. “He is not!”
“Yes, he is. He just told me.”
“And you don’t want me to go beat the crap out of him?”
“No, I just want to forget all about it. I didn’t want to marry him, anyway.”
“Oh,” he said, more calmly than she would have believed.
Kate stared at him, dumbfounded. “What do you mean, ‘Oh’?”
He shrugged, as if he’d told her Mrs. Barnes had lost her cat again, or that Mildred Lake had wandered away from the old folks’ home once more and been found in a bar on Twelfth Street. Stuff that happened all the time.
“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?” she said again.
“I mean, it’s been five years, Katie.”
“So?”
“Five years?”
He said it like that was a bad thing. “We were being careful. I’m a careful woman. You know that.”
“Still, there’s careful and then there’s—”
Kate’s mouth dropped open, making it hard to talk. “What?
“I don’t know. Denial, maybe?”
Kate gasped. She was so mad she could spit. She absolutely couldn’t believe this, not in a million years. “You mean…you knew?”
How could he know? She hadn’t even known herself.
He shrugged helplessly. Her older brother was never helpless.
“All this time you knew?”
“Well…yeah,” he said sheepishly.
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“Katie, nobody can tell you anything.”
Which very nearly made her cry. He didn’t say it to be mean. He said it because it was true. She knew that. Just as she’d thought she’d known she was in love with Joe. But if she’d been wrong about that one important thing, what did it say about everything else she was so sure of? She really was going to cry.
“Oh, hell,” her brother said, opening her car door. “Scoot over.”
He slid in beside her. Next thing she knew, his arm was around her shoulder, and she was sobbing, her face hidden in his shirt.
“Ahhh, baby, I’m sorry. That rat. He didn’t have to do it this way.”
“It’s awful! I never thought he’d do anything like this to me. I thought he was the safest man in the world for me, and he’d never leave me and never hurt me, and I would be as safe as I could be with him. That’s why I picked hi
m.” Why in the world he’d picked her, she had no idea, but obviously he’d thought better of it.
Kate sobbed like she hadn’t since their mother died.
“I’m sorry,” Jax said gently. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“And…” Kate sniffled, tried to stop crying, but couldn’t. “And…I miss Mom!”
Jax followed her all the way home, pulling into the driveway behind her and walking to the door with her.
“Do I look just awful?” she asked, wiping at her face to make sure all her tears were gone before she walked in the front door.
“No.”
She knew he was lying and loved him for it. He really was the sweetest thing to all of them, always had been, and it couldn’t have been easy being the older brother to three lost little girls who hadn’t had a father for most of their lives, being the man of the family from the time he was only eleven. They’d gotten through it together, as they’d done everything else, and the ties between them had grown stronger. She was lucky to have him. They all were.
He was about to open her front door when she stopped him with a hand on his arm. “I’ve been driving you all crazy, haven’t I? Ever since mom got sick again.”
“No,” he lied again, just to make her not feel so bad.
“Yes, I have. And Joe, too. I could see myself doing it, and I just couldn’t stop myself. I wonder if that’s when he found this other woman…?”
“Katie, don’t do this to yourself.”
“I don’t blame him. Not really. I’m not the easiest woman in the world to put up with,” she said, then thought about it again. “Okay, I blame him a little.”
“Me, too.” Jax said. “In fact, I blame him a lot. All he had to say was, I’m sorry, I don’t want to marry you, and walk away. That’s it. Then he could have anybody he wanted and I’d be fine with it. I just hate that he did it this way.”
“But not that he did it,” Kate said. “Not if we’re not supposed to be together.”
“You would have figured it out,” he said.
God, she felt so stupid. So incredibly stupid, and she’d always thought of herself as such an intelligent woman. How had this happened?
“Come on. You’ve got to face them sometime,” Jax said. “And I’m here now. I’ll run interference for you.”
Which meant, if it got too intense, he’d run everybody off, if that’s what she wanted. He was a good brother.
He opened the door. Looking inside, she saw her sisters in the kitchen, whispering furiously to each other. They stopped the instant they saw her. She’d expected time to pull herself together and think of what she was going to say, but she didn’t get it.
Kathie walked up to her, a look of disbelief on her face and maybe a hint of anger, and said, “You’re pregnant, and it’s not even Joe’s baby?”
“No!” Kate shouted.
“How could you do that to him? Poor Joe—”
“I didn’t. I’m not pregnant.”
“But you’re running around town with somebody else. Everybody’s seen you. Poor Joe—”
“There’s no poor Joe in this,” Kate said. “He’s not the victim.”
“He must be devastated,” Kathie said, near tears.
“Trust me. He’s not.”
“Kathie, wait a minute.” Jax stepped between them, as he so often had when they were little.
“She broke his heart,” Kathie said.
“No, I didn’t,” Kate insisted.
Kim did her part, putting an arm around Kathie’s shoulders and hanging on to her. “Wait. Give her a minute. Let her tell us what’s going on.”
“I know what’s going on. I heard all about it.”
“Well, you heard wrong, Kath,” Jax said. “Joe left her.”
“What?”
“He did,” Kate said. “He’s… Well, he says he’s in love with someone else.”
Kathie looked shocked.
Kim looked furious. “That rat!”
Kate wasn’t up to going through the whole thing again. She was exhausted and turned to her brother. “You do it. I’m hiding in my room.”
She didn’t care if it was childish. And she still wanted her mother!
Kate, Ben and Shannon tromped into Dr. Russell’s office together that morning in complete silence.
Once again Shannon was looking ghoulish and once again the poor mothers-to-be in the waiting room recoiled in abject terror when they saw her.
Kate started to laugh. She couldn’t help it.
Ben checked in with the receptionist. Shannon, no doubt, meant to find a seat as far from the two of them as possible, but must have thought Kate was losing it when she’d started laughing to herself. She gave Kate a funny look, then sat down beside her.
Ben, looking uneasy himself, sat down at Kate’s other side and said, “What?”
Shannon shrugged. “No idea. I didn’t say a thing, I swear.”
“What?” Kate giggled some more. Everyone was staring now. What would the local gossip have to say about this? That she was really losing it? “I think of funny things sometimes. I’m not completely humorless.”
Was she?
Oh, geez.
Maybe she was.
Shannon rolled her eyes as the nurse called her name, stood up and stalked away. Kate got to her feet, then looked at Ben who hadn’t.
“What?” he said. “I’m staying right here.”
“No, you’re not. You got me into this. You’re not deserting us now.”
“But it’s a doctor. He’s going to do… I don’t even know what he’s going to do back there. Women stuff.”
“I would hope so.”
“I’m not going back there,” he argued.
“Yes, you are. You can guard the door and make sure Shannon doesn’t disappear before she gets checked out.”
He went reluctantly, but he went.
The nurse stopped at a wide spot in the hall, took Shannon’s blood pressure, her temperature and pricked her finger.
“Ouch,” Shannon complained.
The nurse shot Kate a look that clearly said, If she thinks this hurts, just wait.
Kate didn’t want to think about that. Obviously, Ben didn’t, either. Kate wasn’t sure, but she thought he looked a bit pale at the sight of three drops of blood that had come out of Shannon’s finger.
She was starting to feel a little nervous herself.
It all seemed too real now. There were huge, pregnant bellies everywhere. On posters on the wall and on the women sitting in the waiting room. Pictures of babies and a real baby or two, gurgling and waving their fists in the air, pulling their mother’s hair and babbling as if they were carrying on a perfectly reasonable conversation, even if no one knew what they were saying.
Shannon, this poor lost little girl, was going to have a baby, and she had no one to help her through it, except Kate and Ben, and what did either of them know?
“Do you know anything about babies?” she whispered to him.
“They cry a lot and make messes,” he said.
“Oh, great. You’re going to be so helpful.”
“You have two younger sisters. Don’t you remember anything?”
“They cry and make messes,” she said. “Sometimes, they smell really awful, and if they spit up on you, it’s almost impossible to get the smell out.”
“Out of you, or your clothes?” he asked.
“Both, I think.”
He made a face.
What had they gotten themselves into?
The nurse was going to leave Kate and Ben on a sofa in the hallway outside the treatment room where they put Shannon. The girl looked pleadingly at Kate when it was time for her to go inside. She’d probably never had a pelvic exam, Kate realized, and wasn’t that a treat for women everywhere.
“Okay, I’ll go with you,” Kate said.
Ben looked cheerful enough that she wanted to hit him, but held back.
“It was a man who got her into this condition,” Kate said. “And
where is he now? Nowhere to be found.”
“Amen to that,” the nurse said, as she held open the door, ushering them inside. “Cowards, nearly every one of them.”
“Hey, I didn’t do anything here. I’m just trying to help,” Ben said.
“Cowards,” the nurse repeated.
Ben sat there for twenty minutes, thinking things must have been going okay. Shannon hadn’t tried to escape. He hadn’t heard her so much as raise her voice. Then a nurse wheeled a big machine into the treatment room and he started to worry. What did that thing do? And what did they need it for?
He was thinking dire things when Kate stuck her head out the door a minute later and said, “Your turn.”
“My turn for what?”
“Get in here.”
He felt all the blood in his body rush to his feet. His head started spinning. “Why?”
“There’s something you need to see,” the nurse, who’d called him and all mankind a coward, yelled from behind the door.
“I don’t think so.”
Kate grabbed him by the arm and pulled.
They had the machine pulled up right beside the exam table. Shannon looked about six years old, lying there in her paper gown and her made-up face. The only part of her of any size at all was her rounded belly, which they’d uncovered.
How had she hidden a belly of that size from all of them?
Not that it was huge. Nothing about her was huge. But the belly wasn’t nearly as flat as he’d thought, given how she looked in her big, baggy clothes. He was starting to get a very bad feeling about how close she was to delivering this baby.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“We’re about to find out,” the doctor said, not sounding worried at all.
Shannon looked terrified. “Can I leave now?”
“Not yet,” the nurse said. “Almost done.”
The doctor squirted some goo on her belly and turned on the machine, which now looked like a big computer screen.
“We’re going to get pictures?” Ben asked.
“Yes, we are.”
“Does it hurt?” Ben asked.
“No,” the doctor claimed, but from Shannon’s expression, Ben wasn’t so sure.
The picture on the screen looked like a TV on total static one minute, and then the next…Ben saw something.