She wanted to discuss the clients we’d start with, which I told her I’d be happy to do after I reacquainted myself with the bathroom.
I returned a few minutes later. Cara watched me, her head slightly tilted, brown eyes focused. Like darts. For a moment, I wondered if someone was tiptoeing behind me. I smoothed my tunic, made sure it wasn’t hiked up in the back of my leggings. Checked my shoes. No bath tissue followed me. It wasn’t until I sat down that she leaned across the desk and said, “Is everything okay? As in you—are you okay?”
“I’m fine. All things considered,” I said. “Why?” Was she concerned about my emotional stability?
She tapped her pen on the palm of her hand and returned to her side-to-side chair-swaying. “Just checking. I don’t know. Somehow, you seem different.”
Lovely. Another baby whisperer.
“My hair’s longer?”
“No, I don’t think that’s it. But you’d tell me, right? If something was wrong?”
“Of course I would.” The pregnancy wasn’t wrong, unless she agreed with my mother, which I seriously doubted, knowing her history. I planned to tell Cara about the baby, but sometime later. Not like I’d be able to hide it in a few months anyway. But if I told her now, it would monopolize our conversation, and I preferred to focus on my new job description, not my baby bump.
“Good. Okay, then. Let me get the papers I want to review with you.”
She walked over to her file cabinet, and when I looked down, I realized the subtle shift she’d spotted.
I sat with both hands palms down, propped on the baby bump that only I knew was there.
I left Virtual Strategies with a new title, a list of job descriptions—the most important one being to make certain I pushed anything negative about a business to page three on Google search—and a referral to a private investigator.
Until Cara mentioned issues that could be problematic, especially for family-owned businesses, like infidelity, divorce, kid issues, drinking, addictions, I’d forgotten she’d gone through a messy divorce the year she and Alice opened the agency. Her now ex-husband, a druggie who’d moved so far into recreational use he could have won a gold medal if it were an Olympic sport, was also a prominent attorney who managed to insulate himself from scrutiny about his personal life. He’d filed for custody of their daughters, and Cara was determined to leverage whatever she could to make certain that didn’t happen.
I told her my father’s insurance business might need access to a private investigator. Not that he had asked me, but I didn’t think he’d mind my using him to get the information. Legitimate rationalization, right? I slipped the card for J. M. Tarkington into my wallet.
When I had time, I’d call.
Maybe.
A few days later, armed with my laptop and surrounded by pillows on my bed, I started reviewing one of the three files Cara had sent home with me. I’d already spotted a problem on a client’s Facebook page. Children First was a local day-care center that approached us after they opened their third location. One of their employees had posted a picture of a waste can full of dirty diapers with the comment “A lot of sh*t went down today.” It was on her personal page, but she’d tagged the center.
Not counting that poopy would have been a better choice of words, the picture showed the floor around the waste can littered with used facial tissues, scrunched-up fast-food bags, and a pacifier.
I emailed the owner, alerting her to the post, and advised her to immediately ask the employee to delete it. I told her we’d set a date for a meeting soon.
Still scrolling through websites, I heard something I rarely heard in my house. The telephone, the landline we kept because of hurricanes that generally knocked out cell towers and made charging our cell phones a problem after losing electricity. Usually the only calls were telemarketers and wrong numbers. Whoever was calling now was persistent, because after I didn’t answer the first time, the ringing started again within seconds.
This, Wyatt, was the reason I asked you not to plug the phone into the jack until we needed it. He probably wouldn’t have answered the call if he’d been standing in front of the phone, so odds were he wasn’t going to spirit himself down here now.
I pushed myself off the bed, begrudgingly leaving my comfy pillow fort, and plodded to the den where we kept the phone.
An unfamiliar woman’s voice asked to speak to Mr. Wyatt Hammond.
“Excuse me. Who?” I asked, my voice as disembodied as I felt. I picked at a cuticle, ripped it away, and watched the raw skin underneath bubble with blood. The burning sting distracted me from the jagged edge of anxiety thrumming in my chest.
“Wyatt Hammond. I’m sorry, do I have the wrong number?” The female voice polite, businesslike.
“No, not the wrong number,” I said. “He’s . . . he’s . . .” My elbows on the table, palms pressed against my forehead, I closed my eyes and mumbled, “Not here. He’s not here.”
“Oh, well, could you give him a message? We tried to leave him several voicemails, but the service was out.”
I started to answer, but she powered on.
“This is Kelly from Babycakes. I wanted to apologize for it taking so long for his alphabet name print to come in. We had to return the first one because the company misspelled the name. Can you imagine? Why would they think there was a k in Jacob? But the new one arrived, so he can pick it up anytime.”
CHAPTER 15
While Kelly talked, I walked to my bedroom and opened my laptop, searched, and there it was. Babycakes was located in Oakville.
“Just let me know if he wants it gift wrapped, so I’ll be sure and have it ready when it’s picked up.”
I paced, my hand against my chest as if the pressure might prevent my heart from exploding.
“Could you do me a favor? I couldn’t find it on our credit card statement, and I just wanted to make sure he paid for it already. Would you have that information?” I squeezed my eyes shut, braced myself as if her answer would come hurtling through the phone and bash me on the head.
“Sure. Hold a minute . . . Let’s see, he ordered it April 30, and the ticket shows he paid cash. So it’s already been taken care of.”
“Great. I’ll . . . I’ll let you know about picking it up,” I said. My teeth chattered as if the room temperature had suddenly plummeted to zero, and I set the phone back in its cradle after we hung up.
I wrapped my hand around the bracelet from Ruthie, repeating, “Be still, be still, be still” to my quivering body. I sank to the floor, my hand sliding down the wall, supporting me because my legs were melting beneath me.
This doesn’t mean anything, Olivia. It could still be a gift for someone else. It doesn’t mean this child is his son.
He’d ordered the gift two weeks before the wedding, but it wouldn’t have been ready until after we returned from our honeymoon based on Kelly’s information. He had to have planned to tell me. He had to. That other gift must have also been intended for him, too.
Still, I couldn’t tell anyone about this call. Not yet. It would be all the evidence my mother needed to prove she was right about Wyatt.
I needed to know for sure about Jacob.
Jacob.
I remembered hearing about Jacob in Sunday School. He was a twin, and he was born holding his brother’s heel. My friends and I were about eight then, and we all decided none of us wanted twins if that could happen.
In the story we read in Genesis, Jacob and his mother deceived his father into granting him his older brother’s birthright. I looked up the meaning of the name Jacob: “Holder of the heel; supplanter. A supplanter is one who wrongfully seizes and holds the place of another.”
For the first time in my adult life, I was told it wouldn’t hurt for me to gain weight. If this was any indication of the rest of my prenatal visits, then I couldn’t wait for the next one.
Dr. Schneider, a petite woman whose round eyeglasses made her look like a pretty dragonfly, scanned my chart while
her nurse took my blood pressure. “Most women gain about one or two pounds by their second visit. You’ve lost two pounds.”
I was on my back on the exam table staring at a ceiling covered with blown-up pictures of bright-eyed babies with chipmunk cheeks. “You mean I don’t have to stop buying cartons of ice cream and Snickers?” My hands were over my little pouch, my fingers tapping as I turned to look at Dr. Schneider, who hadn’t responded to my question.
“Only if that’s all you’re eating.” She pushed her glasses up so they held back her springy blonde curls. “No problems with morning sickness?”
“A few times, but nothing recently. Guess I don’t have a routine yet. Sometimes I forget to eat.”
“Hmmm . . .” She measured my stomach and then helped me sit up.
I stretched my blouse back over my bump. “I hate when doctors say ‘hmmm.’ I don’t know if that means ‘Hmmm, you’re an idiot’ or ‘Hmmm, you have a life-threatening disease’ or ‘Hmmm, I have no answer for that.’”
“Sorry, I forget how annoying that is. It’s a habit that follows me home, and I promise you, my husband and kids aren’t crazy about it, either,” she said. “But, in my defense, I was thinking how to help you feed yourself and this baby. Have you ever tried those online services that deliver boxes of food every week? A number of my single moms have subscribed. Saves grocery trips, and they’re eating healthy.”
Single mom. I hated hearing that more than “hmmm.”
Mia called on my way home from the doctor’s visit. I told her the good news: I wasn’t a cystic fibrosis carrier, I was Rh-positive, and the baby was due the first week in February, not earlier like we first thought.
“We didn’t have any luck hearing the baby’s heartbeat, but Dr. Schneider said that’s not unusual, and she’s sure we’ll hear it at my next visit. They’re going to do an ultrasound then, too.”
“Hmmm . . .”
“Oh, not you, too. What’s up with that?” I pulled into the parking lot of the new Trader Joe’s.
“I guess every doctor’s different. Mine did an ultrasound and blood test at every visit,” she said.
I heard the uncertainty. I chose to ignore it. Mia was often overly cautious and fussy. Bryce would have said “phobic and princessy.”
“She said I needed to gain weight, so I’m on my way into the grocery to follow doctor’s orders. I’ll call later and tell you about my new job.”
“Wait? You have a new job? What happened to the old one? You never even mentioned you were looking—”
“Whoa. I can’t vet everything in my life with you first,” I said and followed with a laugh so she wouldn’t shift into her defensive stance. “I should have been more specific. Old job. New title. Now go decorate something and we’ll talk later.”
Shopping for food when the calories didn’t matter was almost as decadent as shopping for clothes without looking at the price tag. At least I could accomplish one of the two. I skipped the fruits and veggies because those I could find anywhere. But pretzel bagels, lemon heart cookies, lobster ravioli, frozen mac and cheese, figs with herbed goat cheese, tiramisu torte, and cookie butter rocked my world at Joe’s.
I zapped frozen sweet potato gnocchi for supper that night, then treated myself to two chocolate croissants while I scrolled through the food-delivery options Dr. Schneider had suggested. I subscribed to one that would start delivery in a week. By next month, I figured I’d have made up for the lost pounds and then some.
I was on my way to solving at least one challenge in my life.
In the days following the phone call from the children’s store in Oakville, I debated whether I should drive there and actually pick up the gift Wyatt had ordered.
That first night after I’d found out about it, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Wyatt smiling as he held a baby. A baby swaddled in a blue blanket. A baby whose face I couldn’t see.
My heart might as well have been made of glass it felt so shattered, shards of it trapped in my lungs, their edges slicing every breath.
But sometimes a wild-animal rage consumed me, and I hated that Wyatt had left me to suffer this alone. I wanted to yank him into the fire fueled by his deception, his irresponsibility, his abandonment.
But I still held on to the hope that Jacob wasn’t Wyatt’s son.
But what if he was? Somewhere in Oakville or nearby, there was a woman who might not know her child was fatherless.
Like mine.
If I couldn’t bring myself to open the baby gift I’d kept ever since my father gave it to me, then I wasn’t ready to drive to Oakville to pick up another one.
I called Babycakes, gave them my address, and asked them to mail it.
CHAPTER 16
I hadn’t seen my parents since I’d been to their office after confronting them with the police report. My father called more often than my mother, who sent brief text messages. In our usual Kavanaugh family dynamics model, we didn’t discuss that afternoon again.
When I listed the house, I put them and my grandmother on notice because, once again, our family code dictated that no one in the family should first hear anything about the family from anyone outside the family. That unwritten rule had gone into effect when I started high school.
My mother had sat me down before I left the house for the football jamboree and said, “Olivia, we might be close to New Orleans, but this is a small town. Your father and I may not know about things you do right away, but believe me, we’ll find out sooner or later. And if we haven’t heard it from you first, you’re going to pray it’s later and not sooner.”
My father had walked into the den midway during her monologue, sat in his recliner, and picked up his remote. And when she finished, he said, “Don’t lie to us. That’s the CliffsNotes version.”
And I never did lie to them. Except for the times I did. By my senior year, my parents trusted me enough to attend parties I’d gone to anyway. If they’d found me out in all the years before that, it was never an issue. Probably coming home sober and at curfew helped.
When they learned that I was selling the house, they asked where I planned to go when I moved. I told them the truth: “I have no idea.” And I didn’t. All I knew was I couldn’t stay in that house.
With the number of showings Amanda had booked, I hoped the house sold soon because I felt like a human boomerang. Plus, there was that thing of having to keep it ready for a walk-through at any time. I discovered that prospective buyers didn’t bother looking in the washer and dryer, so they became my safe places to store clutter and even dirty dishes.
One couple had come back three times. The last time with an architect. Amanda called me after they left. She said they’d told her they would call with an offer by the next morning. “I explained to them that in three weeks I’ve shown this house to at least a dozen couples and some of them twice. If they’re serious, they needed to act.”
And they did. They called her that night, offered me more than my asking price in case another offer might be pending, and were paying cash. While I was doing the happy dance in my kitchen, Amanda added that they wanted the act of sale in three weeks.
“Three weeks from when? Today?” My dance music disappeared.
“Yes. They want to make some changes to the house before they move in, and their schedule’s tight due to his job transfer. They’re paying cash, so we don’t have to wait for loan approval.”
I couldn’t pass up the offer. I signed the contract, rented a storage unit, then sat on my bedroom floor and cried.
I summoned the courage I didn’t use when I avoided driving to Oakville and invited my parents to my soon-to-not-be-my house for coffee and dessert.
I told them about the contract I’d signed and the conditions. “I wanted to ask you—”
My mother held up her hand. “We know. You want to move in with us. Right? Why else would you invite us over after we’ve not seen or hardly talked to you in two weeks? When we drove up and saw the Sol
d sign, it didn’t take us long to figure out.” Her expression waiting for my reaction was as blank as my date calendar.
My father traced the parquet pattern on my kitchen table, looking up only when she finished talking, his eyes moving from me to my mother to the table.
“I’m not asking for forever. This happened sooner than I expected—”
“Like some other things in your life,” my mother said before taking a sip of her coffee.
“Scarlett Ellen.” My father used those names together like a reprimand. His lips formed a tight seam across his face. He shook his head, the slow version he reserved for when he didn’t want to call someone out in front of others. It accompanied the dismal look of deep disappointment. Even at my age, I’d rather bear the force of shouting that could blow leaves off trees than endure the shame and guilt of knowing I was responsible for such emotional devastation.
“As I was trying to explain, it’s temporary until I decide where I want to move.” I sliced a slab of my dad’s favorite lemon Doberge cake, seven layers of lemon pudding and eight layers of cake covered with buttercream and ganache.
“Whoa, Livvy,” he held the plate up until it was at eye level. “I’m not sure I can eat all this.”
I was about to tell him I’d seen him in action with that cake, when he winked and set the plate back on the table and said, “But I’m sure gonna give it my best.”
“And how long is ‘temporary’?” my mother asked.
“I didn’t know you’d want me to define it.” I served her a sliver of a piece, but she scrunched her nose and waved it off.
“I’m still full from dinner. There’s also a luncheon at the club next week, and I don’t want my skirt to be tight. Watching what I eat for a few more days.”
Any other time, I might’ve joked that I noticed those extra eight ounces on her, but her sense of humor left on the first flight out with a one-way ticket the night I told them I was pregnant. Instead, I added her sliver to my Goldilocks “just right” slice and casually mentioned I was under doctor’s orders to gain weight.
Since You've Been Gone Page 8