“Ice chips?”
She was just as confused by the request. All she knew was fake pregnant women on TV shows asked for them all the time, so it seemed like a valid wish that would get him out on the hunt. She watched Fynn leave, shaking his head faintly at the errand or her or why she’d chosen him when there was a perfectly good Tara around to do it. As soon as the door closed behind him she started to undress.
“Caution, you could start a brush fire with that,” Tara said with a giggle.
Catherine had tried her best to get her gown on first and then shed her pants, but the gap down the front was going to show what it was going to show when you were like a walrus in your movements. “You try to keep it neat with this in the way,” she growled, pointing to her stomach. “I haven’t even seen my bikini line in months.”
“Well, it’s very ‘70s. Which I’ve heard is coming back, by the way,” Tara offered. “So, are you ready for this?”
“No.” Catherine got back up on the examination table, cold now, definitely cold enough that she didn’t want to even touch an ice chip if Fynn found some. “I’m pretty well terrified, actually. I have too many things left to do before Christmas and this, well, this changes everything…. What about Cara’s party at school tomorrow? I haven’t missed a thing for her yet.
“She’ll be fine. You just birth this baby so we can start drinking again.”
“You know I’m planning to nurse,” Catherine pointed out.
“And?”
“Drinking will be limited for a while more.”
“You suck.”
There was a knock on the door and the doctor popped his head in, followed by a nurse. “I’m going to need you to lay back on the table.” he said, coming toward her.
Catherine obeyed, holding the slit closed on the gown the best she could.
“The opening actually goes in the back here, but no worries,” the doctor said with a bless-your-heart smile. But she’d been going to the OB/GYN her entire adult life, and he was supposed to be an OB/GYN, and there it was slit to the front, so it was an understandable mistake.
“Now, I spoke to Dr. Sombrarian, who is not on shift or on call at the moment, and he said he wanted us to do an exam while we have you here.” Like she was in a holding cell or pattern or something.
As he got to work at the end of the table, Catherine cringed against another human being becoming intimately involved with her private space, then wanted to disappear completely when Tara blurted, “Bet you’ve seen a lot of those over the years.”
“Don’t mind her.” Catherine wished now that she had chosen more wisely when she voted Fynn off the island.
“No bother. It’s part of the job,” the doctor said.
Catherine tightened against the pain in her abdomen.
“Still feeling uncomfortable?”
She nodded against the table.
“You know, Tums really does work wonders.”
“Better than an epidural?” Catherine joked back.
“Ma’am, we don’t tend to give epidurals for your situation.”
My situation? What kind of doctor are you? Is this one of those New Age holistic hospitals?
“You’ll be just fine taking Tums. A standard dose. More after several hours if you still feel some pain.”
“What?” Snappish.
“You have a bad case of indigestion… Mrs. Trager.” Glancing at her chart to get her name.
Tara let out a hyena cackle. “That’s just perfect! A burrito baby!”
“That would do it,” the doctor said.
“But I—” She’d been so sure. It was so intense. So uncomfortable. So labor-pain-like. Not that she knew what labor pains felt like, but she’d assumed it had to be. And she’d told everyone, and they’d told people, and now she was going to have to go home like this. Can’t you induce? So I don’t look like an idiot?
“You are still at zero percent. No dilating or effacing. You have some time yet before you welcome that baby into your world,” he assured her.
Great.
Fynn popped in, carrying a cup full of the fabled ice chips. “Did I miss anything?”
“Only the birth of major indigestion,” Tara guffawed.
Catherine eyed her darkly—her friend who had decided on eating burritos for lunch in the first place when they both knew that Eve preferred Reubens in the afternoon.
Friday, December 15th
-49-
“Oh, Catherine, you’re here. We weren’t expecting you,” Sophie Watts announced overly sweetly from across the classroom as she tried to slip through the doorway unnoticed and blend into the crowd of parents milling about.
She squelched the why the hell not? that threatened. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“It’s just that we heard you were in the hospital yesterday.” The woman made a beeline for her with a poor-baby look on her face and her head tilted at a patronizing angle that told Catherine quite clearly that Sophie Watts had heard plenty and had loved every detail. The culprit might be the little girl with brown hair and lopsided pigtails giggling in a huddle of friends over near the coatrack wall. Or maybe the small-town gossip disease had been her undoing—nurses with children in the school or friends of cousins twice removed or whatever.
“I’m fine. Just fine.” She shifted uncomfortably, wishing she could melt into the floor.
“Well, that’s good to hear,” Sophie said charitably, throwing Catherine off her scent just long enough to wind up with another jab. “You could always call me if you’re concerned. I’ve had four kids and never once had a false alarm. Some people go back and forth to the hospital with Braxton Hicks several times over, but I always knew exactly when I was in labor.”
It wasn’t Braxton Hicks, it was a burrito, bitch! Not that such an outburst would help her case. It was even worse, actually. But thankfully Sophie Watts was on to other things by now, sidetracked by another mother who she felt was not divvying up the crafts properly to each of the desk clusters, so Catherine gladly took the reprieve to slip to the back of the classroom where most of the other parents were congregated.
“This is worse than the dentist,” she heard over her shoulder, low and bored.
Inside, she nodded her head in agreement.
“Wait, weren’t you the room mother?” Same voice, this time with a gentle touch on her arm to get her attention.
“Was being the operative word,” she said out of the side of her face.
“You quit?”
She glanced back at her questioner this time. “It was a cabal,” she said in no uncertain terms. “Between our new room mother and the teacher, and probably most of the students who prefer edible cookies to burned rocks.”
The guy chuckled.
The distinct sound of throat clearing followed, and Catherine whipped her head around to find Sophie Watts’s searing gaze staring a hole right through her to her fellow man. Hot man. Exceptionally hot man. All white teeth and wavy brown hair and actor good looks. He didn’t belong in an elementary school in Nekoyah, Minnesota. He belonged in a movie opposite Scarlett Johansson.
Once Sophie Watts was content that her point was made, she turned her attention back to Mrs. Karnes, discussing the logistics of fun and food and festivities as if this was a sensitive operation for the land of the free and the home of the brave.
“So how did you get stuck in this nightmare of Sophie Watts proportions?” Catherine hissed over her shoulder.
“I married it.”
She choked on the foot in her mouth. “Oh, I didn’t mean—”
“S’okay. I know. We’re divorced now. She’s remarried. I’m just the father of the kids.”
Ouch.
“My name is Catherine Trager, by the way. I’m Cara’s mo—guar—I’m here with Cara.”
“Oh, the speaking carrot,” he said, putting two and two together.
“The one and only,” she added with chagrin.
“That really got Sophie spun out.”
“Good to hear.” At least she had that much.
“Oh, I do hope we’re not late!” The voice that cut through the commotion was all too familiar. Terrifyingly familiar. Catherine darted a glance toward the front of the class and the figure coming through the doorway loaded up with Tupperware.
“Excuse me, but this is a class party for students and family members only,” Sophie Watts said quickly, rushing to the door and blocking the way in.
“I’m Cara’s aunt. Or is that not family enough for you?” Tara challenged.
Cara readily backed her up, coming forward, nodding with force. And then her little eyes widened even more, “Gramma Lizzy!” she squealed. “You came!”
Tara crashing an elementary school party was about par for the course, but Elizabeth Hemmings? Catherine was shocked. She hadn’t asked her mother to come along or show up or anything. In fact, she’d sloughed it off as a kids-only thing. She certainly hadn’t admitted that this was where she was headed this morning. Now she was embarrassed at being caught in her lie or omission, as it was, and all because she didn’t want her mother to see her great shame at being sidelined by Sophie Watts. Yet here she was, seeing it anyway, and soon enough she would be eating out of Sophie Watts’s hand—or at least off her plates, with her forks, and wiping her mouth on the woman’s napkins (because Catherine had indeed not brought any, on principle). Someone like Elizabeth Hemmings would certainly be impressed by Sophie Watts’s party-hosting skills, and Catherine could imagine them becoming fast friends. And then her mother would be demanding she be nice and polite to the woman who had been nothing but underhanded and manipulative and downright ugly to her.
Sophie Watts looked to Catherine like classroom events didn’t allow plus-twos. But she knew there were kids here with four parents, and other mothers had brought younger brothers and sisters along too. It was all perfectly within the rules, it seemed.
“I’m so sorry I’m late but I wanted to whip up a little something to share for the holidays,” Elizabeth Hemmings asserted brightly.
Catherine felt the sting of tears in her nose and eyes as her mother opened a large Tupperware container—again, something she must have brought all the way from Pennsylvania, just in case there was a baking-and-taking emergency. It was filled with the candy cane cookies she’d baked with Cara while Catherine was in the hospital thinking burrito gas was Eve. The same cookies her mother used to bake when Catherine was growing up, peppermint-laced red and white sugar cookie dough twisted together and formed into dozens of hooks. So pretty and perfect, and each one dressed up with a holly leaf and berries decoration out of frosting.
“I thought those were for home,” Catherine said softly, coming up next to her mother.
“Tara told me what was going on, so I figured they were needed more here.” She linked her arm in her daughter’s, pulling them both off to the side. “I wish you would have told me, though.”
“I should have… I just—I was embarrassed about how bad I was at this whole…” She didn’t finish, just shook her head
“Grab and growl,” Tara announced to the room at large, opening two more Tupperware containers: one filled with stained glass cookies, also an old family favorite that used melted hard candies poured into the cutout center of sugar cookie shapes and hardened; the other filled with butterscotch chip gingersnaps.
Soon enough there was a free-for-all, throwing the room into madness and destroying Sophie Watts’s orderly plans to withhold the food until later. Tara stepped away before she lost a hand to a bunch of hungry first graders, while Sophie Watts protested the surge, futilely trying to regain control.
Tara made her way through the crowd to Catherine and her mother. “So, what do you think?”
“I think that I have to thank you,” Catherine said, heartfelt.
“No biggie.”
“It’s a biggie,” she countered. “The look on Sophie’s face is priceless. Do you see how everyone is gravitating toward my mom’s good old-fashioned home-cooked treats and leaving all of Sophie’s good-for-you allergen and irritant and taste-free options behind. Absolutely priceless.”
“Just so long as you know that we have a lot of baking to do all over again,” Elizabeth Hemmings warned with a smile. “You missed out yesterday, but no excuse on this next batch.”
“If I have to,” she said, acting like it was pulling her teeth. But actually, if she could learn to bake like that and get a reaction like this from a crowd, she was game.
“Now I’m going to spend some time with my granddaughter,” Elizabeth said, wading through the clusters of desks to get to Cara.
“Oh my God, Cat, do you see that guy?” Tara asked. “I’d let him all up in my naughty bits.”
“Sssh. This is an elementary school, remember?”
“He isn’t elementary at all.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means he has all the bells and whistles and pricey extras—”
“And he’s Sophie Watts’s ex,” Catherine warned.
Tara shuddered, then shrugged. “So he has bad taste; you can’t have it all.” She gazed around the rest of the room. “So then what about that one?”
Catherine looked to the scruffy guy wearing jeans.
“Do you think he’s even a dad? Maybe he’s an older brother?”
“I don’t know, Tara,” she sighed heavily.
“I bet you he’s got a Prince Albert under those jeans.”
“A what?”
A pierced penis, she mouthed, shielding her lips from the view of the class.
“Eew.”
“It’s supposed to enhance pleasure.”
Catherine shook her head. “Haven’t you gotten this out of your system? After the other night I thought you’d be cured.” Alluding to the end of her sex drought.
“It’s never out of my system,” Tara admitted.
“Maybe I’ll just try to mingle a bit,” Catherine said, sidestepping away, hoping to avoid any further discussion of an inappropriate nature. She orbited a small group of women, trying to penetrate the crowd and be part of normal motherly conversation, only to hear they were talking about making Gingermelons like it was a snap, all of them nodding and agreeing in one Stepford Wives motion, discussing safety eyes and needle sizes and mohair naps. She could discuss naps with the best of them—length, location, time of day—but was pretty sure their naps had nothing to do with resting.
She didn’t fit in anywhere.
Saturday, December 16th
-50-
“Are you excited for Christmas?” Gramma Lizzy asked, a softball question to a six-year-old.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Cara exclaimed. “But I’ll be sad when Christmas is here too because you will be going back home.”
“Remember what I said, we’ll be back again soon enough,” she assured her as they walked abreast up the driveway toward the mailbox, one of Cara’s mittened hands in hers and the other in Catherine’s, while Magnus led the way with his nose to the snowy ground.
“Can you come every season? That way we can do all the fun things in the spring and in the summer and in the fall and in the winter again.”
“We’ll have to see.” Elizabeth Hemmings avoided her daughter’s eyes, not wanting to know what she thought about such a plan right now when things were going so well between them. No need to ruin a nice visit with the shadow of future standoffs about visits to come. Though if she had looked to Catherine at that moment, her mother would have seen her nodding the slightest affirmative. Yes, she was ready to open that door. A shocker. Her parents’ visit had turned out to be just what she never knew she’d needed to get through the last couple weeks of her pregnancy. And what sealed it for her was her mother’s reaction to her false labor alarm: Better safe than sorry.
Thank you, Elizabeth Hemmings.
“It always seems like it takes forever for Santa to get here,” Cara noted.
Gramma Lizzy nodded. “A watched pot never boils.”
> “What’s a watched pot?”
“It means that if you keep focusing on something it will never happen,” she explained.
“Is that like Pop-Pop and the Flyers?”
“What?” Catherine cut in.
“He says that anytime he watches the Flyers they lose, so he tries not to watch because then they’ll win.”
Catherine chuckled. “Well, it’s just a saying, but it sure feels that way.”
“So if we keep our minds off of Santa, then he will be here in no time,” Gramma Lizzy assured her.
“And how do we do that?” Cara asked, ready and willing.
“Well… you tell me, what do you want to do?”
“Can we go ice skating?” she asked excitedly.
“I said we would take you after Christmas,” Catherine jumped in, trying to squelch the idea before it could take root. “After I have the baby I can teach you how, but I can’t skate right now. There is a lot of winter left for skating after—”
“But I know it would help get my mind off of Santa and presents and Christmas,” Cara reasoned.
“If she wants to ice skate, I don’t see why we can’t take her skating,” her mother offered. “You have a rink in town?”
That was the problem. There was no rink. Only ponds. And lakes. And bad memories. Cara was unknowingly opening up wounds. “Don’t worry about it, Mom. Fynn and I plan to take her after the holidays. There’s plenty of time. And plenty of other things to do, like going to see that new Christmas movie at the theater, and caroling on Main Street, and—”
“Really, Catherine, it is no trouble. I always loved to skate. It is a shame that it has been so long.”
But the last time her family had gone ice skating was before Josey died. When her mother and father’s hearts were whole. And when they were much younger. And when winter days were just beautiful white snowy days and not moments and scenery that resonated with everything they’d lost.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea—”
2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) Page 29