“Oh!” The girl jumped back, giggling.
“I didn’t expect to see you just”—she waved her fingers like a jazz dancer—“pop out like that! Did you find everything you need? Did it all fit well? Oh my gosh, it must be so exciting to go shopping for maternity clothes for the first time.”
Molly tried to interrupt her, but the girl kept talking.
“This is your first time, right? I mean, you’re barely showing! I can’t wait till it’s my time to be pregnant.”
“Well—” Molly started to say.
“I mean,” the girl laughed, “a lot of years from now, of course. I don’t need to be giving my parents a heart attack or anything. God, they’d kill me.”
The teenager wrested an armful of clothes from Molly’s grasp and moved over to the register. Her straight, blond hair swung back and forth over her shoulder blades as she moved. Molly ran her fingers through her own hair, securing it into a loose bun on the back of her head with an elastic band. She was very aware of the years that separated her from this young woman. She wondered if the girl was even old enough to be going to prom this spring. She wondered when she’d turned so crotchety.
The clerk was telling a story about her boyfriend as Molly handed over her debit card, but Molly couldn’t concentrate on the monologue. She had scheduled a lunch with her mother for that afternoon, and it was going to be the first time she’d seen her since her awkward announcement.
Molly hadn’t spoken to either of her parents recently, except for a brief conversation with her father when he called to tell her that WXPN radio was running an old Stevie Nicks live show. But her mom had called her Thursday to ask if she could come into the city to meet Molly for lunch. Molly didn’t know what to expect, but she suspected this wasn’t a casual lunch date. She couldn’t imagine Emily chatting about nursery design or where to register for gifts. What Molly could brace herself for, though, was for her mother to show up with a PowerPoint presentation on why Molly should give the baby up for adoption, or to gypsies, or maybe drop her off at a convent. Molly liked to be one step ahead at all times, but Emily usually had the whole year planned out. Molly’s stomach felt queasy under the swell of her abdomen. This pregnancy was becoming more complicated by the day.
“So, do you want a girl or a boy?” The salesgirl was still talking as she handed Molly the stuffed bags over the counter. She hadn’t stopped smiling once since Molly stepped out of the dressing room. “I’d totally want a girl, just so I could put her in all those cute little pink skirts I keep seeing. You know, the ones with the tutus? I want my perfect little princess. Not now, of course! My boyfriend would die. But one day. What does your husband do? Will you stay home with the baby, or keep working? He must be so thrilled to be a dad, right?”
The girl stood there, smiling, on the other side of the counter. Her eyebrows were raised, waiting.
Molly jammed her wallet back into her purse.
“Um, actually,” Molly said, standing back up straight, “there is no husband. I’m not married. Don’t have a boyfriend, either, for that matter.”
“Oh.” The girl breathed in, her eyes as wide as the hoop earrings she wore. “Uh. So. Huh.” She looked around the store, then at the register, and shifted a pen to the other side of the table. The smile was gone from her face.
“I’m sorry.” Molly was quick with her words. “I didn’t mean to be rude.
“I am excited for the baby,” she continued, “but I’ll most definitely still be working once he or she comes. It’s what happens.”
The girl looked up, her tweezed eyebrows furrowed together.
“What happens?”
Molly gathered her bags together, then met the teenager’s eyes.
“It’s what happens when you date the wrong guy, get pregnant by the wrong guy, and somewhere in there decide that he’s never going to be right enough for you to ever marry. It’s what happens when you suddenly hear the words ‘single mother’ and know it describes you, too.” Molly shrugged, and smiled. “So think about that on prom night, okay? Have a good time. But, you know. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Molly gulped. “Now, I mean. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do now.”
She hurried out the door, leaving the salesgirl staring after her, mouth open, hand already reaching for her cell phone. Molly quickened her pace, the large bags banging her knees with every step. She had a lunch date to keep.
A short while later, Molly swung the door open to enter Caribou Café, a chic French bistro on Walnut Street. Her mother rarely came into the city anymore, preferring to stay close to the comfortable—and affordable—pubs and diners of West Chester, a university town with its own restaurant scene filled with familiar faces and the occasional cluster of college students. Emily must have been desperate to see her, Molly thought, to brave the unfamiliar one-way streets and parking garages of the city on a busy spring Saturday. With a pang of guilt, Molly had made reservations at Caribou, feeling that she at least owed her mother a nice lunch. Emily had spent a couple of years studying in Paris before she’d met Jack, in a whole other gutsy, more worldly life. Molly had never had a chance to experience an adventure like that before meeting Scott. A splurge on a Parisian-style bistro meal was the best she could do, and it made her feel young somehow.
She paused at the entrance of the restaurant, pushing her aviators up to rest on the top of her windblown hair. It took a second for her eyes to adjust from the sharp glare of the early spring afternoon to the hushed tones of the intimate, narrow restaurant. Molly spotted her mother sitting at a two-top against the railing on the second floor, ramrod-straight in the plush burgundy chair, watching the door. Molly took a deep breath and began to work her way in between the tables and up the dark wood stairs, holding the shopping bags ahead of her like the prow of a ship cutting through water. The walk had made her so ravenous that she felt dizzy and had to hold on to the rail as she climbed the steps.
“Hey, Mom.” Molly leaned down to kiss her mother’s cheek before sinking into her seat. Emily smelled like the powdery scent she dabbed behind her ears on the most special of occasions.
Emily took a long look at Molly, and then the shopping bags. “You’ve been busy! A Pea in the Pod?”
“Yeah, it’s a maternity store.” Molly patted her stomach, where her cotton-and-spandex shirt was stretched across her belly button. “I thought it was about time I got out of my denial and into some pants that fit.”
“Well, that’s nice, I suppose,” Emily replied. She patted her hands across the napkin in her lap. “But why didn’t you tell me you were going? I’d have come in early to go with you.”
“I didn’t want to bother you,” Molly said. She looked at her mom, confused. She hadn’t thought to ask her mother, who’d much rather thumb the pages of a book than hangers full of clothes. Monica had always been her shopping buddy. Besides, she didn’t want to let on how little she could afford to get. Her parents were already worried enough about her. She didn’t need to know that each of the outfits in Molly’s bag had come off the clearance rack.
“Well, next time let me know,” Emily said. “I feel like I’ve missed so much of your pregnancy already, considering how late you told us.”
Molly pressed her lips together. Her stomach growled in defiance.
“But now I’d like to get you a few things.” Emily looked at Molly with eyes that were soft, then smiled. “My daughter’s having a baby. My baby’s having a baby.”
Molly took a second to take in her mother’s posture. She knew that Emily’s retirement pension was needed to help cover the increasing overhead at Jack’s store. Her parents couldn’t afford any extra costs right now. Molly thought about Monica, whose wallet was filled with so many credit cards it made Molly anxious. She’d never seen her so much as glance at a price tag.
“Okay,” Molly said. She paused, contemplating her mother’s sudden interest in bonding
activities. It seemed that impending motherhood could stir change that spread well beyond just the woman awaiting her child. “I’ll call you next time, and we’ll go out. Maybe King of Prussia mall, next month?” Molly patted her midsection. “The way I’m eating, I’ll be out of these clothes before I have a chance to take off the tags.”
Molly signaled the waiter to let him know they were ready. If she didn’t order lunch soon, the restaurant would be in serious danger of her gnawing away at the table, bleached linen tablecloth and all. The double cheeseburger she’d wolfed down at McDonald’s before clothes shopping was a distant memory by now.
In the restaurant below them, business lunches took place at some tables, and mothers sat at others eating crepes with one hand while feeding babies with the other. Emily looked over at Molly.
“How are you, Molly?” she asked. “Really?”
Molly blew out a deep lungful of air.
“Excited. Terrified. You know, the usual.” She tried to chuckle. “I’m worrying about everything. Whether to breastfeed, and if I do, how it’ll go. If it’ll hurt. What it’ll do to my boobs.”
Emily shrugged and nodded. She knew.
“I can’t wait to meet this person, of course. BabyCenter says she—or he—is the size of a green pepper already. But then I start thinking about sleep deprivation and discipline and not, like, accidentally poking her in her soft spot, and I freak myself out all over again.”
She laughed, but didn’t say the rest. That she was worried about doing it on her own. Without Scott. Without a partner. Without somebody there to tell her if what the hell she was doing would be the right thing or not. Molly asked herself sometimes how she was supposed to raise a child when it often felt like she wasn’t quite all the way grown herself. She wondered if all adults felt like she did—like they were pretending at this grown-up game, waiting to be discovered in society’s biggest charade.
Molly’s stomach growled again, and the sound was loud enough to make her squirm in her seat. She looked around to make sure no one else heard the gurgle. More than fear or anticipation, Molly was consumed by hunger, and right now she was feeling so famished she would consider eating the menu in front of her. She wondered if she had any Tootsie Rolls left in her bag.
“Look, Molly,” Emily said. “Scott’s that baby’s father. He needs to provide for his family. Support you and the little one. It’s not right that you should be on your own in this.”
A mother knows her daughter’s mind. Molly sighed.
“Mom, I’m not on my own. I have you. And Pop. And you know Jenny and Dan are practically going to move in once the baby’s here. I have a solid support system. You don’t have to worry. And financially, I’m okay.” She swallowed down the small lie. She had always taken care of her bills, but was embarrassed that she had gotten used to Scott treating her to all the rest. “It’ll be fine.”
Molly glanced around again, considering whether it was worth making a scene to find a manager.
“But you may have to bail me out of jail, because I’m going to snatch somebody’s food off of his plate if I don’t get some bread on this table.” She craned her neck to the rear of the restaurant. “Oh my gosh, where is he?”
Trying to ignore her angry, empty stomach, Molly filled her mom in on the situation with Jenny and Dan, and how Jenny had moved back in with her parents in Cherry Hill. A waiter strolled by the table and dropped a basket of rolls in between them before taking off again. Molly groaned with both relief and exasperation.
“But why would she do that?” Emily asked. “I thought they were trying to have a baby.”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing,” Molly said. “She’s put so much pressure on herself to be perfect, and I think what Scott implied was enough to be a breaking point for her. You know how scared she is of becoming her parents. I think she already needed some distance, and this just pushed her right into it.”
“Do you think?” Emily asked.
“That he cheated?” Molly shook her head. “I don’t know, actually.”
Her mother laughed. “It’s Dan, Molly. Do you remember that time we were all down the shore?”
Molly remembered. It was the first summer after she’d met Jenny, when the three of them stayed at the shore house Molly’s parents had splurged to rent in Avalon. On the beach one afternoon, Jenny had stepped on a tiny jellyfish and reacted with such pain, anyone would’ve thought she’d been bitten by a shark. Dan had rushed to her side and carried her all the way to the lifeguard stand for first aid. He’d been so concerned about her, brushing her hair from her face as she cried, and all the lifeguard needed to do was give Jenny a Band-Aid and advise her to take some aspirin.
“That’s exactly why I let Scott go, Mom,” Molly said. “I could never imagine him worrying over somebody like that. All that concerns Scott is whether somebody is caring for him.”
She thought back to a temper tantrum Scott once threw when he couldn’t get tickets to a revival of The Godfather.
“I don’t need two babies to take care of.” She was quiet a moment longer. “And I don’t want my child being raised by somebody who grew up thinking his housekeeper’s name was ‘Mommy.’ Scott has no idea how to be a parent. I don’t want my child to grow up wondering why her daddy doesn’t care enough about her.”
Emily pressed her lips together. “But she’s going to wonder that, anyway, Molly, without a father in her life.”
Molly swallowed.
“I realize that.”
Molly wondered if it would really be that bad to sneak a few sips of her mother’s wine now that she was out of the first trimester. A small glass might not hurt, possibly.
“Have you stopped to consider that maybe a poor father might be better than no father at all?” Emily asked.
Molly nodded. “Of course. I think about it a lot. But, Mom, you’re forgetting that Scott hasn’t offered to be a father now that we’re not getting married. Should I have to marry him just to get him to step up? What’s he going to do, suddenly decide he’s got some recessive paternal instinct that’s just dying to express itself because he has a ring on his finger? Come on.”
Emily didn’t hurry to respond. Molly’s thoughts were scrambling now, scratching at her common sense like the hunger pangs clawing at her stomach. She knew she was right. She knew she hadn’t made a mistake breaking up with Scott. She just wondered if she was the only one who thought that way.
“Wait. Does Pop agree with you?” she asked. “I can’t imagine that he’d be okay with me marrying Scott. Pop used to call me after Scott drove me home from your place just to make sure he wasn’t still there.”
Emily cleared her throat. “I can’t speak for your father. You know him. He sets his own mind on matters like this.”
That told Molly nothing. She nodded in acknowledgment, but what she really wanted to do was bang her forehead against the table.
“We just . . .” Emily hesitated. “We wish circumstances were different, that’s all.” She sighed, and leaned over to rub Molly’s arm. “I’m sorry, honey. I shouldn’t say that, not now. I just never thought that when it came time for you to have children you’d be doing it alone.”
Molly’s memory fell back to a Saturday morning a few days after her first date with Liam. She’d walked over to Reading Terminal Market in search of steamed crabs. A friend from college was coming in that night from the Midwest, and Molly was intent on making a meal she could only find fresh on the East Coast. Molly stumbled into the market early, sweaty from the trek, her hair in a wild bun on top of her head. She was wearing the baggy sweatpants she’d pulled on straight out of bed. She hadn’t felt like putting on makeup before she left the house, and it was a decision she regretted as soon as she saw Liam standing in line at the seafood counter. But his face broke into a grin when he saw her, and they spent the rest of the morning together, wandering around the city with c
offee in their hands, talking. Molly, in her ragged hoodie and old running shoes, never felt prettier than when she was with him that day. After that, her best moments with Liam were the ones that unfurled on their own, without pretense.
It had all been so uncomplicated.
“Yeah,” Molly said. “Neither did I.”
Molly knew that her child hadn’t been conceived out of love so much as out of her need to make everything okay, of a hurry to patch up the relationship and move on, but it wasn’t the baby’s fault his parents had messed up, or that his dad now didn’t seem to want him. Molly was determined to make sure this baby was raised with so much love that it wouldn’t matter in the slightest how he got there, or who made him. She owed the child that much.
“Mom, the bottom line is that even if I wanted Scott back in my life—which I don’t—he doesn’t want to be there. Not everyone can have what you and Pop do. Scott proposed before he knew I was pregnant, not after.”
Emily smoothed the napkin again in her lap. Molly fought the urge to snatch the cloth from her mom’s legs and throw it over the balcony. Her appetite was roaring with a growling vengeance. She had never been this hungry, not even that time in college after she’d heard a speech from PETA and made it almost four weeks as a vegan.
“Mom, you’re not listening.” Molly’s voice grew harder. This lunch was going to be more painful than that entire month by far.
“Scott completely freaked out when I told him. He acted like his world was ending, and then . . . he shut down. It seemed like a switch just shut off in his heart. It was almost like it was suddenly perfectly fine that I didn’t want to marry him now that it meant there would be three people on our honeymoon.”
Emily blinked hard once, and lifted her water glass to her lips.
“Why else do you think I haven’t talked to him in two months?” Molly said. “He wanted me, but only me—nothing more. Not exactly father-figure material, right there.” Molly was shaking. “So yeah, no dad at all is better than having a disinterested one.”
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