Before anyone could protest, she grabbed her mother’s arm and started towing her through the crowd and into the hall just as Prescott came trotting toward them, holding his pants up by the waistband, his eye bolt bouncing. “She’s pushing!”
“Please tell me that’s not the father,” Solange said under her breath.
“Huh? Geez, no. That’s Prescott.” Mimi said, breaking into a brisk jog, Solange and Tom hard on her heels. She was about to lead the charge into the delivery room when the OB nurse stepped into the doorway and crossed her arms over her chest. The Werners skidded to a stop.
“This isn’t a matinee, folks,” the nurse said sternly. “There’s a baby being born in there, and no one’s going in unless they’re approved by the mother and have the proper booties on.”
“Mommy!”
Solange went right through the nurse.
“Let’s go get a pizza and a pitcher of beer,” Prescott suggested to Tom and Mary fifteen minutes later. The Olson clan had fled to Buonfiglio’s at the last shriek, extending smiling if hurried invitations to anyone who got kicked out of the labor room to join them.
“What about Grandmother?” Mary asked, nodding to where Imogene lay eerily decorous on her back on the green sofa, her hands crossed at her waist like she was a body laid out at a morgue.
“You guys go ahead. I’ll watch her,” Mimi said. She glanced at Prescott, then looked tellingly at Mary. “But, ah, what if she wakes up and, ah, needs something?” Something like Demerol or whatever the old girl was using.
“Mom’s got it covered,” Mary replied blithely.
“Mom?” Mimi’s voice rose. Solange was Imogene’s…supplier?
Tom coughed. “I thought I saw a drinking fountain down the hall. I’ll be back shortly.”
“Look, Grandmother has diabetic neuropathy. She’s never going to not have it. It is extremely painful—”
“I’m not judging,” Mimi cut in. “I’m just surprised.”
“Because he was taking into account her incipient dementia, her physician wouldn’t prescribe enough meds to provide relief. He said he was worried about side effects, most notably that a delusion might lead to her getting hurt.” Mary’s mouth flattened. “That’s what he said. Personally, I think he was worried about his medical license or being sued if she jumped off a roof because she thought she could fly. Not that I can wholly blame him.”
“And Mom just…what? Went around him?” Mimi was still in a state of awe.
“Yes,” Mary said. “Mom said, ‘We can deal with the hallucinations. Not pain.’”
“How?” Mimi asked.
“I didn’t ask,” Mary replied primly.
“Wow,” Mimi said. “Solange doesn’t even like Imogene, and the feeling is mutual.”
“Mom’s not one to dodge responsibilities.”
No, she wasn’t. She never had been. “Maybe it was simple compassion,” Mimi suggested.
“Maybe a combination,” Mary countered.
“Anyone want me to get them a pop?” Prescott offered, looking desperately uncomfortable.
“No,” both sisters replied, eyeing each other.
“Have you really been up here all this time taking care of Sarah?” Mary finally asked.
Oh, crap. Here it came. The expectations of a new, improved Mimi. She didn’t like expectations. Granted, sometimes people couldn’t help themselves. Like her expectation of something more for her and Joe. But they still made her uncomfortable.
Before she could answer, Prescott said, “Yes. And the dogs and me and Joe.”
“Who’s Joe—? Joe Tierney?” Mary had evidently put the last names together.
“My dad,” he said.
“Never mind,” Mimi said. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Mary. I just…Sarah needed…and…”
“And you did what had to be done,” Mary finished for her. “It’s about time.”
Mimi sighed. She had called that one, all right. “Look. Aren’t you a little old for this ‘proving yourself against your big sister’ bit? Come on, Mar, let it go—”
“Oh, shut up,” Mary said crossly. “Yeah, yeah, I know what everyone thinks—except Mom. That due to feelings of intense sibling rivalry little Mary is dying for Mimi to enter the race so she can go toe to toe and prove herself. Bullshit. Has it ever occurred to you the reason I’m so angry with you has nothing to do with sibling rivalry?”
No. Never, thought Mimi, but she didn’t say so. She just looked askance at her sister.
“Are all geniuses so egocentric?” Mary asked the room at large.
“Yes,” volunteered Prescott, obviously feeling that here was a subject he felt qualified to comment upon.
“I don’t want to compete with you, Mimi. I want you to stop feeling sorry for yourself and start living. If that means using all those brains Mom claims you have—and just under the auspices of full disclosure, I have my doubts about that—or tap-dancing in a carnival sideshow, fine.”
“Should I go?” Prescott asked again, squirming.
No one paid him any attention. “When I was a little girl, you were my hero, Mimi. Then your dad disappeared and so did you. You turned into some Lady of Shalott, living her life through ghosts. Only it isn’t Shalott, it’s Chez Ducky, and there’s been no Galahad to draw you out.”
She meant Lancelot, but Mimi didn’t feel this was the right time to offer a correction.
“You’re living at a distance. In stasis. It pisses me off. I want you to wake up. Not because I want to compete with you, but because I love you.”
Huh? “You do?”
“What an idiot you are, Mimi.”
“And the only reason you’ve been so angry at me for the last ten years is because of your concern for my happiness?” Mimi was trying very hard to buy this, and she could see from the look on Mary’s face that she really wanted her to. Maybe it started out as sibling rivalry that had just grown into habit and now Mary was looking for a way out with a little dignity attached. Mimi could understand that.
Mary shifted a little like her underwear was binding but managed to meet Mimi’s eye levelly. “Mostly.”
There was possibly some truth in Mary’s melodramatic analogy. Mimi had been living life at a distance. You didn’t get messy at a distance. Things didn’t have the same power at a distance. Mary wanted to reconcile; that was good enough for Mimi. Mimi’s vision began to grow suspiciously shimmery.
Prescott pushed himself halfway up from his chair. “Should I maybe go now?”
Both she and Mary shot him identical looks of disbelief.
“Why?” Mary asked. “You’ve been here through the main event. Everything else is going to be a denouement, don’t you think?”
Prescott lowered himself gingerly back onto the chair.
“So,” Mimi said, “it turns out that all this time you’ve been the secure, well-adjusted one?”
“You bet your ass.”
Happily, poor Prescott was saved from being subjected to any more Werner family secrets by Tom’s return. He looked cautiously from Mimi to Mary and smiled when it was obvious that whatever was going to be said had been said. Men, Mimi thought, not for the first time, were basically cowards.
“Can we go now?” Prescott sounded like a grade-schooler begging for a bathroom pass.
“Sure.”
Prescott jumped to his feet.
“Maybe I should stay,” Tom said. He didn’t look like he meant it, though.
“No, you go, too, Tom,” Mimi said. “Sarah’s been in a holding pattern for a couple hours. What are the chances of her going in the next forty-five minutes? I promise, if anything changes, I’ll use the phone at the nurse’s station and call. You’re never more than five minutes away from anything else in Fawn Creek.”
That’s all it took. Tom, Mary, and Prescott headed toward the elevator looking every bit as tired as Mimi felt. She could only imagine what Sarah was going through. She looked at Imogene. She was snoring.
Mimi found
an empty room right outside the waiting area, where she nabbed a folded blanket off the foot of the bed. She returned and spread it gently over Imogene, tucking it under her chin. There. Now she looked more like a snoozing old lady than a sarcophagus effigy.
That task taken care of, she sat down and put her feet up.
“I suppose I should be mad at you.”
Mimi looked up to find Solange standing beside her chair. She looked exhausted. “Sarah asked me not to tell,” she told her mother. “I would have called if there had been any trouble,” she said, more tired than defensive.
Solange sat down beside her. “I know.”
Mimi smiled at her. “Thanks. How is the little mother doing?”
“If she doesn’t get a move on soon, she’s having a C-section,” Solange said. “I think the mention of knives has inspired her to try harder. I just came out to see how you were doing.”
She looked around. “Where’s Tom and Mary? And that odd young man with the hardware in his face?”
“Prescott. They went for pizza. I told them I’d call as soon as something happened.”
Solange nodded, smiling wanly. “Poor Tom. He’s no better at this than your father was.”
“Dad?”
“He was a terrible mess. I think he threw up three times on the way to the hospital. We called a taxi, you know. I wouldn’t have trusted him to drive across an empty parking lot, the state he was in.”
“Dad?” Mimi asked in surprise. “But he was always so laid-back.”
Solange gave her a funny look but said mildly, “Wasn’t he, though?”
“Was he there? In the delivery room?”
“He tried,” Solange said. “But he passed out as soon as my water broke, so the attendants dragged him off to the waiting room.” She looked at Mimi. “You took thirty-four hours to make your appearance. Always were a strong-willed child.”
Mimi flinched. “I bet you wish you could have left the room, too.”
Solange shook her head. “No. Not at all. I wished you’d been a little quicker about the process, but we were in it together and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. We made it just fine, too.”
Solange had always seen her role as being there. Sometimes she’d been a little too much there, but Mimi had never doubted her mother’s dedication.
“You never were quick to leave a room,” Mimi said quietly. “I remember you used to read me to sleep every night.”
“Didn’t think you liked it that much,” Solange said with a small self-deprecating laugh.
“Well, I might have preferred The Boxcar Children to the Iliad, but…”
“The classics are the classics,” Solange said, rising to her feet. “I better get back to Sarah before she harms that nurse.”
She patted Mimi absently on the head and headed back to the room.
Mimi stretched, glancing up at the clock. Sarah had better get a move on, or Mimi was going to have to take off for the lawyers’ office without seeing Little Mignonette or the less popular Little Prescott. On the other hand, let the lawyers wait.
Still, she might as well be ready. She picked up her backpack and headed into the bathroom, where she stripped off her shirt and washed up as well as she could. She brushed her teeth and attempted to comb her hair with her fingers. She leaned over the sink, peering closely in the mirror. She was sure there was more gray in her hair today than there had been yesterday. Small wonder.
The door opened behind her. She glanced up in the mirror—
“Joe!” She spun around, her heart thudding like a snared rabbit’s, dizzy with happiness.
He looked perfect. The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled up on those spectacular forearms, his collar was open, and his hair gleamed like polished carbon. He must have shaved in the parking lot. His jaw looked kissably smooth.
“Hello, Mimi.” His voice. Her toes curled in her shoes.
“How did you know I was in here?”
“The desk nurse saw you go in,” he answered, looking around. He saw a metal chair sitting at the end of the sinks and smiled. He picked it and tipped it backward, sliding the top under the door handle, saying conversationally, “I really would like us not to be interrupted.”
“Oh,” she said faintly.
“Did you get my e-mail?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“You haven’t said ‘I love you,’” he said. “I thought I was pretty clear on that.”
Her heart was beating like a jackhammer. “Control freak,” she said, only it came out in a breathy little rush.
“Absolutely.” He walked over to her and, without breaking stride, cradled her face between his strong, beautifully manicured hands and proceeded to kiss the hell out of her. When he was done, his hands dropped to her waist, steadying her.
“I love you, Mimi,” he said. “I want to be with you. And if I can’t, as long as I know where to find you, I’ll be okay with it. When I was in Singapore, thinking about you, I had this feeling of finally having reached some destination even though I was thousands of miles away from you. For the first time in my adult life, I have somewhere to go and someone to go to. You.
“You’re my touchstone, Mimi.”
“I think you mean lodestone,” she said breathlessly. He smiled, his eyes crinkling up at the corners in an altogether sexy way.
She was having a hard time breathing and her hands seemed to keep reaching up to touch his face or smooth the material over his chest. Beneath her fingertips she could read the beat of his heart, and oops! She owed him a new shirt because his buttons were popping off and she was dragging his shirt from a very muscular pair of shoulders, her mouth nipping at the base of his throat, and—
“Come on, Mimi. Tell me.”
“Yes!” She lashed her arms around his bare torso. He felt warm and dense and oh, man, she just wanted to crawl into him.
“Yes, what?” he insisted.
“I love you.” He was looking at her and she realized that being half Scandinavian and therefore not prone to dramatic declaration had its drawbacks, because she couldn’t think of any words that could describe the intensity of this feeling, the enormity, the wonder of it. So, she went with what she could. “Unequivocally!”
It seemed to satisfy him.
“Do you want to make love?” he asked, pulling her closer.
“Unequivocally.”
“Where have you been?” Solange asked suspiciously as Mimi entered the hospital room. Joe had left to find Prescott while Mimi went in search of someone to tell her how the birthing process was going. She discovered that while she and Joe had been otherwise engaged, the birthing process had been completed and that Sarah was the mother of a healthy baby girl.
“I was trying to get hold of Tom and the others,” she lied.
“And did you?”
“Yes,” she said, relieved the nurse had already tracked down the crew by the time they’d exited the bathroom. “They’re on their way. How are you doing, Sarah?”
She shouldn’t have bothered asking. Sarah was rapt, gazing adoringly at a small puckered little creature in a pink blanket with a pink skullcap on. The baby’s eyes were squished shut.
“Isn’t she absolutely the most ravishing thing you’ve ever seen?” Sarah whispered without lifting her eyes from the baby.
“Yeah.”
“Mom, does she look like any of us when we were babies?”
“Impossibly, she’s even more beautiful,” cooed Solange, reaching over and gently stroking the baby’s cheek with the back of her finger.
“I think so, too!” gushed Sarah.
“You look good, Sarah,” Mimi said. “Considering how long you were in labor.” She did, too. It was as if someone had carved the fat from her face to find the cheekbones again.
“Yup,” Sarah said. “The doctor said I was mostly carrying fluid.” She giggled and stuck one leg out from under the blanket. “See? No more cankles.”
Her leg was still a little canklish in Mimi
’s opinion, but in honor of the occasion, she kept it to herself.
“So, what did you name the little sweetheart?”
“Well,” Sarah started. “You know how much I wanted to honor both you and Prescott for all the support you’ve given me and everything you’ve done for me for the past few months. But most especially for going behind my back and calling Mom so that she could be with me when the baby was born, because I don’t think you would have been so good at that.”
“Probably not,” Mimi conceded.
“And Prescott,” she sighed. “Such a doll. He cleaned up after me all the time. Did you know that?”
Again, Mimi kept to herself the fact that Prescott wasn’t acting because of love, but because of a phobia.
“So what could I do? I couldn’t name her after one of you and not the other!” Sarah chirped brightly. “And let’s face it, Mimi, ‘Mescott’ or ‘Pipi’ just wasn’t going to happen.”
“So, what did you name her?” Mimi asked.
“Solange!”
Solange gave Mimi a complacent smile.
Mimi stared at Sarah a moment. “Okay. But you’re telling Prescott.”
“Oh, Mimi. Prescott won’t mind. He’ll be so giddy over being the godfather, he won’t care.”
“Prescott’s going to be the godfather?”
“Well, who else?” Sarah said, her tone declaring duh. “He’s family.”
“Speaking of family, Mimi,” said Solange, “aren’t you supposed to be at the lawyers’ office”—she glanced at the clock—“now?”
Mimi, hovering in the back of the room, barely heard this last bit. Something Sarah had said reminded her of something Joe had said, and that reminded her—
That was it!
She got going.
Chapter Forty-seven
Mimi flung open the door to the lawyers’ conference room. It banged against the inner wall and bounced back, nearly hitting her in the face. So much for her dramatic entrance. She pushed it open with a little less force this time and stepped into the room. Mike Peterson, the lawyer, Birgie, Charlie, Gerry, Johanna, Naomi, and Half-Uncle Bill sat around a pine table. In front of each were open file folders and pens. An empty chair and file folder waited for her.
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