The Friendship Pact

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “Maybe you should lie down for a while.”

  He was kidding, right? Bailey and I had a full day planned. Danny and Jake and a group of Jake’s college buddies were going to some golf tournament across town and would be out late that night. And Bailey and I were going to make good use of the free time.

  Just as I heard him step away, I was struck by another strong wave of nausea. When I was halfway through retching, Danny had returned, holding my hair back for me. I should probably get it cut.

  “Here are some crackers,” my husband said as I finally sat up and leaned against the wall.

  Suddenly ravenous, I took them. And was content to sit on the fluffy rug in our ceramic-tiled bathroom and crunch away on those crackers.

  Danny was frowning as he stood there, staring at me. Like he was worried about me. “When’s Jake picking you up?” I asked.

  “Not until eleven,” he said. “Tee time isn’t until one.” They’d play eighteen holes, drinking as they went, then have dinner and awards, and more drinking. Jake was the designated driver. It was only seven in the morning now.

  “I thought I’d go with you over to Bailey’s this morning and see if I can get her crib put together while you two finish with the wallpaper.”

  He’d assembled our crib when we’d finished our nursery several days ago and...I stared up at him. Had Danny just offered to do something for Bailey without my begging him?

  “You sure you have time?” I asked, trying not to gape. Or act like anything weird and wonderful was happening.

  “Yeah. As long as we can get going soon. But if you’re feeling bad, we can do it another...”

  “No!” I jumped up so fast I got dizzy. But I walked through the wooziness to our bedroom, pulling a pair of sweats and an old T-shirt out of my drawer. Somehow, whenever I wallpapered I managed to wear the paste, so I’d take along a change of clothes to wear for our pregnancy exercise class that afternoon and then something else for the movie and dinner we had planned. “Give me twenty minutes and I’ll be ready,” I told him.

  No way was I going to tempt fate when she was handing out miracles.

  * * *

  By the middle of July, Bailey was getting fat. She was only two and half months pregnant as opposed to Kora’s four and a half, but her belly was almost as big. She knew because they were playing a “dirty minds” social game one night with a group of friends at the home of a couple they’d hung out with in high school, and the question was what do you tell your wife if she asks you whether she’s fat.

  “You tell her yes!” Danny shouted. And everyone laughed. “Yeah, and then you tell her best friend that she’s even fatter,” he added.

  “Shut up!” Bailey yelped, sticking her tongue out at him. “I am not.”

  Three of the seven women in the room were pregnant, and two others already had children. Everyone knew Bailey was pregnant. She’d seen no sense in keeping it a secret.

  She’d had more raised eyebrows than she would’ve liked, at work and among her peers, but everyone was respectful to her face.

  “Yes, you are,” Danny rebutted, lying on the carpet on his side as he grinned back at her. “Come on, you two, stand up and compare baby bumps.” He nudged Kora, who was sitting cross-legged beside him. When she stood, Bailey slowly got up from the edge of the hearth where she’d been sitting with a member of their senior class. Karen was the only one of them who’d been divorced, but also the only one, other than Bailey, who wasn’t part of a couple. They’d been paired up on various teams all evening long.

  Pulling up her shirt to expose the barely needed elastic on her shorts, Kora struck a sideways pose and Bailey did the same. She was a little taller than Kora, but not much. Their bellies almost touched as everyone hollered out their votes.

  Bailey. By a landslide.

  “It’d be just like you to pop out twins, Bailey Watters,” Danny joked. “You work harder than anyone else at everything you do.”

  “I do not!” she half laughed, half sputtered as she sat back down.

  “He’s right, Watters, you’re the one who blew the curve for all of us in eighth grade science. We all come in with our volcanos, bouncing eggs in shells and dirt clods proving which seeds grow faster, and you set up a way to find out the rate at which various compounds decompose H2O2!”

  “Hey, Shackley! You were just jealous because you thought putting eggs in vinegar for a week and letting them sit there was going to get you first place,” Danny called out before Bailey could respond. Apparently he was allowed to tease her, but no one else was.

  It kind of reminded Bailey of Brian, back when they were kids....

  “What about English class our junior year?” Honey, a girl who’d been on the cheer squad with them, jumped in. “Remember we had to write that futuristic essay over Christmas break and hers was, like, fifty pages?”

  “It was thirty,” Bailey said, smiling. Their ribbing was good-natured. Because she was one of them.

  And she was happy.

  Chapter Eighteen

  On the third Monday in July, I woke up sick again. I made it to the bathroom, but barely in time. I retched until I thought my ribs would break.

  Until tears were streaming down my face.

  And still, through it all, with Danny holding back my hair and handing me cool wet washcloths, I was happy. I knew pregnancy was going to cause physical stress. I was prepared and willing to experience every second of it.

  I was making a baby. Danny’s baby.

  Afterward, as I’d been doing more and more often lately, I sat on the floor, leaning back against the wall of our bathroom. I knew every single speck in every single square of the tile.

  And probably every little thread in the plush maroon throw rugs, too. They went with my rose decor. I focused on roses. In the border trim around the ceiling. The painting on the wall in the garden tub alcove. The live, small flowered plant I’d managed to grow....

  “Crackers,” Danny said, coming back into the room with a sleeve of what had become my morning-time best friend.

  I took them because he was handing them to me. But instead of devouring them like I usually did, I held on to them.

  “Are you going to get sick again?” Danny squatted down beside me and I wanted nothing more than to lay my head against him and go back to sleep.

  “No,” I told him. The nausea had passed. I just didn’t feel...well. All part of the process, I knew.

  “You’re going to be late for work, sweetie,” I told him. “Get in the shower and I’ll go make breakfast.”

  We usually just grabbed bowls of cereal during the school year, but over the summer I liked to make him a full breakfast. I’d been planning on waffles and turkey bacon that morning. With some peach puree instead of syrup...

  “Kor?”

  I glanced up at him as the wave of...I didn’t know what...passed.

  “I’m fine,” I told him. “Go.”

  He took off his robe. Opened the door to the shower. And stood there looking hot and sexy enough for me to want to crawl on top of him—but all I felt was...heavy.

  “Has Bailey been sick, too?” he asked, glancing back at me as he adjusted the water.

  “No,” I told him without any bitterness at all. “It’s about time she got to do something the easy way....”

  My vision went completely black for a second. As the room came back into focus, I thought I might be sick again. Until the pain started up my back.

  “Kor?” I heard the worry in Danny’s voice.

  And then...nothing.

  * * *

  “They’re going to be fine.” Bailey held both arms of the chair she was sitting in to keep herself in place. Danny, in the chair beside hers, was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, head bowed, with his hands crossed at the back
of his neck.

  He’d been that way for more than twenty minutes.

  Bailey needed to pace. To get coffee. No, maybe not coffee—water. Or milk. Whatever pregnant women drank that they could buy from hospital vending machines during times of stress. They’d been at the hospital for more than six hours and were upstairs on some ward where they’d wheeled Kora. Dr. Hersey, their OB, was with her. They’d asked Danny and Bailey to wait outside.

  A couple of other people had been in the small family waiting room while they’d been there, but mostly visitors sat with the people they were visiting.

  “Danny?” Bailey said again. “She’s going to be fine.”

  “Yeah.” He sat back, dropping his hands to his thighs, staring straight ahead. “I know you’re right,” he said.

  Someday they were all going to laugh about how he looked. Sweats, the button-down shirt he’d just ironed for work, and sandals—the things closest to him as he’d dressed while he was on the phone with Bailey, telling her to get over to his place immediately.

  Luckily she’d been leaving the house on her way to work, hoping to beat the morning rush hour traffic.

  “Did you need to call work again? Let them know you won’t be in this afternoon?”

  When he’d called earlier, he’d told them he might be. Bailey had rescheduled her entire day when she’d called in.

  Someone had to be home to stay with Kora after they released her. If they released her. Mama Di and Papa Bill were downstairs. Papa Bill had needed a walk. But there was no way Bailey was leaving her friend until she knew that all danger was past.

  “You heard what Dr. Hersey said,” she went on. “It could be toxemia, which may require bed rest, but mothers and babies come through it just fine. Same with the other things it could be....”

  The doctor had also told them she didn’t know for sure what was going on with Kora.

  “She’s concerned about Kora’s lack of weight gain.”

  “It’s because she’s doing all the measuring stuff.” Bailey was ravenous most of the time and eating whatever looked good.

  “She’s trying so hard to do the whole thing perfectly.”

  “Yeah, this little jaunt is really going to piss her off,” Bailey said, trying for a grin. Truth was, she was worried sick.

  Dr. Hersey had told them Kora should be okay. If she was losing the baby, chances were that would already have happened. Her placenta was intact. But there’d been some question about the ultrasound they’d run early that morning, and Kora had had another bout of violent vomiting since they got there.

  “I’m guessing she’s starved herself of some important nutrient. Maybe a necessary fat of some kind,” Bailey continued, as much for her own sake as Danny’s. Kora didn’t get sick.

  Neither of them did. Other than strep throat, which they’d managed to pass on to each other, neither of them had ever even been on antibiotics. Kora used to have some bad cramps with her period, though. Not always, but when they came, they had her throwing up and in tears.

  “Her blood work will show if it’s diet-related,” Danny agreed, clasping his hands together and then letting them fall to his knees. His feet, in the sandals he’d slipped into as he carried his wife out the door to put her in the backseat of Bailey’s car, were tapping an ever-changing beat on the floor.

  He’d sat beside her, cradling her, as Bailey drove.

  His hair was still bed-mussed. Made worse by the fingers he’d been running through it. As soon as they talked to the doctor and knew for sure that Kora wasn’t in danger, Bailey would talk him into going home and having a shower. It would make him feel better.

  And would relax Kora, too. Right now, her best friend’s husband looked as though something horrible had happened. She’d be feeling bad enough as it was; she didn’t need him looking like the sky had fallen.

  “She really loves being pregnant at the same time you are,” Danny said out of the blue when Bailey was getting ready to pace her way back to the vending machine for a carton of milk. She was not and never had been a sitter.

  “It’s what we always planned,” she said, feeling softer than she usually did around anyone but Kora. And maybe Jake.

  She’d called him. To tell him she was pregnant. His wife had answered his phone and asked that Bailey never call her husband again.

  Bailey didn’t know if Jake had been there or not. She’d called his cell the next day, but he could have left it in his car. Or at home. He could have been in the shower....

  He hadn’t called back. And she was going to honor his wife’s wishes.

  “We, um, did the right thing, you and I, with the insemination,” Danny said. And Bailey didn’t know if he was asking her or telling her. Was he second-guessing himself?

  Because he was afraid Kora was going to lose their baby?

  She wasn’t going to, Bailey reminded herself. She would, almost certainly, have lost it already if that was the case. The doctor had said so. But she could understand Danny’s fear.

  “Kora told me the other night that she fell in love with me all over again when I assembled your crib,” he said. “I honestly didn’t think about it, but according to her it was the first time I ever offered to do something for you without her bringing it up first.”

  He paused, as if giving her a chance to refute the claim, but she couldn’t.

  “It’s true, isn’t it? I kind of blanked out where you were concerned. It’s not that I had bad feelings toward you, or resented you, I just didn’t include you in my circle.”

  Now was not the time for him to be beating himself up.

  “It’s okay, Danny.” And it was. He’d made it okay.

  “No, really...this problem between you and me—the reason we were never close friends like the rest of the group—it was my fault, wasn’t it? I treated you like you didn’t exist.”

  “It’s understandable,” she told him, uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was taking. “I was always around. You either had to ignore me or resent the hell out of me. I’d choose being ignored any time.”

  “It wasn’t right, Bailey. I was good friends with everyone else in our group.”

  “I know.”

  He turned and studied her as though he was seeing her for the first time. “I used to think you were a cold fish, but it was me who froze you out, wasn’t it?”

  “I am a cold fish.” On the outside.

  “No.” He shook his head, still watching her. “You aren’t. Jake told me I didn’t ever get to know you, and I think he was right. I mean, Kora, she’s all heart and I should have figured that if she saw something in you—”

  “Hey!” Bailey stood up. “Let’s not go overboard here, Brown. Don’t forget I’m the bitch who broke your best friend’s heart.” She was way too close to crying.

  “I never said that.”

  “But you thought it. Go ahead, admit it.” She was grinning, to mask everything she didn’t want exposed.

  “I’m sorry, Bailey.”

  She wanted to go get that milk. Wanted to shrug him off. Make some flip comment. Instead, she sat back down. “It really is okay, Danny. Truthfully, you’ve been great all these years, understanding Kora and me, not trying to come between us or making her feel guilty about our closeness. You never made her choose. And now...well, you’ve given me a chance to live the life I want to live.”

  To be a single parent and build her own happy family.

  He was silent for a while. Then he said, “Kora told me she’s noticed a difference between the two of us. She thanked me for it.”

  His intimate, brotherly look was difficult for her to bear.

  “Do you still think we did the right thing?” she asked. It was a little late now if he didn’t. Her baby was proof of that.

  “I know we did,”
Danny said now. “I just wish we could tell Kora...”

  “Maybe we can.” Bailey had been toying with the idea, too. The secret she was keeping from Kora was bothering her. “She’s come around to the idea of me having this baby. Hell, she insisted on being my birthing coach. And she doesn’t let a day pass without calling to check on me.”

  “What’s different about that?” Danny chuckled. And he had a point. She and Kora had always spoken regularly—often daily. But before Bailey got pregnant, they’d missed some days. And had been almost like strangers on others.

  “Anyway, I think we should tell her,” Bailey said. Danny nodded. “I agree.” Silence fell again, and Bailey contemplated the idea some more. “I’d like you to let me be the one to do it, though,” Danny said several minutes later, sitting back to look her in the face. “Doing it together would be wrong, coming at her like it’s you and me against her. And since I’m her husband and I’m the one who suggested it...”

  He’d obviously given this a great deal of thought—prior to that day.

  She’d like to tell Kora herself. Wanted to be able to try to explain, heart to heart, her reason for the choice, rather than relying on Danny to do it for her. But what right did she have to object to Danny’s request? He’d done her a huge favor. And he was Kora’s husband, her life partner....

  “Just be careful that she doesn’t think you’re suddenly doing things for me, like building the crib, because you feel some kind of ownership over my kid,” she said, trying to keep her tone light, although she was completely serious. “If Kora thinks for one second that—”

  Danny cut her off. “Don’t even go there. That baby you’re carrying is no more mine than the kid we saw downstairs in the emergency room this morning. Any more than if someone gave you a lung, and then thought they owned part of your life. I gave a biological donation to a clinic. Period. I did it to help you, yes. Because you’re my wife’s best friend. But there is no way I want any woman, not even you, carrying my child.

  “Kora is the only woman who will ever mother my children.”