“Did you pull this out of a flood zone?” Judith looks down at the warped, worn side-cabinet she and Linda just dragged in.
“No—I scooped it up from Mrs. Kumar’s curb on the last heavy pickup day.”
“What the hell is this for?” Jack, Erin’s boyfriend, gestures towards the rusty, patina coated, penny-farthing, high-wheel bicycle I found at a flea market in Pennsylvania.
I gaze at the bicycle warmly—like the treasure it is—because I love what I do.
“I’m either going to use the big wheel as the base for an accent table—or just hang the whole thing on the wall. I haven’t decided yet.”
I’ve always been a picker, a dumpster diver, a saver-for-laterer, a recycler. It makes me sad to think of something that was once loved being discarded without a second thought.
When I was a preteen and outgrew my immense collection of stuffed animals, instead of tossing them like my mother wanted—I sliced them open and gutted them. I used their stuffing to make new pillows and sewed their fuzzy pelts together to make a one-of-a-kind rug for my bedroom floor.
Morbid? Possibly.
But it gave a new purpose to the furry companions that had seen me through thunder storms and scary movies and tummy aches.
I was a lifestyle blogger at heart before the words even existed.
~ ~ ~
After everything’s been moved in, and the den resembles the overstocked junk yard of an owner with fabulous taste, the family enjoys pizza and cocktails on the back patio. I’m with Jack and Erin in the kitchen making more lemonade, both the adult and kid-friendly kind.
I bend over slightly at the waist, rubbing my breasts covertly with my forearm, wanting to just full-out massage the poor girls. Because they’re aching—a cold, excruciating, throbbing sort of pain—like my nipples have frostbite.
“You okay?” Erin asks.
“Yeah—it’s just my boobs are killing me.” I glance at Jack, leaning against the white marble counter. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Boobs are my second favorite thing to talk about.”
“What’s the first thing?”
He wiggles his eyebrows. “You’re sister’s boobs.”
Erin laughs, then she turns to me, still smiling.
“Oh, my God—do you know what I just thought of? Remember, when you were preggers with Jay—but you were still hiding it from Mom and Dad? And we were all home from school in the car going to get the Christmas tree, and your boobs were hurting so bad, that you had them pressed up against the heating vents in the back of the car? You said it felt like they were frozen—two boobsicles.”
“As if I could ever forget.” I snort out a chuckle. “That sucked.”
But then I stop chuckling.
And everything inside me freezes—going as stone-cold as my poor chilly nipples. Because I did forget—what it felt like to be pregnant. The early signs.
It’s like God gives women amnesia about the really shitty parts of child-bearing, so we won’t mind doing it again and again. But now, in this kitchen—it’s like a horrible lightning bolt of epiphany has struck me. Like the blinders have fallen away.
And I remember all the early symptoms. The soul-deep exhaustion, the heavy, sluggish, bloated feeling, the nausea . . . the painful, aching breasts.
Everything I’ve been experiencing for the last three weeks.
I chalked it up to the excitement and stress of starting the show, the move—but there’s something else. Something else I totally forgot.
“Oh, no.”
I start counting backward in my head. The days, the weeks, not retracing my steps . . . but my menstrual cycle. And I feel the color drain from my face.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.”
“Are you gonna puke?” Jack takes a few steps back—out of the potential splash-zone. “Is she gonna puke, Er?”
A—yes, I’m definitely gonna puke.
And B—
“Lainey, what is it?”
I look into Erin’s eyes, the “B” spilling from my lips in hushed, shocked words.
“I need to take a pregnancy test.”
Chapter Four
Lainey
“Why does this keep happening to me?!”
Three positive pregnancy tests later—we’re all in the kitchen, with all of my sisters fully updated on the latest unexpected, development. My parents are still clueless and supervising the grandchildren down on the dock.
I’m pregnant. Knocked up. In the family way. Unplanned. Again.
No matter how many times or how many different ways I say it to myself—I still can’t make it make sense. When I first found out I was pregnant with Jason, the overwhelming feeling was fear—fear of what I was going to do, what my parents would say, fear of the unknown.
This time around I’m older—though wiser is still up for debate.
And I’m just utterly . . . flabbergasted. Flabbergasted is a really good word.
“We used condoms! We used a whole box of condoms!”
“Wow.” Judith smirks. “The drummer-boy really brought it, huh?”
Brooke twists her pearls. “Not the time, Judith.”
Jason’s father was my first—my first serious boyfriend, my first everything. We used condoms too, though a bit fumblingly. And by the third or fourth time we’d had sex—boom, I was pregnant.