I stared at her dumbly. I’ll go with you! I wanted to holler—but my lips couldn’t seem to form the words.
“Another time?” she asked.
Mute, I nodded.
12
Faye
The week went by… although it took its sweet goddamn time to do it.
I planned lessons, taught classes, marked papers… but my mind was far from the postcolonial literature I was lecturing about.
The meeting with Amanda weighed heavily on me, and I practiced what I wanted to say a hundred times a day. It would’ve been easier if I had a clue of where she was coming from. Even researching PPD didn’t give me much to go on. The idea of conceiving a child, nurturing it for nine months, and then throwing it to the wolves was completely foreign to me.
Not that I was a wolf—I was probably a sheep compared to her—but…
I set goals for the meeting. Find out why she’s so opposed to taking Gretchen. Whether she knows who the father is. If she can get child support.
I even called Ma and filled her in. If things went badly enough, I told myself, I could always call her and have her speak to Amanda. That was a last resort, though. I doubted Amanda would even listen.
Sometimes late at night, with Gretchen crying for the umpteenth time and no one but me to get up and feed her, I wondered why all this had been dumped on me. Why me, when I hadn’t done anything to deserve it? I would’ve helped Amanda with the baby out of sisterly obligation if she was a halfway decent mother. But no, all the responsibility came down on me. And my own mother—why did I have to be born to a woman who didn’t even care to meet her own grandchild?
But I fed Gretchen and went back to sleep, because that was all I could do.
There was no use in whining or moping. Keep going, keep moving forward. Like it or not, this was my new reality.
I didn’t know what I would’ve done without Jaz helping me. There were other babysitters, but not like her. Working for the lowest possible price, taking the best possible care of the baby, always ready with a grin and a helping hand. I never once took Jaz for granted.
In fact, every moment I wasn’t thinking of Amanda and Gretchen, I thought about Jaz.
I found myself reminiscing constantly about her soft lips and seductive smile. I savored the time I spent with her… the whole five minutes a day, anyway.
At this point, I was pretty sure she saw me as the creepy old woman who’d tried to get in her pants. I’d decided to leave the ball in her court, let her decide when we were going to do anything else. And up to now, she hadn’t initiated a thing.
So I cut our meetings shorter, kept them as professional as I could. If she wanted to just be my babysitter, that was okay with me. Even if I got this odd pain in my chest every time I had to look at her.
The week went by. Slowly but surely, it went by.
And on Saturday at one p.m., I met Amanda.
* * *
“You look like shit” was the first thing my sister said as she slipped into the seat across from me.
“Thanks.”
For her part, she looked about the same as always, other than a slight thickness to her belly that hinted at the changes it’d recently gone through. She wore the same fall coat she’d had for years, and she shivered under her thin floral scarf, as impractical as every other one she owned. Deep hollows had formed under her eyes. Yet from her casual demeanor, I would’ve never guessed anything had changed.
“Seriously,” she said, “I had to double-check that I was going over to the right person. For a moment I thought you were a forty-year-old who’d stolen my sister’s jacket and glasses.” She wrinkled her nose. “When are you going to get some glasses with actual frames?”
“I like these.”
As for the rest of it, I wasn’t going to point out that I may have looked less rested than usual because of the baby—the actual miniature human being—she’d unceremoniously dumped on me without a word of warning.
I wasn’t even going to think about it. Definitely not.
“Anyway…” Amanda twisted a tendril of hair. “I’m here, like you wanted.”