“Even in the board meetings?” a slow smile curled around her lips.
“Especially then.”
She smiled at me.
“Let’s see how it goes,” she said, her voice sweet. “Right now, baby needs to get some sleep.”
We walked up to our separate rooms, and I thought about her all night long.
As we drove back the next day, holding hands in the car like teenage sweethearts, I told her that I would have to tell my mother about the baby. She looked concerned. She knew my mother was not supportive like her mother and I’d told her enough about my background to know that my mother could make life hard for us.
“How do you think she’ll react?” she asked, anxiously.
“She wants me to marry some other woman,” I said. I filled Lauren briefly in on the situation with Taya.
I glanced over at Lauren and saw her face had gone white.
“Look, I’m sure she won’t be pleased at first, but she’ll have to come around eventually.”
“What if that never happens?”
“It has to, if she wants to get to know her grandchild and I’m pretty sure she will want to do that.”
I was sounding more confident than I felt.
At the night of the benefit gala, my mother sat next to me at the dinner table. She’d tried to convince me to bring Taya and we’d had a fight when I told her I was not doing that. As a result, there was an empty seat on my other side as she’d bought the ticket months in advance already. I waited for the speaker of the event and the master of ceremonies to do their bit, downing a few extra glasses of champagne to give me courage.
My mother noticed.
“You’re drinking rather a lot tonight?”
“I need to tell you something?”
She put down her fork. “Oh?”
“An ex-girlfriend of mine is having my baby.”
Her face froze and I waited for her to say something. But instead, her faced arranged itself into an awful smile.
“What?” her voice was low. I repeated what I said.
“An ex-girlfriend? Who?”
I explained to her about seeing Lauren in college and how she came to work for me and said we’d started seeing each other again.
“Who is this girl?” she hissed, her voice shaking. “What does her family do?”
“It’s not a family we know,” I said. “Her mother is a teacher. She doesn’t know who her father is.” It didn’t sound well, even to me. But I didn’t care how it sounded. I cared about Lauren and the baby.
My mother dabbed a serviette to her mouth, pushed her plate away.
“We will talk about this at home.”
“No,” I said.
She blinked a few times. “What do you mean, no?”
“There is nothing to talk about,” I said, firmly. “She is having my baby and I’m supporting her. You don’t have to approve of it, you don’t have to like it, but I’m afraid that it is happening, one way or another.”