Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [52]
“Good luck,” one woman said. “We collapsed. You’ll be too exhausted to even think about it.”
“How many times did you do it on your wedding night?” Valerie asked the host.
“Nada.”
“Seriously?”
“Are you counting night or night and the next morning?”
“Wedding night,” someone piped.
“Both,” another protested. “If your wedding goes late, you don’t have much of a window of time. Morning should count as part of the wedding night.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“All who vote to keep the morning after as part of the wedding night, lift your punch.”
I escaped to the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the toilet to wait out the conversation. The yard outside the window to my right was too nice, square allotments of sod clumped together like patches of a quilt. A single sapling stood in the lawn, supported by wires knotted round its trunk and plugged into the ground. The wires were so taut you could imagine things the other way around: the wires held the tree down, not up, and if you clipped the strings, the sapling might escape.
By the time I returned to the party, Jake and another husband had returned from the gym, and on their arrival the subject of wedding nights had been temporarily suspended. Everyone moved to the table to admire the bassinet cake that said Congratulations, it’s a girl! in sweating curls of hot pink icing. We stood in the kitchen eating slices off paper plates. Valerie raised her shirt to show off her rounded belly. Jake gazed at her with a doting adoration I had only seen in teenage boys and in grooms.
At home, I stuffed a pillow in my shirt and considered my newly rounded figure in the bedroom mirror. Too light. Babies weighed seven to eight pounds and that wasn’t counting the fluids and whatnot. I would probably need a bowling ball.
“You’ve been busy.”
Zoë stood in the doorway. I held my cupped hands an inch from my chest. “My breasts would have to be bigger.”
“Your everything would have to be bigger.”
I pulled the pillow out from my shirt and tossed it at her.
“How was the shower?” She sat on my bed.
“It was all right. Valerie seems happy; she was quite literally glowing.”
“Michael told me that he finds pregnant woman incredibly sexy,” she said.
I sat beside her on the bed. “Do you ever think about having children?”
“Occasionally, but it never seems real to me that I could be a mother. I guess I imagine myself with older children—teenagers. Five boys, all football players. But I can’t see myself with a baby. Can you?”
I didn’t say anything. I lay down on my back and ran my hand over my stomach, wondering at its latent power.
Mom called at six thirty Monday morning to say there had been a kidnapping at Harvard and I should be on my guard.
“Mom, it’s not even light out yet.”
“Turn on channel nine.”
“It’s Harvard. In Boston.” I pressed my face into my pillow.
“You can’t be too careful these days. Apathy killed the cat.”
I sat up, propping my elbow on my knee and my forehead in my hand while Mom relayed everything the Channel 9 News anchor said: “… Police canvassing the neighborhoods … no news from the campus … woman at the supermarket says she saw a man who fits the suspect’s description …” She turned the television down. “I should call Brian.”
“Mom,” I sighed. “Why do you keep calling?”
“I don’t want to waste my minutes,” she said.
“You don’t have any minutes. They’re all free,” I said. “Anytime you call me it’s free.”
“Precisely!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want to waste free minutes!”
“I’m going now.”
I felt more than saw Zoë listening at the open door.
“That Mom?” she asked.
“Yes. Someone should have performed an intervention when Brian decided to buy her that phone.”
“I told you it was a bad idea.”
“You said no such thing.”
“Get up. We can argue about it on the way to campus.”
I squinted at the clock, then at Zoë. She was carrying a pair of running shoes.
“Your morning run,” she stated.
I’d forgotten: today was trail day. I pulled the blanket back over