Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [75]
“Turn around,” she answered. As soon as he flicked the blinker she thought better of it. “No, keep going. It’s David’s baby, too. We have to tell him. He’ll be heartbroken if he doesn’t even know.”
Win seemed to think that was a good answer. He got back into the left lane of the highway and pushed the speed. He was going eighty-five and Carmen wasn’t complaining.
The news shook her and sent her mind back to Bethesda to be with her mother. Carmen knew Christina was scared. She was probably in a lot of pain. “I was her labor coach,” Carmen murmured.
She was close to her mother. Underneath everything was that. It wasn’t just the good answer, it was true. How else could you explain how powerfully she felt her mother’s distress?
Her mother told her once that when you feel someone else’s pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you knew you really loved them. Right now Carmen knew she had the pain part right. The joy…well, she still had work to do on that.
Win expertly took the exit for Downingtown. Carmen focused her energies on the map. She was a good map reader. They had the cross streets and the car make and the license plate number. That would be enough information, they both hoped. God forbid David had parked in an underground garage or something.
The coordinates led them to a housing development. Carmen screamed when she saw the green Mercury. She screamed out the letters and numbers of the license plate. Win was laughing and yelling too. The two of them stormed the front door of the recently built clapboard house. Carmen fidgeted, trying to restrain herself from ringing the doorbell more than twice.
A woman appeared at the door. Carmen saw David behind her and immediately started waving and yelling. It was all a flurry after that. Carmen couldn’t remember who said what, but five minutes later, Carmen, Win, and David were speeding south toward Bethesda, Maryland.
“I forgot my rental car,” David muttered from the backseat, still whitish gray in the face.
“It’s okay. Somebody can take it back for you,” Carmen reassured him. She looked from Win, in the driver’s seat, to David. “By the way, David Breckman, this is Win—”
Was it possible that she didn’t know his last name? Here they’d run the gauntlet of emotions, he’d experienced everything with her from Valia’s friable ligaments to Katherine’s hockey helmet to her mother’s unexpected labor, and she really didn’t know even that? “Uh, what’s your last name?”
“Sawyer.”
“Win Sawyer,” she murmured.
“Thanks for your help, Win,” David said robotically. He was trying to call the hospital on Carmen’s cell phone. Her battery was almost gone.
“What’s yours?” Win asked her. They were in their own world.
“Lowell.”
“How do you do, Carmen Lowell?”
She smiled at him gratefully. “Ask me later.”
By Baltimore, they were flying down 95 at just as many miles per hour. Carmen was incensed when a siren started blaring behind them. Win groaned.
“Oh, you’re joking,” Carmen said.
Win pulled onto the shoulder. Carmen opened her door.
“Carmen, no!” Both Win and David were yelling at her. “You’re not supposed to get out of the car!”
Suddenly a policeman was yelling at her over his bullhorn. It made her angrier. She slammed the door and crossed her arms over her chest.
“My mother is in the hospital about to have a baby without her husband, and you are holding us up!” She practically exploded.
After an impassioned chat with the policeman, Carmen got back in the car.
Win looked a bit shell-shocked. He and David both looked defeated, as though expecting tickets and fines of hundreds of dollars and also to go to jail.
“He said he was sorry,” Carmen reported instead. “Go ahead.”
“What?” both Win and David yelled at her.
“Win, go!” she said. And Win obliged. “He offered us an escort but I said no,” Carmen continued once they’d gotten back up to speed. “I told him no, but please radio ahead to his fellow cops and tell them to leave us alone.”
Win was trying to hold back his smile. Carmen couldn’t think about whether