Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [87]
I’d been laughing when Ms. Hicks hurled a volleyball at me, hollering at me to get my head in the game. Later, I’d learned why laughter and people were so important to Frank. His mother had gotten pregnant for the first time at forty-two, after more than two decades of marriage, after she’d given up on the possibility of children and had mostly given up on her marriage as well. She’d loved Frank, but his arrival had been a disruption. Corrinne Barrow wasn’t good with disruptions. Nor was she much of a laugher. She believed in God, and thrice-weekly church attendance; she worked as a medical secretary from seven a.m. to four p.m. each day; she cooked meals for the poor and visited the sick and devoted the hours she wasn’t doing those things to peering through her blinds at the neighbors across the street, who had four kids and innumerable grandchildren and made more noise at one meal than Corrinne and her husband and son did in an entire year. Frank had pegged me right—I did like people, and laughter, music, and stories. I traveled in a crowd, and I loved to have parties, to fill my house with friends, to cook, even if it was just pizza or cookies, to have everyone together, safe and full and happy.
In the car, Frank took my hand and pulled me so close that I could feel his eyelashes on my cheek. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay,” I answered as he slowly brought his lips to mine. I remember thinking that this was a guy I could love, really love, in a way I hadn’t loved the other boys I’d dated, that he was steady and grown-up in a way that they weren’t. I also knew that parts of Frank would always be a mystery, that there would always be more going on in his head than he’d be able to express with his words.
Almost without discussion, we’d become a couple that night, and, again, almost without discussion, we’d gotten engaged, then married, and we’d slipped into a life that was more or less the same as the life my parents had. By the time we went to that dance, he’d already been in touch with the army recruiter. He enlisted in the spring of his senior year and was off to basic training the week after we graduated. We got married when he came home after his eight weeks in Fort Benning, with new muscles and a new tattoo. Then he went off to Afghanistan, and I got pregnant the first time he came home on leave. His father died, and we named Spencer after him. Together, we cleared out the garage, where Frank’s dad kept most of his things, and slept some nights. I’d been the one to find his cardboard box full of copies of Barely Legal, and I’d thrown them away without saying a word to Frank.
None of this was surprising. In our world, you finished high school and got married, and if you were a girl it was a big point of pride if you didn’t get pregnant before either of those other events. I hadn’t ever thought about college, or traveling, or waiting to start my own family, or having anything that you could call a career as opposed to just a job. I lived my life like a meal that had been set in front of me, never asking if there were other choices or even if I was hungry.
But then, after Spencer came along, and I knew he’d be my last baby, without ever planning on it, I started seeing, and wanting, other things. A picture of a home office in a magazine, a description of Paris in a book, a restaurant review in the Philadelphia Inquirer of a place I knew we could never afford to go—these things, and a hundred more like them, would start a voice whispering in my head. I want, I want, I want, the voice would say. It wanted a new couch; it wanted a vacation somewhere other than Disney World or the Jersey Shore; it wanted to read the books Gabe gave me and not have to look up a word or two every page, sometimes every paragraph. When I asked the voice how on earth I could ever hope to get any of these things, the voice answered, Simple. Money.
I’d never known anyone who’d been a surrogate. A wife