• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1341 0

Lisa had stumbled on the perfect excuse and convinced him, forcibly, that it would be wrong to tell Cee Cee before they’d had a chance to tell Karen. In case of trauma. Truth was, of course, that she did not want Cee Cee to know. There was definitely a trauma factor, but it was all her own. Not that Cee Cee needed any encouragement in this area. She had apparently decided that she approved of Lisa, after all this time, and her line of questioning this week had run along such “happy families” lines that Lisa would have suspected Andy had already told her, if she didn’t know him to be so scrupulously honest and straightforward. Putting Cee Cee to bed at eight provided Lisa with some relief from the questioning about the likelihood of a new brother or sister for next New Year’s Eve.

When she got back downstairs, Andy had poured the rest of the bottle into her glass. She drank it, settling back into the crook of his arm to watch The Mask of Zorro, and they had both woken up at 12:40, having slept through the whole thing.

Jennifer

Jennifer wasn’t hungry, although it was after 10:00 P.M. and she hadn’t had anything to eat since lunchtime. She pushed her fettuccine Alfredo around the plate and sipped at her Prosecco. It was noisy and smoky. Most people were already on the way to being drunk, although it was still an hour until midnight. Revelers passed by on the street, occasionally leering unsteadily through the window where they were sitting. She wished she was at home. She wasn’t in the mood for all this good-naturedness. She spoke when spoken to, as animatedly as she could, and kept a smile frozen on her face, but, when left alone, her mind wandered to somewhere else.

It was New Year’s Eve three years ago that she and Stephen had first tried for a baby. It had felt like an appropriately adventurous thing to do, to celebrate the New Year by creating a new life. When she was a child, Jennifer used to like to see the front of the local paper the first week in January—it always carried a photograph of a smiling mother clutching the first baby of the year, born at the local hospital at two minutes past midnight on New Year’s Day…Mum used to look over her shoulder, clicking her tongue and exclaiming that being in labor was no way to spend New Year’s Eve, but she would always admire the baby, nonetheless. “You forget how small they are!”

They’d been in New York three years ago. The pound was strong against the dollar, airfares were cheap, and they’d found a little hotel off Times Square that had a good rate. They’d flown on December 28 and packed all the touristy things into a few days. The city was crowded with bargain hunters—Fifth Avenue was a jungle. It was bitterly cold; the wind whistled up the island like a thousand tiny knives, and many, many hot chocolate stops were required. Stephen bought them earmuffs from a street vendor. They’d been up the Empire State Building in bright sunshine, marveling at the urban tapestry laid out before them, danced cacophonously on the giant piano in FAO Schwartz, taken a ride around Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage, and skated—badly, and painfully—at the Rockefeller rink in the shadow of the biggest Christmas tree either of them had ever seen. Skating, it appeared, was the one sport Stephen was destined to fail at. He flailed and slid like a cartoon, landing on the hard ice from every angle, over and over. Jennifer and Lisa had begged their mum to take them skating at the rink in Queensway practically every weekend for about two years when they were about fourteen and fifteen. Although she hadn’t done it since, the memory of how to do it came flooding back when she stepped on the ice and let go of the sides.

“You can go backward!” Stephen’s tone was incredulous, but admiring. “You never said.”

“I’d forgotten. We used to go when we were kids.”

“You’re pretty good. You can do that one foot to the other glide thing.”

“I know!” She’d hunched her shoulders with delight, and sped up, no longer watching her feet.

Lapping him, she came up from behind, shouting, “Feels good to be better