“What?” Rachel says. The tea has fresh mint in it.
“I’m pregnant,” Mary says, squeezing Rachel’s arm with both of her cold, dry hands.
“Pregnant?” Rachel repeats, and her own stomach does a strange flop.
“Fourteen weeks,” Mary tells her.
It comes back to Rachel, how in pregnancy time is counted week by week. It takes her a moment to calculate.
“Why, that’s over three months!” Rachel says finally.
Mary’s face clouds. “Don’t be mad,” she says, still gripping Rachel’s arm. “I would have told you sooner, but I felt so superstitious. It’s silly, I suppose. But we’ve been trying for two years—”
“You have?” Rachel asks, startled. Of course Mary wouldn’t have told her that; they really aren’t good enough friends for such an intimacy. Rachel used to refer to Mary as one of her “Mommy friends,” the women she saw for play dates or in the playground or at Story Hour at the local bookstore. With her other friends, the ones she often thought of as her real friends, she sometimes made fun of the other mothers, their competitiveness, their ability to discuss trivial things endlessly. With her real friends, Rachel drank wine and rented foreign movies and stayed up too late; with her Mommy friends she put on a different, more placid face.
Somehow, she supposed, watching Mary’s concerned expression, Mary fell somewhere in between.
“You are angry,” Mary is saying. “It was silly of me to not tell you sooner. I just didn’t want to jinx it, that’s all.”
“I was the same way,” Rachel lies. “With Sofia. I waited forever to tell people.”
Really she called everyone, immediately. She can still remember staring at the bright pink circle on the home pregnancy test while she dialed the phone. But Mary looks relieved.
“I just didn’t want to jinx it,” she says again. “You hear so many stories.” Her face softens. “I’m so glad you’re not mad at me,” she says.
IT IS PETER’S weekend to have Sofia. These Fridays leave Rachel with such a mixed feeling—glad to have some time to herself, but jealous too, of all the hours he will have with Sofia. Packing her daughter’s Little Mermaid suitcase, folding the baby doll pajamas, and tucking her Madeline doll in the zipper compartment, Rachel knows that it is not just the hours Peter will have with their daughter; it’s the hours Yvonne will have. When Peter left them and moved in with Yvonne, everyone told Rachel it would never last. He’ll be back, they assured her. But now, three years later, Peter and Yvonne are still together, cozily ensconced in a cottage at the beach.
Although Rachel has never been there, she imagines it every time Sofia drives off with them for the weekend. Weathered shingles, dark green shutters, Adirondack chairs overlooking the water. Some of these details she’s gleaned from Sofia, or the dozens of pictures Yvonne and Peter take and send home with her. Others she makes up—sheer curtains, a clawfoot tub, botanical prints. And of course the animals. Sofia talks about them by name. Lulu Gus Annabelle Rusty MacNamara Beatrice Bubba. But Rachel gives them faces, breeds. She imagines two tabby cats, an Irish setter, several mutts, and a pair of cockatiels. Peter is a veterinarian, and he cannot resist a hurt or homeless animal. The one thing Rachel does not miss about her marriage is all the hours nursing strays, making splints for bunnies, or cleaning wounds. She lost an Afghan to blindness, a cat to feline leukemia, several dogs to hit and runs. It was too much. Now, she and Sofia keep goldfish. When one dies, they unceremoniously flush it down the toilet and go and buy a new one. Rachel likes that. You don’t invest emotion in goldfish.
Outside, a horn beeps.
Rachel looks down the three stories to the street below, where Peter and Yvonne sit in his blue Honda, the same one he and Rachel picked out when she was pregnant with Sofia. It was reliable, they thought. Sensible. A good family car.
Sofia runs in to get her suitcase.
“Did you forget Madeline?” she asks. She stands on tiptoe and peeks out the window too.
“No,” Rachel says, snippy. She has never forgotten to pack the doll, yet Sofia asks her every time.
Sofia swoops her suitcase from the bed, and begins to skip away.
“We’re going for chowder and clamcakes,” she says, grinning.
Her hair needs to be combed again, Rachel notices. And there is a spot of something bright blue in the middle of her Simba tee shirt. She will come back neater, bathed and shampooed with expensive beauty products made from papaya and mango and coconut. After her last weekend there, she returned with a white rope bracelet that she has refused to take off her wrist, even though it grows dingier every day.
“Have fun,” Rachel says, trying to sound cheerful.
Sofia hesitates, frowning in the doorway.
The horn beeps again.
Sofia runs back into the room and hugs Rachel around the legs, hard, so that she is thrown slightly off balance.