Now that she was actually on her way to the dinner, Olivia reviewed all the reasons why she would never date Pete Lancelotta. No matter what she added or subtracted from the list, she always ended with the same thing: Pete was not David.
When she pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant and saw Janice and Carl’s car parked right beside Pete’s, she had to fight the desire to turn around and surprise Ruby at the movie. She sat in her car and looked at the name of the restaurant: Angel’s. Maybe, Olivia thought, David had sent Ruby her way. Maybe he was in heaven, or wherever it was people went, and he’d found Ruby for her. She imagined David screening potential people to help her get along without him. Certainly he had eliminated Amy and Pete Lancelotta. But then he’d come across Ruby. A pregnant girl who did not want her baby. And David had said, Yes! You! As crazy as Olivia knew this was, she almost believed it. Sitting there in that parking lot under a sign that said ANGEL’S, Olivia finally felt David’s presence.
A loud knock on her car window startled her.
There stood Janice, peering in.
“Are you okay?” Janice shouted, loudly enough for Olivia to hear through the closed window and above the car’s air conditioner.
Olivia didn’t turn the car off. She rolled down the window, swallowing a mouthful of muggy summer air.
“I am,” she said. She struggled to explain it all to Janice. David had sent her Ruby. He had sent her the baby they never got to make together. But she couldn’t find the words to say to Janice, who was standing there in her pink dress and white sandals, all dressed up for a dinner out.
Instead, Olivia said, “Pal?” softly into the summer night. “Thanks.” Her voice was a whisper. Despite the heat, a shiver ran up Olivia’s spine, making the back of her neck tingle.
“Uh,” Janice said, glancing over her shoulder, “we’re all inside waiting.”
“You know what?” Olivia said, almost lightheartedly. “I can’t do this.”
“You can,” Janice said. “It’s just friends. A dinner.” She glanced back again. “They have really good calamari.”
Olivia shook her head. “The thing is, I’m working on this project.”
She would go home and paint the nursery the way she and David had discussed once, with murals—a cow jumping over the moon, Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill, Humpty-Dumpty. “You’ll paint it the way a kid’s room should be,” David had told her, and she’d imagined it, the brightly colored walls depicting a child’s world. He’d had faith in her to do it right. And she would.
Janice was reaching in to take her arm, to lead her out of the car and into the restaurant toward Pete Lancelotta and the good calamari, but Olivia resisted.
She said, “I’m sorry, Janice.”
Janice stepped back. On her face, Olivia read a whole world of emotion—Poor Olivia, she was thinking; Olivia was certain of that.
“I’m okay,” Olivia said. “I am.”
What Olivia imagined was that she would sit down and plan the room. She would go home and dig through her portfolio, the one she used to carry in the trunk of her car, the one full of graph paper and different points for her drawing pens, the one that had been under her bed since last September. She would sit at the kitchen table and begin. When Ruby came home from the movie—and Olivia could see the moment, Ruby’s face shiny from buttered popcorn, and her breath sweet from an extralarge soda—she would find Olivia there, drawing, and together they would construct the room for the baby.
But instead, Olivia came in and heard the television upstairs. Ruby was home already. Or perhaps she had been too tired to go to the movie after all. The theater was a short walk from the house, and Olivia had seen Ruby start off. But she must have turned around. She got tired so easily.
Olivia rushed up the stairs, eager to begin.
She expected to see Ruby in Olivia’s bed, in Olivia’s nightgown, all the pillows behind her and food strewn everywhere and some silly sitcom on—Ruby loved them, all of them, with their fake versions of life in New York City and ridiculous friendships and canned laughter.
But what she found was this: Ruby large and naked—and Olivia had not seen her naked, was unprepared for the large misshapen belly and jutting belly button and blue-veined breasts—sprawled out on the bed, her cheeks flushed, her face pink. Beside her, also naked, was a boy, a teenager, with long blond hair to his shoulders and a dark tan and the kind of muscles that stand out even when the person isn’t trying to show them off. They were lying together, tangled, familiar, eating the gourmet popcorn that Winnie had sent—jalape?o.
Olivia stood in the doorway, too shocked to be embarrassed.
The bluish lights from the TV screen made them look otherworldly; as if a very pregnant naked teenager and a naked boy weren’t otherworldly enough. Olivia thought she smelled marijuana. There was the canned laughter, and then the two of them laughed, too, a beat behind.