Something passed through his eyes then, a sadness, maybe, that made her wish she hadn’t asked the question. “Yes.”
They stared at each other. She saw the way he was trying to smile and it wounded her, made her feel closer to him. She knew about disappointment. “I’m not like that other girl, you know.”
“I know.” He backed up, as if he wanted to put some distance between them, and sat down on the sofa.
She went to the coffee table and sat down on it. “What kind of father would you be?”
The question seemed to jolt him. He flinched, looked down at his hands. It took him a long time to answer, and when he finally did, his voice was soft. “There, I guess. I wouldn’t miss a thing. Not a game, not a school play, not a dentist appointment.” He looked up. “I’d take her—or him—to the park and the beach and the movies.”
Lauren’s breath caught in her throat. Longing tightened her chest. She hadn’t realized until just then, with that quietly spoken answer, that what she’d really been asking was: What does a father do?
He looked at her, and in his eyes, she saw that sadness again, and a new understanding.
She felt transparent suddenly, vulnerable. She stood up. “I guess I’ll go read. I just started the new Stephen King book.”
“We could go to the movies,” he said gently. “To Have and Have Not is playing downtown.”
She barely had a voice. “I’ve never heard of it.”
He stood up beside her. “Bogart and Bacall? The greatest screen pair of all time? That’s criminal. Come on. Let’s go.”
May roared across western Washington. Day after day dawned bright and hot. All over town roses burst into fragrant bloom. Overnight, it seemed, the baskets that hung along Driftwood Way went from spindly, gray, and unnoticeable, to riotous cascades of color. Purple lobelia, red gardenia, yellow pansies, and lavender phlox. The air smelled of fresh flowers, and salt water, and kelp baking beneath a hot sun.
People came out of their homes slowly, blinking mole-like at the brightness. Kids ripped open their closets and burrowed through everything, looking for last year’s cutoffs and a shirt without sleeves or a fleece lining. Later, their mothers stood in those same bedrooms, hands on hips, staring at the piles of winter clothes, hearing the whirl of bike wheels outside and the laughter of children who’d been hiding from the rain for too many months.
Soon—after Memorial Day—the town would begin to fill up with tourists. They would arrive in hordes, by car, by bus, by recreational vehicle, carrying their fishing gear, reading tide charts. The empty stretch of sandy beach would call out to them inexorably, drawing them to the sea in words so old and elemental the visitors could no longer say what had brought them here. But come they would.
To those who had lived in West End always, or to those who had survived a few wet winters, the tourists were good news/bad news. No one doubted that their money kept this town going, fixed the roads and bought the school supplies and paid the teachers. They also caused traffic and crowds and lines ten people long at the grocery checkout.
On the first Saturday in May, Lauren woke up early, unable to find a comfortable position in which to sleep. She slipped into clothes—a pair of elephant-waisted stretch leggings and a gauzy tent blouse with bell-shaped sleeves—then looked out her bedroom window.
The sky was a beautiful lavender-pink that seemed to backlight the black trees. She decided to go outside. She felt closeted-in here, too confined. She tiptoed past Angie and Conlan’s closed door.
She crept downstairs, grabbed the soft angora blanket off the sofa, and went outside. The gentle, lapping sound of the surf was an instant balm to her ragged nerves. She felt herself calming down, breathing evenly again.
She stood at the porch railing for all of ten minutes before her feet started hurting.
This pregnancy was really starting to suck. Her feet hurt, her heart burned, her head ached half the time, and her baby was starting to hurl through her stomach like a gymnast. The worst part of it all was the Lamaze classes that she and Angie attended every week. The pictures were terrifying. Poor David had gone to one class and begged to be let go. In truth, she’d been glad to let him. She wanted Angie beside her when the time came. Lauren was pretty sure that breathing hard in a ha-ha-ha pattern wouldn’t get her through the pain. She’d need Angie.
Last night she’d had the dream again, the one in which she was a little girl dressed in a bright green J.C. Penney dress and holding her mother’s hand. She felt so safe with that strong hand wrapped around her tiny fingers. Come on now, her dream mother said. We don’t want to be late.
What they were going to be late for, Lauren didn’t know. Sometimes it was church, sometimes it was school, sometimes it was a dinner with Daddy. All she knew was that she would have followed that mommy anywhere.…