I was hugging her so tight, trying to get my brain to register this monumental news. My best friend was going to be a mother.
We broke our embrace, and I swiped an unexpected tear from my eye. “Oh my God, Lis. Congratulations. Holy crap. How long have you known?”
She tried to contain her sniffles, too, announcing, “I just found out this morning. Took a test and the damned stick turned pink on me! I don’t even know why I took it, I’m not even late yet. I just had the thing lying around from a scare a few months ago. I’d gone out and bought like twenty of them.”
“You never told me about that!”
“Yeah, well, it was a shock, let me tell you. I was so panicked at the thought of being knocked up, but then I took the test and it showed up negative. It was weird, because instead of being relieved, I felt… disappointed. Pick, too. We didn’t realize that we were ready for this until then. We started trying after that.”
“Trying?” I asked. That sounded so grown-up to me. “Yeesh. It’s like you spend your whole life trying not to get preggers, it must have been strange to actually want to get knocked up. What did Pick say?”
“Oh, I woke the poor guy up at five this morning. I came running out of the bathroom wielding the pee stick, just shrieking at him. He jumped up, grabbing for his golf club under the bed before he realized I wasn’t being murdered.”
“Ha! But he’s happy?”
“Over the moon.”
“Did you tell your parents yet? Oh my God, what did your mother say?!”
“Oh, Steph just hit the roof. She woke my father up screaming and the two of them were just laughing and crying hysterically over the phone. She got all mad that I had called her about it instead of going over in person. So, I pit-stopped there before coming here, but I’ll go back with Pick after our breakfast.”
The information finally caught up with me, enough so that I had to sit down before my legs gave out. Lisa took a seat too, and I reached across the table to grab her hands, staring dumbstruck into her beaming face. “Wow. Just... wow, Lis. I can’t believe you’re actually going to have a baby. A real, live, human baby!”
“Well, God willing. I mean, it could turn out to be a T-Rex or something.”
We both laughed.
“Do you know when you’re due?” Oh God. It was just such an adult conversation. Due dates? How could I be discussing due dates with my childhood best friend? In my mind, she was perpetually seven years old.
“Well, I haven’t even called the doctor yet, but based on my calculations, I’d have to guess sometime around May?”
It was going to be quite the busy spring; planning my wedding, attending my cousin’s… and now there was a baby on the way. God… a baby! I still couldn’t wrap my brain around it.
“I’m going to be an aunt!” I suddenly declared, with marked enthusiasm.
“Well, good for you. It’s quite the accomplishment. You should be proud. I’m so happy for you. Congratulations.”
I started cracking up at Lisa’s flat tone. I knew she was kidding, but I also knew the next months were going to be a hormonal bitchfest. Lis was moody enough without the added chemical imbalance. Time to poke the bear. “Shut it. You’re just pissed that you’re gonna get fat.”
Instead of rising to my comment, she shot me a durrhurr face and said, “Oh, hey. Speaking of that… I brought Louie for you, by the way.”
I gave her a wide-eyed smile before rising out of my chair and heading over to the satchel I’d dumped near the front door. “For me?”
“Don’t look so excited, you’re only getting the stuff inside. I expect the bag back.”
I lugged the huge tote into my living room and plopped the thing onto my futon. When I unzipped it, I saw—much to my delight—an entire closet’s worth of clothes.
Before I could even ask, Lisa said, “It’s a few favorite things from my fall wardrobe. Lord knows I’ll be too fat to fit in any of it by then, so I figured at least one of us should get some use out of it.” Then she got up to fix our mimosas.
Jeez. Lisa was already getting pissy about the weight situation, but from the look of her, I’d guessed she hadn’t so much as gained a single ounce yet. The next months were going to be fun. Not.
I started tearing through everything, pulling out piece after piece, laying them out in a mound on the coffee table, spreading my favorites across the back of the sofa. Lisa was always such a clothes horse, a condition made worse during her years at the various fashion institutes she’d attended after high school. When she and Pick had first moved out to California, she’d gone to Hollywood Arts and gotten her BA in Design. But by the time they’d moved back east, Pick was earning a crazy enough salary that her education was used less toward advancing her career and more toward maxing out her credit cards. She was fond of saying that she had majored in shopping, earning her degree from the college of Neiman Marcus.