She tried to distract herself from the temptation to call Derrick by researching the complications Kyle’s friend might face. According to one site on the internet, 40 percent of infants born to women who’d had a liver or kidney transplant were premature, so it was probably fortunate that Callie’s pregnancy had lasted as long as it did. Four weeks wasn’t as early as it could’ve been.
Callie was still looking at a whole list of dangers, however—high blood pressure, kidney infection, preeclampsia and cholestasis, to name a few. The baby faced its fair share of peril, too—stunted growth, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, various infections and immune deficiencies, even birth defects. To make the situation even less certain, there hadn’t been sufficient testing to determine the effects that some of the newer antirejection drugs might have on an infant. Lourdes couldn’t even guess what Callie had been taking, of course. It could be corticosteroids, cyclosporine, azathioprine, tacrolimus or a whole host of others she saw listed on various websites. But Callie was likely on several. Everything Lourdes read suggested someone in Callie’s situation would have to be, and Kyle had said as much, too.
Lourdes could understand why he was worried. She was worried for Callie, too. But reading about childbirth was making her uncomfortable for other reasons. She was fairly certain she wanted to be a mother someday, but she couldn’t really see that happening if she stayed on her current course. Derrick didn’t seem particularly interested in raising kids. He never talked about it and put her off if she brought it up. She felt that at forty he should be more interested if he was ever going to be interested. They were both too involved in the constant challenges of the music business. Chasing success was like an all-consuming drug, so all-consuming that when she was in Nashville, it was easy to feel nothing else mattered.
Here in Whiskey Creek, however, she had to ask herself if chasing her dream meant she’d miss out on another important aspect of life.
Stop, she told herself. Even if she and Derrick could get past their current problems, she couldn’t have a child anytime soon. Her career would be completely dead if she had to pull away for even a few extra months—and trying to resuscitate it afterward would be almost as hard as starting over. How would she juggle those long days and late nights with a new baby?
She went to the couch and strummed her guitar, but she couldn’t shake the idea that she was standing on the verge of taking one of two very different paths. That reminded her of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” She could still recite some of it. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...”
Could the downturn in her career be a wake-up call? she wondered. A chance to stand back and reassess, to decide whether she really wanted to exchange fame and fortune for everything else?
Her phone rang. Once she reclaimed it from the dining table, she saw that it was Derrick—and silenced it. But when he called back again and again, she finally slid the answer button to the right.
“What do you want?” she snapped. Her uncertainty about him—about so many aspects of her life—left her unprepared to talk to him.
“Don’t be mad. Come on. I miss you, babe. You can’t be serious about Crystal. She has nothing on you.”
He’d been drinking. She could hear it in the way he slurred his words. “Mad? That’s what you think? That I’m mad, and when I calm down it’ll all go away?”
“That’s what I’m hoping. You must be on the rag to be so bitchy.”
She almost couldn’t believe her ears. “Could you be any more dismissive of my feelings and concerns? Any more disrespectful to women in general?”
“I wouldn’t suggest it if it wasn’t true. You get like this when it’s that time of the month.”
“No, I don’t,” she argued, getting up to pace. “I’m having a legitimate problem with the attention you’re devoting to Crystal, and I’ve had that problem for months. How dare you blame it on my hormones!”
“It’s jealousy, plain and simple!”
“In addition to feeling as if I’m being misled!”