“We knew the second we laid eyes on you,” Wattie said, ignoring Rachel.
Birchie chimed in, “You look exactly like me when I was four months gone.”
“Gone where? What am I missing?” Rachel said, getting frustrated. “Who is Batman?”
She said it loud enough for him to hear us. He looked up. As soon as he saw us, he tucked his book into a gym bag at his feet. He stood, lifting one regular, ungloved hand up in an awkward wave. His shirt had a picture of the evolution of man on the front, Homo habilis at the beginning of a line of figures that grew taller and straighter. At the end of the line, a giant robot was throttling modern man. It was a joke, but it wasn’t going to play in Birchville. Neither Birchie nor Wattie thought there was anything amusing about evolution.
“You’re carrying mostly in your hind end,” Wattie said.
Birchie said, “In our family that means a boy.”
Rachel looked at each of us in a confused round-robin. She blinked, shook her head in a tiny no, and then I saw understanding come into her face. Her gaze snapped to meet mine.
“Does Mom know?” I shook my head, and her eyes widened, suddenly horrified. “Oh God! I never should have said that you were fat! You aren’t fat at all!”
Which was so perfectly Rachel that I felt a wild, hysterical bubble of a laugh rising up inside me and had to work to quash it down.
“Come along,” said Birchie, and she crossed the lawn to the porch stairs, letting out a long exhale. It was made of words, a breathy string of syllables, near silent. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” she was saying. I didn’t know if she meant Batman or her own father. The one she’d ended with a hammer. Either way, she had overdone it this morning.
I followed her. We all did. As we reached the bottom of the porch stairs, Selcouth Martin picked up his bag and came forward to the top of them. He looked different—better—than his profile pics. I’d assumed I’d looked at him through slightly rosy beer-and-tequila goggles back at FanCon, but actually he wasn’t photogenic. Now I saw the man I’d taken right upstairs to bed with me. Here was the beautiful mouth and narrow jaw, those wide-set eyes with their ridiculous long lashes. Pictures didn’t convey how well his features worked in person. Worked for me, anyway, I thought, and I felt heat come into my cheeks.
Lavender let go of our hands and went springing up the stairs, past Birchie and Wattie, and she reached him first.
“Hello, Batman,” she said, grinning up at him.
“Hello,” said Batman.
“Lavender knows your boyfriend?” Rachel asked in a whisper. Then, louder, “Wait, Lavender knows that you’re pregnant?”
Selcouth Martin heard her. His jaw went tense, and I shrugged at him, helplessly. I’d thought that he would call me back in a few days or text me for a meet-up in his TeamSpeak channel. I’d assumed I would have time to think of what should happen next. Instead next was happening right now.
“Come on in out of the heat,” Wattie told him, unlocking the door.
I followed them all in, but it didn’t feel like escaping the heat. Not a bit. I was walking into it.
19
We filed into the entryway between the parlor and the big formal dining room. Lavender had left her sticky breakfast plate and a fork with egg yolk congealing on the tines sitting out on the table, but Birchie’s house was otherwise immaculate, as always. Birchie and Wattie stopped in front of the stairs and the center hallway, turning back toward us. We formed up into a loose half circle facing them, as if we were all children who’d been varying degrees of naughty.
It was me, then Rachel, then Lav, and Selcouth Martin on the far end, holding his gym bag. Lav was sticking close to him, all big eyes and dazzled smile. I’d conjured her father, and now her hello! frog emoji had magicked Digby’s into being. She was delighted with herself.
I stole a peek down the line at him, and his face was unreadable and stoic. His arrival had been so fast it seemed decisive, as if he already knew his course. That scared me. My mind ticked through scenarios: He was here to demand I sign a paper absolving him of fatherhood. No, he wanted to claim shared custody from the get-go. Could he legally make me mail a brand-new baby twelve hours away from Norfolk every other weekend? I’d called because Digby deserved to have a father, to know his father’s family. But now Selcouth Martin was here in Birchville. He was a real, whole person. He had a heartbeat and a brain full of his own ideas. I was terrified of what those ideas might be.
I stopped, frozen in the entry with my family like a deer who feels safer in the center of a herd. But deer couldn’t talk. What a luxury! I wished I couldn’t either, the second I started to introduce him and realized that I’d never heard him say his name. Not sober. Not that I remembered. What if I said “Sel-cowth” and he corrected me—Actually, it’s Sel-coth—making it instantly plain that I was pregnant by a man whose name I did not know how to say? Which was true, actually, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d put on a birth announcement. I couldn’t very well declare, Y’all, this is Batman, like I was Lavender. Introducing him as Mr. Martin seemed way too formal, considering that I was chock-full of his baby.
So I floundered. It was only a second of gigged silence, but Birchie sailed into the gap, so fast that even my socially adept stepsister was left in her mannerly dust.
“I’m Emily Birch Briggs, young man. Leia’s grandmother,” she announced, stepping forward with her hand out. Her eyes were still overbright, as if a blue-hot fire had been lit behind them. “And you are?”
“Selcouth Martin,” he said, shaking her hand. Sel-cooth, so at least I knew that now. He added, “Most of mmmm . . . I go by Sel.”
“We are all, as you can imagine, very interested to meet you, Mr. Martin,” my grandmother said, seemingly in control, but there’d been rabbits afoot already this morning, and then that “Daddy” chanting in the yard. She was pale, and though the house was so cool the air had a crisp edge to it, a fine sheen of sweat was forming on her forehead. “How long have you known about the baby, is my question.”
Selcouth—Sel—took a quick peek at his watch and said, “Uh . . . about seven hours?”
“Six hours and fifty-five minutes longer than I have,” Rachel said to me, sotto voce and a little snotty.
“Well, he is the father,” I whispered back. He would have had a much bigger lead on her, in an ideal world. One where I knew his agenda and how to pronounce his name. My head was still spinning with sinister reasons for his instapresence, my worst-case scenarios expanding at both ends: He wanted primary custody. He was going to try to bully me into an abortion.
“And yet my teenage daughter knows?” Rachel whispered, and I missed the first part of whatever Wattie was saying.