“Can I see it?”
“Yeah, of course.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket and gave it to my mom. “She had to circle the baby, because in the earlier sonogram she sent, I couldn’t see the fetus.”
My parents shared a look. “I see,” said my mom carefully. Then I focused on eating my fettuccine alfredo as quickly as I could to get away from their questions.
I felt bad for not talking to my parents much, but they weren’t that chatty normally. I talked to them fairly regularly, so there wasn’t much to catch up on. I went back to my room to read more of my book.
My birthday was tomorrow. My mom had already asked me what kind of cake I wanted weeks ago; I didn’t have an answer. We used to get fruit tarts from Marsh, but now that Kroger was there, I didn’t know if they made the same kind of pastries. I was fine with sheet cake, but I wondered what my dad could eat with his newly diagnosed diabetes. I wondered if they made sugar-free cheesecake. When my dad was first diagnosed, I went and looked up a lot of snacks. There were things called fat bombs made of cream cheese. Maybe we could make something special at home. It was kind of a bummer to give up on the fruit tarts that we normally had. Mom didn’t like sheet cakes because it was too sweet for her. With diabetes, I guessed that fruit tarts would be out of the question.
I wandered out of my room to talk to Mom, who was loading the dishwasher. “What are we going to do for cake tomorrow?”
“Either you and I can get a cake for two, or we can bake something with a sugar substitute at home.”
“I saw a recipe for fat bombs.”
“What are those?”
“It’s just peanut butter, cream cheese, and a sugar substitute blended together at room temperature and frozen for two hours.”
“That doesn’t sound too hard.” Mom looked at me and said, “Do you have the recipe?”
I pulled it up on my phone and handed it to her. “I guess that’s what we’ll have for your birthday. Thanks for being flexible, honey.”
“I want Dad to be able to participate,” I said. “I’m hardly going to eat cake in front of a diabetic.”
“Kroger doesn’t have the same kind of pastries, sweetheart. Your dad would love a fruit tart, but he can’t have them right now.”
“I’m okay with it,” I replied.
“You know I love having you around, but I have to ask why you’re home so early. You could have come home tomorrow. I thought you liked spending time with Logan.”
“Annabelle doesn’t want me there anymore,” I said in a flat tone of voice.
“Oh.” My mom shook her head. “With kids, you never know.”
I felt more sadness wash over me. “I’m going to turn in soon.”
“Sure, honey.” She gave me a hug. “We’re always right here for you.”
I loved my parents even though they were old-fashioned in a lot of ways. My mother thought automatically that I would be regularly sleeping with Logan if I slept over at his house. The first night had been spent in the guest bedroom. I’d sleep-walked all my life. I knew I was probably too hesitant to sleep with him again so soon otherwise.
“Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Candace. Happy birthday to you.” My mom didn’t bother with candles when it came to the fat bombs, but she’d rolled them in cocoa nibs so we had something my dad could eat. I bit into the cold fat bomb; it tasted like chocolate and peanut butter cheesecake.
All my friends, including Bianca, were back in New York; I hadn’t spoken to my Hoosier friends in years. It was so easy to lose touch nowadays, especially since I could pretend that hitting Like on a Facebook post was contact. My birthday was just my parents sitting down with me and celebrating my thirtieth birthday.
It was easy to envy my friends who had kids. They had more people who loved them to celebrate their birthdays with. I wished that things hadn’t gotten so weird at Logan’s house. He had already texted me happy birthday this morning without any mention of anything else.
After kissing both of my parents on the cheek, I went back to my bedroom and cried myself to sleep as silently as I could. Maybe tomorrow would be better.
Chapter 17
Two Months Later
“You look like shit.” Bianca’s greeting was blunt and went straight to the point. I was back in New York now and had been acting like a zombie. At first, my assistant plunked down everything that had been piling up while I was away. I’d had to catch up with a week’s worth of work while handling the incoming work. Bianca had asked me out for brunch on a Saturday; I’d accepted because I didn’t know what else to do with myself if I didn’t put my head down and keep going on the barrage of emails that always accumulated every day.
“I haven’t been sleeping well.” Understatement. I kept having dreams about Logan. I wished I could go back to Indiana and sleep in his bed again.
“Do you want to see more sonogram pictures?”
“Okay.” Bianca fiddled with her phone for a little while before handing it to me. She had a whole album marked “Baby”; it had a lot of sonogram pictures.
“Cute.” I didn’t know what else to say. The baby wasn’t real to me; Bianca’s stomach looked the same as ever.
“Dex has been buying baby books to read to the baby. I told him that the baby isn’t even born yet and can’t read. He or she won’t be able to for a few years, but he read something about making sure that the baby is surrounded by books.”
I had no idea when little kids started to read. “Do kids read around five?”
“Something like that.”
“He’s really starting the baby early, then.”
Bianca beamed at me and gently rubbed her stomach. “I’m okay with it. He’s been reading parenting manuals; my mom told him that kids don’t come with a manual, but he has bought enough of them to say definitively that kids do come with manuals. There are a lot of books about how to be a dad now.”
“Your mileage may vary. I have no idea how good any dad manuals are. I’ve been reading parenting magazines for a long time, though.”
Bianca took a sip of her water. “What about you? What have you been doing?”
“Work.”
“What about your vacation fling?”
I shrugged at the question. “He hasn’t been in touch.” He hadn’t called me. I was holding myself back from initiating with him. I knew that Annabelle was much more important than me.
“You can contact him, you know.”
“I know.” I took a sip of my own water. “But it was just a fling.”
“Having a vacation fling doesn’t leave you looking like death. There are huge circles under your eyes.”
I touched one of the bags under my eyes. “I know.” I didn’t have much more to add, really. My vacation had been relaxing in some ways, but it was straight back into the grind when I came back. “I’ve been so stressed out I didn’t have my period this month.”
“There’s more than one reason to skip a period.” Bianca frowned at me. “Did you use protection?”