Chapter 5

I hesitated, my finger poised to click, before I pulled my hand away. I wasn’t sure and it was a lot to spend on something that I wasn’t sure about. Ok, I’d need a second opinion.

Even before I got it, my phone rang. “Hi,” I answered Nicola.

“Brenna says that you just texted her, asking about clothes,” she responded. “You’re shopping? For yourself?”

She sounded so hopeful and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like to think that she needed to feel hopeful about me, because I was fine. That was why, perhaps, my answer came out slightly angrily. “Holy Mary! Don’t you two have anything better to do than gossip about my online shopping?”

“No, not really. Oh, hold on.”

I distinctly heard the noise of her vomiting and then I listened to her husband Jude helping her. “She’ll call you right back, ok, Soph?” he said into the phone, and hung up.

Poor Nic. But she sounded close to normal when she called again. “I’m ok,” she assured me. “I’m feeling a lot better, actually. I have a lot more energy.”

I remained a skeptic but resolved to be nicer, even when she resumed grilling me. “I’m doing a little shopping and I’m sorry that I forgot to send out alerts,” I told her. “It’s no big deal.”

“Is this because of Daniel Ryder?”

Well, partially. “I just wanted some new stuff,” I answered testily, and Nicola responded with enthusiasm.

“I think that’s great! Why don’t we go shopping together? I want to look at baby stuff—oh,” she said, breaking off. “Patrick is calling me.”

He never called us. “Something’s wrong,” I said, and she hung up.

I forgot about the items in my cart as I waited to hear what was happening, and I even took a walk up and down my block to try to escape my worry. I was still pacing the sidewalk when Danny turned into the street and when he got out of his truck, he came to join me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You’re doing your hair thing. You used to do that while we waited to get a test handed back and you were worried about your grade.”

I realized that I was, in fact, making giant tangles by twirling it around my fingers. My hair was mostly straight, just turning under a little at the ends, and mostly neat if left on its own. It probably wasn’t that way right now. “Something’s happening with Patrick and he called Nicola. I’m afraid it’s about the baby but no one knows anything.”

“Maybe it’s coming right now. He would want to talk to his big sister, since she has medical experience.”

“Maybe.” Patrick always made me furious but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, or to that kid. “Maybe something’s going wrong. Nic wouldn’t have texted us because she never wants us to worry. She’s always trying to protect us, like we aren’t adults now!”

“Because she loves you.”

I blinked, trying not to cry. “I told everyone that he called her and we’re all freaking out, anyway.”

“Did you tell your mom?”

I looked at him scornfully. I was an old hand at this rodeo. “Of course not! She’ll be the last to know if it’s something bad so we can figure out how to deal with it. So it probably is something bad, because Patrick would have called Mom first if it was good news. He knows he can depend on Nic if…” I stopped because my voice had broken.

“Hey, hey.” Danny reached out and took my hand. “It’s ok. Whatever it is, you guys will be able to face it together.” He wrapped his other hand around mine, too. “You’re really cold. Let’s go inside.”

I nodded, but when he started to head toward my side of the street, I shook my head. “No, I’d rather go to your house,” I said, and he looked surprised but changed direction. I sat in the little room off his kitchen, where he’d put a table and chairs, and he got out two bottles of beer.

“Do you want something to eat?” he suggested, and I checked the time on my phone. It was around the hour that most people had dinner but over the past few years, I’d gotten out of the habit of regular mealtimes. I also saw that I had no messages, calls, or emails. Nothing.

I picked my head up and stared at Danny, thinking that he had grown up without a mother, as this baby would. If this baby was ok. Danny had been ok, hadn’t he? He hadn’t needed that person; he wouldn’t have needed her now. But a baby…I checked my phone again.

“Sophie? Are you hungry?”

“What? Oh, no. No, thank you,” I answered, and he asked if I cared if he ate. “I’ll keep you company if that’s ok,” I suggested, because I didn’t want to leave. We talked as he moved around the kitchen, mostly about what we’d been doing that day before disaster may have struck. It did help me to relax—

The notification from my phone startled me so much that I knocked it off the table by mistake. Danny picked it up and handed it over, and when I read the message, I slumped a little.

“Sophie!” He had grabbed my shoulders. “What’s the matter?”

“No, it’s ok,” I told him. My voice broke again. “They’re ok. You were right and the baby came. That text was from my mom in the group chat saying it’s a girl.”

He breathed out, expelling a big breath. “Thank fuck for that. I’ve never seen you so upset.”

I was reading the message again and new ones started to fly back and forth, too. “She’s very small,” I said. “Nicola sounds worried. The baby is in the NICU right now. Patrick…oh, that crap head. He left the hospital because he says it’s too much for him. I guess that’s why Nicola didn’t answer us for a while, because she was busy reaming him out and talking to the roommate of the baby’s mother. At least that poor woman has someone there to help her, a friend.”

I kept reading. Nic was saying that she should fly to San Francisco and my mom was jumping in to say no, that she would. Juliet was quiet, although I knew that she wanted to be there herself. She didn’t have the money to buy a ticket, and maybe I should have bought it for her? No, she couldn’t miss work if she was already worried about getting fired.

“This is no good for Nicola,” I stated. “I’ve had enough.” I slammed my fingers into the keys and turned the phone over when I was done. For a moment, it stopped notifying me of more messages.

“What did you say to them?” he asked.

“That they were all being ridiculous. Mom needs to stop making this about her, talking about how she’s feeling and going on about her own memories of having us. Brenna has to stop telling even worse birth stories about women and babies who actually died. Nicola can’t go to California, full stop, so she needs to close all the ticket-booking websites. Patrick has to refasten his diaper, get his butt back to the hospital, and figure out how to support his baby and the woman he impregnated because he didn’t have a condom so he told her that he was sterile.”

“Holy shit. He really did that?” Danny shook his head.

“Would you ever have told a lie like that?”

He jerked back a little in what seemed like revulsion. “Hell, no! As much as I may have wanted to sleep with someone, I never lied to help my chances.”

“I didn’t think you would,” I said. “I wish Patrick hadn’t.” My phone finally made a noise and I checked it again. Then I stared at the screen and covered my mouth with a shaking hand.

“What? What’s the matter now?”

I showed him. It was a picture of Patrick’s red-faced, scrunched-up, baby daughter.

“Oh,” he said, and he smiled. “She’s beautiful!”

I turned the screen to look again. “I agree, but Brenna just wrote that she looks like an angry strawberry.”

He started to laugh. “Maybe there’s a little bit of that. I wish she didn’t have those tubes in her.”

“Nicola just explained what they all are and why she has them.” I read it back to him, and since he didn’t get sick like Juliet did with medical stuff, he listened as he filled two plates with the dinner he’d made and put them down on the table.

“Try,” he suggested, when I didn’t make a move to eat. “I remember you getting pretty sharp when you were hungry.”

I did try and after a slow start, I finished most of the serving he’d given me. The worry had made me hungry, I guessed. “Thank you,” I told him and just as I did, someone rang the doorbell.

He looked over at me and his face got solemn. “That’s Carrington.”

“Oh, sugar!” I almost choked on the bite I’d taken and had to gulp the rest of my beer, which had gotten fairly warm. “Did you know that she was coming now?”

“Yeah. It’s fine,” he told me. “I’m allowed to have guests in my house.”

“But remember the last time she saw me? She got mad,” I reminded him, in case he’d forgotten. I didn’t personally care if she was mad at me but I didn’t want to cause a problem for Danny.

“She may again,” he said, and went to answer the door. I sat for a moment, listening to him quietly talking to her in the other room, before I got up to clean the kitchen. I bet his dishwasher worked, so I filled it, and then I started to scrub the pasta pot. I was elbow-deep in suds when they walked into the kitchen.

Carrington stared at me. “Well. You look right at home.”

“Hi,” I answered, and rinsed off the soap. “I’m here because I ran into Danny on the street when I was upset. He invited me in to be nice.”

“ Daniel already told me that,” she stated. “There’s nothing that you have to explain.” She eyed me. “Are you feeling better now?”

Her tone made those words sound more like a “get out, you witch” statement than a genuine question about my emotional well-being. “I’m feeling great,” I answered. “Amazing. I have a new niece.”

“Wow, how wonderful.” Again, her tone said something different, more like, “I could not give even one single crap about that. Next.”

“Do you like kids?” I asked innocently, but this girl hadn’t gotten into her private college because her parents donated a building. Or, not entirely for that. She was smart enough to catch on to my trap and she looked up briefly at Danny before breaking out into a big smile.

“I love kids,” she announced, her words dripping with sincerity.

“That’s wonderful. I truly believe you,” I answered, just as sincere. “Ok, I’m leaving now. Goodbye, Carrington. Daniel,” I said, and nodded at him. “Thank you for your help tonight. I really appreciate it.”

He nodded back and I left, but I saw him watching me from his window to make sure I got inside.

I spent a while on my phone talking to my sisters, my mom, and even my brother. He’d previously been yelled at (badly) by Nicola and maybe even by JuJu, too. Most of our conversation consisted of him saying that he was sorry and me responding that he needed to apologize to the mother of his child and to the baby herself, because he’d started out her life by deserting her.

It wasn’t the best look, I reminded him, and he had six siblings who would always remember this day. His answer was that we all knew how he’d never been able to deal with stress, and when he hung up, I had to put my face into the pillow to scream. How in the holy heck was he going to be a parent? How?

The screaming thing made me wish that I had sheets, because the pillow hadn’t smelled good and I considered that it wasn’t very clean without a case on it. Dirt didn’t bother me much, except I’d felt a rush of embarrassment and hadn’t wanted Danny—excuse me, Daniel to come over today. I got up and walked through my house, looking around and trying to act as I always did for my clients. For my job, I had to gather evidence methodically and without judgement, and then I had to combine it into an impartial report, free of prejudice and opinion.

Most of my sisters were hypercritical but that didn’t mean a normal person would be. I tried to look at my house as an outsider, someone without a dog in the fight…and I decided that yes, there might be a problem. It wasn’t very neat, that was something I noticed right off the bat. There was a lot of stuff around, because I didn’t bother about putting everything away once it was out. It was only me in here, after all; I wasn’t trying to impress anyone else. And certainly, no one would have been impressed by the neatness. They might have been surprised by the lack of it.

The kitchen was a bit messy. The problem in there wasn’t just stuff out of its proper place, but also some old food that I should have thrown away (I’d given up on the refrigerator and unplugged it, but I’d left its contents on the counter). The sink was full of dishes, because the dishwasher still wasn’t working and I didn’t actually have a sponge or soap to do them by hand. I’d been having a lot of carry-out and there were some containers around.

No, there were a lot of containers around, if I looked at the situation honestly. There was also a pile of cans that should have been recycled, but I hadn’t gotten to that chore in a while. And there were trash bags, too, which I hadn’t been bringing to the curb regularly. Since Naked Night, I’d been concerned about my safety on that trip.

The bathroom also wasn’t good. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d actually cleaned it. The bedroom? Not much better. The floors were a different color from what I remembered and the windows weren’t very clear anymore. Even my furniture was a bit of a problem. I had a little habit of bringing home things I’d found, either at garage sales or just on the sidewalk, because I thought that I could fix them up and use them. I never did fix much, though, and my sisters (besides Grace) refused to sit on any of my chairs. One of them had called my couch rancid—that was Brenna, of course.

I did locate some sheets, and I put them on the bed before I went to sleep that night. Then I got up again, went back to my laptop, and opened my shopping cart. I looked over the items in it, all of the clothes that I’d been hesitating about. Brenna had already written back that they weren’t totally revolting, and that was as good as a round of applause from her.

I hit the button hard and bought them all. Then I went back to bed, to the clean sheets…sugar, I might not have washed them before I put them away.

A few days later, my order hadn’t arrived so I wore my old things to a family meeting at Nicola’s house. Our mom had already taken off for California and our dad was, as usual, at work, so it was just us sisters. It was better that way; we got more accomplished when it was the six of us.

“Oh, yum,” Juliet said when Nicola’s husband walked out of their kitchen with a giant tray of sandwiches. He’d been working a lot on improving his cooking and we were all happy to help him by tasting it.

“Do you want anything else?” he asked his wife. “How about more ranch to sip?”

“No, thanks. I’m good,” she told him, and he leaned down and put his forehead to hers. They smiled at each other.

“You’re drinking ranch dressing?” Juliet asked doubtfully, and Nicola turned on her with fire in her eyes.

“It stays down and I like it!” she hissed, and the rest of us nodded as if that was obviously a normal thing to do and JuJu was an idiot. We knew not to argue with Nicola and we were all on Team Ranch.

“What are we going to do about Patrick?” Addie broke in. “I couldn’t believe how he acted when the baby was born!”

“Really? You couldn’t believe that he would run away and behave like a little boy?” I asked skeptically. “That’s exactly what he did when Liv needed him when they were engaged. That’s why she wouldn’t have touched him with tongs when he wanted to get back together.”

“Ok, well, that’s over and done with, so we can move on,” JuJu said quickly. “There’s no need to keep bashing him.”

“I want to bash,” Brenna piped up, and even Grace nodded and added that Patrick sucked.

“What are you going to do when they come home and you’re all living together?” I asked her curiously. “Things are going to change around the house.”

“I’m moving out,” she said, and we all stared.

“What? Where are you going?”

“I’m working on that,” she informed us, and I rolled my eyes. Sure. I wouldn’t hold my breath for any changes in that quarter and until Grace left, Patrick and the baby (and maybe my mom doing yoga) would be in the same room. He had never been great about sharing, either, mostly because he’d never had to. My sisters and I had passed down clothes, bowling shoes, books (and in one unfortunate case, a boyfriend)—but my brother’s things were mostly new and also undivided. He’d never gotten only two pairs of socks for himself like when Nicola, Addie, and I had to divvy up a six-pack. We hadn’t been allowed to go into his room without permission, we hadn’t been allowed to touch his stuff. We had anyway, but he’d gotten furious.

Part of his selfishness had been borne out of practical reasons: there was no older son above him in our pecking order, so there were no male-specific hand-me-downs. But most of his absorption in himself sprang from the fact that in our family, he was special. Different. He was the only boy, and now he’d given the family another girl. I wondered how my mom was dealing with that.

She was also on my big sister’s mind. “I wonder how Mom is really doing in San Francisco,” Nicola said. “She keeps texting all those platitudes about fog and a grandmother’s love, but dealing with a baby in the hospital is so stressful and sad.” She looked briefly down at her own stomach and put her hands over it protectively.

“She called me last night,” Juliet volunteered, but then she paused. She never liked to say very much that went against my mom’s narrative, and the current story was that everything was great! Amazing! Bonding with baby! Love my son!

“And?” Brenna prompted.

“She sounded really tired. She said that the baby’s mom went home to Oregon, like, she already left California. I guess she also already started the legal stuff to terminate her parental rights.”

“She really doesn’t want to keep her?” Addie asked. She had her phone out and was looking at the latest pictures from the hospital. Most of the tubes were gone and the baby wasn’t a red strawberry. She was even more beautiful.

“She never wanted to be a mother. It was always going to be an adoption situation for them. Until…” Juliet paused. “Well, I guess you guys will probably find out soon anyway, so I can tell you that Mom convinced Patrick to keep the baby and raise her himself.”

That wasn’t a surprise, but it sure was infuriating. “Of course,” I snarled. “And she assumed that someone, like a baby fairy, would come and take care of the kid just like it did for us when we were little.” All of us, except for Juliet, looked at Nicola. JuJu frowned at the sandwich tray.

“Nic, you can’t take this baby,” Addie said. “But Granger and I have been talking about it, and we—”

“No way,” I interrupted. “No way! This kid is not your responsibility. It’s—”

I broke off, because Grace was holding her cracked phone screen in front of my face. It showed a picture of the baby, her eyes closed and her thumb in her mouth.

“Ok,” I said, much more calmly. “I get your point. This isn’t just a philosophical, no-stakes argument about responsibility. There’s a real, tiny person involved.”

“Esme.”

I pushed the phone out of my face to stare at her, as did the rest of my sisters. “What?” Nicola asked.

“Her name is Esme,” she told us. It was unclear how she knew this, but when Juliet texted our mom, we got confirmation.

“Addie, I don’t think you and Granger should take Esme either,” Nicola said. “Patrick has to step up. We’re not doing him any favors by jumping in all the time.” She sighed. “Yes, I mean myself. I realize that I do that too often for all of you guys. I’m going to stop because I will have someone new to take care of.”

“Take care of yourself, too. We’re ok, Nic,” Brenna said, and it made me remember that I did, actually, love her. But then she continued, “It’s kind of annoying how you hover, anyway.”

“Holy Mary, Brenna!” Juliet snarled, and they started arguing.

We didn’t come up with anything groundbreaking or even satisfactory by the time that our meeting concluded. “We’ll support them, but none of us is going to take over,” Nicola declared, and looked around her table at all of us. She had taken tiny bites of sandwich, but also had a shot glass of ranch dressing next to her plate.

“Ok,” I said and the rest of my sisters echoed that, some of them without a lot of conviction. Addie was one of the doubters, and I cornered her on our way out.

“You have to live your own life,” I told her. “I know that in our family, we’re always meddling. But if you take over with this baby, it’s going to lead to major heartbreak. You know Patrick. What if, in a few years, he wants to jump back in and play dad? He wouldn’t even consider how much you love Esme or how much she’s a part of your lives. He probably wouldn’t even say thank you on his way out the door with her.”

She hesitated, her hand on the roof of the car as if she needed its support. “And we don’t know how he’s going to handle this,” she said. “He may turn into a really great father and all this worry will be for nothing.”

That seemed very, very unlikely to me, given the way he’d recently behaved (i.e., running away from the hospital on the day of the birth). “Maybe,” I said cautiously. “I don’t want anything to happen to the baby either, and if things are really going downhill, we can reconvene to discuss the next steps. But for now, Addie, you have to promise that you’re not going to tell him that you’ll take her, or adopt her, or anything else. Ok?”

She hesitated a lot. “Ok,” she said finally. “I’m not going to let Nicola do it, though, so if it comes down to someone being responsible for Esme, it will have to be me.”

I watched her drive away and felt more than a little annoyed. Why would she have been the responsible one? Other people were plenty responsible. Other people had jobs, houses, and cars that ran fairly well. I huffed. Addie was two years younger than I was so obviously, I was two years more mature. I stuck out my tongue at her car as it disappeared around the corner.

“Sophie.”

I put my tongue back in and turned to another little sister. “JuJu, I love him too, but I also recognize that—”

“No, I don’t want to talk about Patrick anymore,” she interrupted. “Here.” She handed me a thick envelope.

“What is this?” I saw when I opened it, and holy Mary. “How much money is in here?”

“It’s six thousand.”

“You…how did you get this much…if you did something illegal, I will tell Nicola!”

“I didn’t,” she answered. “I appreciate you bailing me out and I’ll keep giving you payments for the rest of what I owe you.”

“This is making me nervous. You know I’m going to go home and try to figure out how you got it,” I told her.

“It’s nothing bad,” she said, but she wasn’t meeting my eyes. “Can’t you just take it without throwing a fit? I have to go.”

“JuJu,” I started to argue, but she did go and I stood there staring after her. What was she up to?

“No,” Brenna was saying to Grace as they exited the house next. “I’m not giving you a ride. Why don’t you have a license?”

“I lost it.”

“Do you actually have one? A legal, valid, driver’s license?” Brenna demanded.

Grace had to think and while she did, Brenna quickly departed as well. “I’ll drive you,” I said, and my youngest sister got into my passenger seat.

“This looks funny,” she announced. “What’s different?”

“I straightened it up,” I answered. I had removed the junk in the car, vacuumed it out, and scrubbed the non-cloth parts until the original color was visible. I’d done the outside, too, although I’d been the only person at the car wash. Most people waited until it wasn’t raining, but I’d wanted to get it done. I’d suddenly felt some urgency.

“Oh,” Grace commented, and that was all. She didn’t follow with any remarks about it looking nice or that I should have done it sooner, which was a relief. I didn’t want to hear about either of those things, because this wasn’t any big deal. Anyone could clean her car without people having to fawn over it, but that was what Addie and Nicola would have done. Juliet would have been shocked and Brenna would have been snarky. I liked my youngest sister’s reaction the best.

“Are you really trying to move?” I asked her.

“Yes. I think a baby will be loud. Also, Patrick is a piece of crap.”

I agreed. “Where are you going to go?”

“Maybe to my boyfriend’s.”

“Who is your boyfriend?” I asked. I hadn’t heard about anyone new.

“He’s a guy I know,” she told me. “He’s a little older.”

“Wait, how much older?” I demanded, but she was saying something else.

“Do you think that Patrick will change and be a good dad?”

I sighed. “Addie still has hope,” I said. “I don’t, not really.”

“Nicola doesn’t think so, either. You can tell, because she did this.” Grace imitated our oldest sister’s expression and for just a moment, they looked exactly alike. I laughed and she stopped making the face to smile back at me.

“Yeah, she did do that.” I stopped smiling when I remembered why, that it was because our brother was poised to be a big jerk. Again.

“Juliet’s just going to be sad,” she went on, and that made me think.

“She always wants to defend him,” I said. “Maybe she feels like she has to, since he’s her twin. They’re not very much alike, though.”

Grace shrugged. “I don’t know. Aren’t they?”

And that was Grace. You thought that she wasn’t paying attention, but she wasn’t missing very much.

“I guess JuJu acts selfish sometimes, too,” I said. I thought of some examples but Grace, who’d also grown up with her, had more.

“She used to eat all the cereal I liked and then leave the empty box on the shelf,” she said. “She did that with shampoo in the bathroom, too.”

“Kids are dumb,” I mentioned. Juliet and I had our share of disagreements, but those things weren’t too bad.

“She had a big swim meet in Indiana and that meant that Mom and Dad couldn’t go to my high school graduation. She told me that lots of people graduated but not very many made that time standard.”

“Oh.” I shook my head—I’d known, of course, about our parents skipping her graduation but not what Juliet had said about it. “That really sucked.”

“You and Nicola and Addie came. Even Brenna was there,” Grace pointed out. “You all took me to dinner and you made a cake, Sophie.”

“I remember,” I said, and she nodded.

“I do, too.”

We rode back to my parents’ house with both of us quiet, thinking. It was hard to know how to raise kids so they didn’t act terribly to their younger sisters, and I hoped that Patrick would step up to the plate and do something. Anything.

But I doubted it. I doubted that he would step up at all, and it made me furious.