My mother cocked her head and looked at me oddly. “You went to a doctor on a Saturday?”
“Yes. This doctor sees patients six days a week,” Charlie said smoothly.
“You don’t have to go to Mississippi, son,” Charlie’s dad said. “I can handle that store opening.”
“No, this expansion is my responsibility. I’ll go get it started, hire a manager to run it, and then after the baby is born and things are running smoothly, we’ll come back here.”
Charlie’s father pushed back his chair. “Well, I think this calls for a toast!”
He went to the cupboard in his study, and returned with a bottle of sparkling wine. And everyone toasted and drank to my health, and I sat there, miserable, the lie lying like a boulder on my heart.
“Do you want me to come and stay with you in Mississippi?” my mother asked.
“Thank you, but no,” Charlie said before I could even open mymouth. “We’ve talked about it, and we don’t want to take you away from Grammie. What would be most helpful would be if you and Mom could take turns keeping Becky and Eddie for us once we get close to the due date.”
“Of course. We’d be thrilled to do that.”
Oh, he was smooth. I never knew how smooth he could be. This wasn’t the same Charlie I knew, the insecure, bumbling Charlie. Evil had made him a silver-tongued devil.
I wondered if the other woman had taught him how to lie so adroitly. How many times had he lied to me when he was seeing her? I’d always thought I could see right through him. Somewhere along the line, he’d turned into a world-class deceiver. If I hadn’t known he was lying now, I would have been as sucked in as my family; he was just that smooth.
“Mommy—you’re havin’ a baby?” Becky asked me.
I swallowed. This was the point of no return. It was one thing to lie to my parents, quite another to lie to my child.
Charlie did it for me. “Yes, honey. You’re going to have another baby brother or a baby sister.”
“A sister! I want a sister.”
Later, as we were cleaning up, my mother looked me up and down. “My word, child—you’re not showing at all. And you must be four months, give or take.”
“You know, Beula was like that,” said my grandmother. “She carried her second baby toward her back. The doctor said he was sitting near her spine. Guess that’s what’s going on with Adelaide here.”
She reached out her hand to touch my stomach.
Charlie grabbed her arm, stopping her. “The doctor said people should keep their distance from Adelaide’s stomach, that she and the baby might be vulnerable to, um, electrical impulses from other people. He said just patting her belly can cause a transfer of electricity that can be harmful.”
“Why, I never heard of such a thing!” my mother exclaimed.
My grandmother and Charlie’s mother murmured in agreement.
“Me, neither,” said Charlie, “but this doctor says it’s a brand-new medical theory, and since Adelaide’s had problems, we want to follow his advice to the letter, no matter how odd it sounds. Can’t be too careful.”
“Well, I guess that’s right,” my mother said. “But what about the children? She’s going to be holding them and picking them up.”
“The doctor said that children don’t have near as much of an electrical current as the hands of adults, so that should be all right.”
33
adelaide
And they believed that?”
I opened my eyes to find myself in the rocker in my bedroom. I’d forgotten Hope was there. I’d forgotten I was talking aloud. It seemed so real, like was I back in the past, just living it all over again.
I nodded. “Antibiotics and X-rays and all the things you take for granted now were brand-new back then, so discoveries about electrical impulses didn’t sound like too much of a stretch. But then, no one expected Charlie to lie about a thing like that.” I know I sure hadn’t. I hadn’t known Charlie was that imaginative.
“What did you use for padding?” Hope asked.
