Elodie: I asked you to help me not adopt a baby.
Me: And I acknowledged your cry for help. I’m on the phone with the police, giving them your location. Help is coming.
Elodie:
Me:
As expected, my phone rings, and my sister’s name is on the screen.
“Yes?” I ask, grinning.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“What the hell is wrongwith me?” I ask. “You’re the one talking about adopting a kid.”
She whines, “I know.” Her sigh is long and very,verydramatic. “I just met a friend for lunch, and she brought her three-month-old. Now I smell like baby lotion and spit-up, which should be gross. But it’s doing weird things to my uterus.”
“You know we have a mother and a sister, right? Because I have … Well, I don’t want to say that I have no experience with uteruses, but it’s usually the cervix when I?—”
“Oh, my gosh. Shut the fuck up.”
I laugh, leaning against the table.
“It’s just that all of my friends are getting married and having babies,” she says. “And I’m quickly becoming ‘The Aunt,’ if you know what I mean. I’m starting to think that’s all I’m ever going to be. Always the aunt, never the mom.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Drake—”
“No judgment. This is a judgment-free zone. You can treat this like a safe space.”
She growls, making me chuckle.
“All right,” I say. “I’m done joking. Please, drag me into your crisis. I have nothing better to do today.”
“I’m going to overlook your sarcasm.”
I consider teasing her again, but stop short. As the oldest of the three of us at thirty-six, Elodie is typically calm and confident—even if her ideas and plans of execution equal mine when I was ten years old. But there’s a slight panic to her tone today that has me backing off from giving her shit.
“Drake, do you think I’m too old to have kids? Have I missed a window?”
“No, I don’t. You’re thirty-six, not fifty-six. Hell, I think you can still have kids when you’re fifty-six.” I run a hand down my jaw. “Didn’t you just say that your friends are having kids? Aren’t they the same age as you?”
“Yeah, but they’re settled. Most of them are married. All of them are in committed relationships. The only thing I’m committed to is paying taxes and my nail tech. And not in that order.”
I laugh. “Did something go awry with the veterinarian you’ve been seeing?”
“I ended things primarily because he works so much. We rarely see each other now, and I don’t like the idea of sitting at home waiting for him day in, day out—which is a fair point.”
Sounds like she’s called in to Gianna’s show for advice.The thought makes me smile. “Absolutely.”
She pauses, the energy through the line shifting. “But what if I made a mistake?”
“The great thing about mistakes is that you can fix them. Worst case, you learn from them.”
“I don’t even know whether this baby thing has anything to do with him or not. I just know that when I held the baby today, it felt so natural. For the first time in my life, I could imagine myself holding a child of my own, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
This might be a revelation to Elodie, but it’s not to me. She’s always been someone who loves people. She loves making others happy and taking care of them. There’s never been a day when I didn’t see a child in her future.
