When the page got dark, I pulled on my hoodie and went out for alast barn check. The security lights flickered on, throwing deep shadows in the corners, turning dust motes into fireflies.
The goats jostled against their enclosure, crying for attention. I rubbed heads and shaggy coats, refilled their water trough, pulled down hay.
My mother had called this farm our heritage. I did not have her connection to the land. I’d been so eager to get away to make something of myself, to forge a new, grown-up identity far from home. But being back stirred so many memories. I felt my roots digging deep, drawing stories from the earth. The farm was not my heritage, but the stories were. I wanted to pass them on.
Lately a female tabby had taken to hanging around the barn, seeking shelter from the rain. There would be kittens in the spring, I thought. I’d posted a story about farm cats and bodega cats, including a shot of the tabby rolling flirtatiously in the straw, another of Weasley posed like a miniature lion. Eric had responded in the comments with a photo of the black cat eating from a plate in the alley behind Gusto. My cat. He was feeding my cat.Your friend misses you,he wrote.
My heart stumbled.
And my readers loved it. Not just cat owners and cat lovers, posting pictures of their felines, but an organic pet food company offering to buy ad space. A homesteader in Washington State and another in Virginia. A bodega owner in Flatbush. Farm-to-fork restaurants in Wilmington, in Raleigh and Asheville.
Comments on the blog had fallen from the peak of speculation over Eric’s identity, but overall traffic was up. City dwellers responding to some fantasy of getting away from it all, maybe. Or voyeuristic interest in Eric’s and my relationship, hinted at in pictures and replies.
I had a growing audience, it seemed. Or he did.
I was thankful for the interest. And the income. But even the success ofHungryleft me unsatisfied. I felt a longing, a root-deep yearning for... something else. Something of my very own.
Tell your story.
I touched my stomach lightly.Is it you?Are you part of my story?
A slow, blind rising welled. Like a flood filling me up, like love or faith or certainty. I was having a baby. With or without a job, with or without Eric.There you are.Hello, baby. Hello.
Meg came over to drop off the twins, dressed for her meeting with the All Seasons rep in what I thought of as her bank clothes, the bag from Amy doubling as a briefcase.
“You look good,” I told her. “Happy.” Glowing, which is what they said about pregnant women. Not that I was glowing much after throwing up.
“I am happy,” Meg said, loading the samples into the back of her big white Explorer. “You sure you’re okay out here all alone?”
The girls, Amy and Beth, were both still gone. For once, I was the one left at home. There was no place I would rather be. I’d always been happy with my own company.
But I missed Eric.
I swallowed the ache in my throat. “I’m not alone.” The twins scampered around the kids’ paddock like a pair of baby goats, Daisy stamping through puddles in her glittery pink galoshes. “I have these guys. And Mom gets out of rehab next week.”
Meg closed the hatch and turned. “We should all have dinner before Amy flies back to Paris. The way we used to for Dad when he got home. A dinner for Mom.”
“Beth’s classes start the Tuesday after Martin Luther King Day. Maybe that weekend? Before she goes back to school.”
“I wish she hadn’t gone to Nashville.”
I watched DJ try to climb up the bottom of the toddler slide. “Colt Henderson invited her to record her song in his studio. She can’t turn down an opportunity like that.”
“Or she can’t turn down Colt Henderson. I don’t trust him,” Meg said.
“You’ve never met him.”
“I don’t have to meet him to form an opinion about him.”
“You’ve never met Eric,” I pointed out.
She raised her eyebrows without speaking, a trick she got from Mom.And look where that got you.
I flushed. “I should probably make that doctor’s appointment soon.”
The look dissolved into concern. “You want me to come with you? I can hold your hand.”
She was the world’s best sister.
