I glanced down at Josh’s tone. “It happened last week. Lou heard someone fighting, and it was the neighbor’s brother,” I had to explain.
The ten-year-old turned his head to pin me with this expression that was beyond his years, like he knew what I was trying to hide. Or maybe he could guess what I had done.
I didn’t need or want him worrying, so I kicked him in the butt, immediately shoving my neighbor’s business aside. “Come on. Let’s get started on dinner before we have to put Mac on the grill.”
“Gross!” Lou gagged.
I swear I loved messing with him. There was something about being young and innocent and gullible that I loved, and to be fair, I used to do the same thing to Josh before he’d gotten old enough to realize I was usually full of shit. The boys had just gone inside the house when my phone started ringing. It was my best friend, Van.
“Diana” was the first thing out of her mouth. “I’m dying,” the too familiar voice on the other end moaned.
I snorted, locking the front door behind me as I held the phone up to my face with my shoulder. “You’re pregnant. You’re not dying.”
“But it feels like I am,” the person who rarely ever complained whined. We’d been best friends our entire lives, and I could only count on one hand the number of times I’d heard her grumble about something that wasn’t her family. I’d had the title of being the whiner in our epic love affair that had survived more shit than I was willing to remember right then.
I held up a finger when Louie tipped his head toward the kitchen as if asking if I was going to get started on dinner or not. “Well, nobody told you to get pregnant with the Hulk’s baby. What did you expect? He’s probably going to come out the size of a toddler.”
The laugh that burst out of her made me laugh too. This fierce feeling of missing her reminded me it had been months since we’d last seen each other. “Shut up.”
“You can’t avoid the truth forever.” Her husband was huge. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t expect her unborn baby to be a giant too.
“Ugh.” A long sigh came through the receiver in resignation. “I don’t know what I was thinking—”
“You weren’t thinking.”
She ignored me. “We’re never having another one. I can’t sleep. I have to pee every two minutes. I’m the size of Mars—”
“The last time I saw you”—which had been two months ago—“you were the size of Mars. The baby is probably the size of Mars now. I’d probably say you’re about the size of Uranus.”
She ignored me again. “Everything makes me cry and I itch. I itch so bad.”
“Do I… want to know where you’re itching?”
“Nasty. My stomach. Aiden’s been rubbing coconut oil on me every hour he’s here.”
I tried to imagine her six-foot-five-inch, Hercules-sized husband doing that to Van, but my imagination wasn’t that great. “Is he doing okay?” I asked, knowing off our past conversations that while he’d been over the moon with her pregnancy, he’d also turned into mother hen supreme. It made me feel better knowing that she wasn’t living in a different state all by herself with no one else for support. Some people in life got lucky and found someone great, the rest of us either took a long time… or not ever.
“He’s worried I’m going to fall down the stairs when he isn’t around, and he’s talking about getting a one-story house so that I can put him out of his misery.”
“You know you can come stay with us if you want.”
She made a noise.
“I’m just offering, bitch. If you don’t want to be alone when he starts traveling more for games, you can stay here as long as you need. Louie doesn’t sleep in his room half the time anyway, and we have a one-story house. You could sleep with me if you really wanted to. It’ll be like we’re fourteen all over again.”
She sighed. “I would. I really would, but I couldn’t leave Aiden.”
And I couldn’t leave the boys for longer than a couple of weeks, but she knew that. Well, she also knew I couldn’t not work for that long, too.
“Maybe you can get one of those I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up—”
Vanessa let out another loud laugh. “You jerk.”
“What? You could.”
There was a pause. “I don’t even know why I bother with you half the time.”
“Because you love me?”
