After all these months, but especially after these last three months of living together, I really knew her. Her moods, her ups and downs. Her verbal diarrhea. The way her brain took off on tangents. Her perceptions of everyone around her.
We weren’t strangers having a baby together after a one-night stand.
We were us.
A sometimes complicated and confusingus.But still us.
“I’m worried how you’re going to be when you know if it is a boy or a girl. I’m worried it might be too real for you and you might decide you can’t handle it. And then I’ll have to do it all alone, which was always the plan, but now these past three months you’ve made me believe I won’t be alone. But maybe I will.”
I circled the kitchen island and put my hands on either armrest of the stool, boxing her in while I leaned over her. It was another routine we’d established.
Flowers didn’t want to have sex because she thought it would complicate things too much. But that didn’t mean she didn’t need intimacy.
Closeness.
I rested my forehead against hers but said nothing.
“What are you doing?”
“Shh,” I whispered. “I’m reading your mind. Much easier than waiting for you to say what you’re really thinking about.”
“E.G.,” she growled.
“Flowers,” I growled back.
“People sometimes don’t like having girls and they give them away,” she whispered into the space between our mouths. “I saw it on60 Minutes.”
I closed my eyes and counted a few beats before I spoke. Flowers was a rational creature about ninety-nine percent of the time. Right up until she wasn’t. But once upon a time, she’d been a girl and someone had given her away.
“I would like a girl, I think,” I said quietly, thoughtfully. “If she looks like you and has your brain, I think I would like that very much. And I would never want to give her away. Ever.”
“No,” Flowers objected. “If she looks like you, with the red hair and green eyes, she could be the next Nicole Kidman. There’s no point in letting all your recessive genes go to waste. Look at Rebecca’s hair.”
My sister did have beautiful hair.
“Okay, she can have my hair,” I said. “But in every other way, I want her to be like you.”
“Okay,” she said. “And you would love her as much as you would love a son, right?”
“Yep,” I said confidently. “I will love her as much as I’ve ever loved anyone in my life.”
“Hmm.”
“What?” I asked, lifting my head away from hers, now that I’d pulled out what was really scaring her.
“What if I get jealous?”
I didn’t understand the question. “Jealous of what?”
“My daughter. What if I get jealous of her because you love her, but you don’t love me.” She pulled her face back then and looked at me, worried for a second, but then it seemed as ifshe shook it off. “No. A mother wouldn’t be jealous of her own daughter. Stupid. I’m just being weird. Or hungry. Let me eat.”
She started attacking the toast and peanut butter like it had been days since she’d last eaten. Her appetite was truly something to behold.
“We need to leave for the doctor in about an hour. Ricky will drive,” I said, in lieu of saying something else. Something that got stuck in my throat.
She nodded even as she crunched on toast covered with peanut butter. “I’ll be ready.”
“When we get back, we should call my parents.”
