My career, the one thing that had kept me grounded through miscarriages and divorce, was slipping through my fingers, too. If my license was gone, how would I pay rent? Support this incoming baby?
Not having enough money or stability was exactly why I’d delayed trying to get pregnant with Corey for so long.
What was this? All Your Worst Fears Come True Day?
If so, I had an extremely strong protest email to write to whoever came up with that crap.
“Is there anything I can do?” Lark asked, looking even more worried on my phone screen.
“Put me in a time machine and stop me from making the biggest mistake of my life while my career was going up in flames,” I muttered.
“What?” Lark asked, her forehead crinkling.
A knock sounded on my door before I could explain. Probably my landlady, letting me know I’d also have to pay more rent on my crappy apartment in honor of All Your Worst Fears Come True Day.
But I couldn’t fall apart. This baby only had me now. I had to keep it together.
“I’ll figure this out and call you back,” I told Lark before hanging up to answer the door.
But when I opened it, it wasn’t my 4’9” Asian-Canadian landlady standing there.
It was Corey, my 5’9”, half-French-Canadian ex-husband.
22/
what are you doing here?
holly
“Allô, Holly Bell, how are you?”
Corey said hello and clipped his “you” in a vaguely French-Canadian way. Quebec was on the other side of the count, and he’d been mostly raised in Minnesota by his American mother, but he’d decided to lean into his paternal accent when we moved to Canada, thanks to his dual citizenship.
I hated that about him.
I also hated that he still referred to me by my first and middle name, even though I’d somehow managed to convince myself that it was cute that Corey insisted on calling me Holly Bell even after I told him I didn’t like it on our first date.
Truly wondering what I’d ever seen in him, I stared at the man whose smug, entitled expression hadn’t changed much since the last time I saw him in person. On the other side of a courtroom,pumping his fist because his conniving lawyer had gotten every undeserved thing he asked for.
I sighed and folded my arms. “What do you want, Corey?”
“I was hoping you hadn’t written that alimony check yet,” he answered.
He stopped. Probably expecting me to ask him why.
I just stared at him. Giving him nothing.
“The thing is,” he said with a mournful look, “it turns out that your years of making me wait were more detrimental than I initially thought. Despite her much younger age and health prognosis, Celeste and I still haven’t managed to get pregnant.”
Another pause. Corey and I met while he was completing his M.F.A. in Public Art, but he’d done a bachelor’s in Theatre before that, and unfortunately, the only thing he retained from that unnecessary four years of education was how to abuse the dramatic pause.
Again, I waited for him to get to the point.
Which, eventually, he did with a mulish look. “Celeste wisely suggested I get tested, and as it turns out, I suffer from a condition of age called male factor.”
“A condition?” I felt a little like Hawk when I lifted both eyebrows to ask, “You’re calling not having the swimmers to get your girlfriend pregnant a condition of age?”
His lips thinned. “The point is, it’s all your fault that Celeste and I will also have to undergo IVF, so I will be needing more money from you in the next alimony check.”
