Joy
He’s really not coming?? Who’s going to eat my pumpkin pie?!?
Honny
NO ONE.
Cherry
Your gluten-free pumpkin pie? No one.
Honny
Jinx! Cherry, you owe me a Coke.
Chapter 46
Stevie was three months old when they brought her home—they drove five hours to get her from a breeder in Missouri—and she was already as big as a full-grown schnauzer.
She was a roly-poly sausage. Fluffy and white, with a bandit mask and a comically long tongue that rolled out like a lizard’s every time she yawned.
“She looks more like a Gene Simmons than a Stevie Nicks,” Cherry said.
Tom carried the puppy into the house like a baby. “You look like a Stevie Nicks—don’t you, Stevie Nicks?”
“I didn’t think I’d feel threatened by a dog, but then you named it after your dream girl.”
“You’re my dream girl,” Tom said, swatting Cherry’s bottom. He was in a good mood.
He wanted this, and Cherry had made it happen.
He’d been circling the idea of a dog for months. Hinting. Sending Cherry links to breeders when they were sitting right next to each other on the couch. Sending her photos of puppies.
“You really want to do this?” she’d ask.
And he’d say, “I don’t know. It’s a big commitment. And I’m traveling so much...”
Those were the same reasons Tom didn’t want to have a baby.
That had felt like a mean trick. A real switcheroo.
In the beginning of their relationship, it was Cherry who didn’twant to have kids. She’d grown up in a big family in a small house, and she was done with kids by the time she was done being one.
Cherry wanted to work. And travel. And she wanted to love Tom with her eyes open.
You know how parents say they blinked one day, and their kid jumped from kindergarten to college? Cherry didn’t want that. She wanted her years with Tom to go slow. She wanted to savor them.
It was Tom who’d said, “It’d be nice to have a family, don’t you think? Someday?” Back when they were first dating.
It was Tom who said, “I don’t know. There’s a lot of life to be lived as a parent.” After they got engaged.
And then, on their honeymoon—“It doesn’t seem like people usually regret having kids.”
It planted a seed in Cherry.
Maybe itwouldbe nice, she thought passively. Maybe kids would make their life richer. Maybe parenthood would be another thing she and Tom could share.
She didn’t immediately say so. But she softened. And started to assume they were headed that way.
