Free Sunset Bridge by Emilie Richards Page B

because there is no baby coming to bless us. Not yet.”
    Everyone made sympathetic noises.
    With no real experience in theater, Tracy still knew a cue when she heard one. “Alice, you’re the only one here who hasn’t heard my news. There is a baby coming to bless me —and Marsh, too, only he doesn’t know it yet, and I don’t want anybody to tell him. So, please keep this a secret. Let’s not tell Olivia, okay?”
    Alice looked stunned. “You’re…pregnant?”
    “Symptoms, test results, the whole nine yards.”
    “You were planning…?”
    Tracy shook her head. “And we’ve been so careful about birth control. I’m never careless…except, well, once. The first time we, you know, did it. It was the evening of Bay’s birthday party. Marsh and I had been keeping our distance. I went to drop off a present, and Bay wanted me to stay. Afterward, Marsh and I made up big-time. I didn’t have my…anything with me to prevent pregnancy, and we just kind of fell into bed—actually the floor—before either of us thought that far ahead. But it was just that once. Man, who’d have thought just once would do it?”
    “Anybody who’s ever had a sex-ed class,” Maggie said, fork halfway to her mouth.
    “Oh, great, another wiseass at Happiness Key.” Tracy tried a bite of the macaroni and waited to see if her stomach would rebel. It didn’t. She took another.
    “So, there’s got to be a good reason you aren’t acquaintingthe baby’s own father with the situation,” Wanda said. “Let’s have it.”
    Tracy ate another three bites quickly, more because she wanted to strike while the iron was hot than because she wanted to avoid answering. She wondered if that was how the entire pregnancy would go. She would eat during the brief moments when her stomach was behaving, and the other twenty-three and a half hours each day she would avoid food and any mention of it.
    “That casserole’s not going anywhere,” Wanda said. “Spill, and I don’t mean macaroni.”
    “It’s complicated, and this is the first thing I’ve eaten since noon that’s stayed put.”
    “Then talk with your mouth full.”
    “You can’t let Mom bully you,” Maggie said. “Give her an inch…”
    “You think they don’t know that?” Wanda said. “We been neighbors more than a year now. They’re still standing, aren’t they?”
    Tracy thought if everybody had been sentimental, touchy-feely about her announcement, she probably couldn’t have said another word. But she felt reassured, somehow, by Wanda’s matter-of-fact digging.
    “You’re not sure you’re going through with this pregnancy?” Wanda said, turning back to Tracy. “That’s why you don’t want Marsh to know?”
    Tracy couldn’t say that the idea of not going through with it hadn’t occurred to her. A woman carrying a baby she hadn’t planned for had legal options, and she wasn’t naive. Still, she felt those options existed for circumstances decidedly different than hers.
    “I’m glad women have choices,” she said, “but I don’t thinkthat’s one of mine. And I would never leave Marsh out of a decision like that, either.”
    Wanda didn’t look surprised. “I figured. I only wanted to get you talking.”
    “Marsh and I were just getting started.” Tracy looked around the table. “We finally got past all the garbage, and we were starting to figure each other out. Now, how will I know what he really feels? Whatever he does will always be mixed up with this baby. I’ll never know if we were falling in love big-time, you know? It’s all going to be about custody, and whether we live together for the sake of the kid, and who gets him or her when and for how long. Not about us, but about all of us.”
    “You could always ask him and get it over with,” Wanda said.
    “The man’s never even told me he loves me. I might ask and get silence, because I don’t think Marsh knows how he feels.”
    No one seemed to know what to say to that, until finally