Chapter 4
THE PINK PEAR PREGNANCY POWER POWDER
After breakfast, our conversation was far from finished, but Barry did still have a morning practice to get to (one he’d probably feel like shit for on account of the jalapeno cheeseburger). He couldn’t miss it—first day and all that—and for this I was grateful.
“Can I get your number? We can talk right after,” Barry said. I hesitated, because what was he going to do with my number?
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?” Barry asked. We stood in the player’s entrance area of the practice center. “We have stuff to talk about.”
“What stuff?”
Barry crouched to put his face closer to level with mine, scowling as he looked me hard in the eyes. He held a long finger in front of my face and moved it left and right.
“What are you doing?” I asked, leaning away from him.
“Making sure you don’t have a concussion. Did you forget that there’s a baby I just learned about?”
I scoffed and he stood up straight again.
“We have to talk about plans and stuff—baby stuff,” Barry said.
What other baby stuff did he want to talk about?
I told him at breakfast I was keeping the baby, and I wasn’t going to budge on that.
I also told him that he didn’t need to think about her beyond giving me a full history of his and his family’s health issues for the last three generations.
What more was there to discuss beyond that?
“Please, Hannah.” He sounded desperate.
A couple of similarly large men walked through the front door, excitedly calling Barry by his last name as they passed. He grinned at them, clapped them both on their shoulders in the dude way my brother is always going for, then turned back to me with all seriousness.
“Yes, you can have my number.” I held out my hand for his phone. When he gave it to me, I punched my number in, and he called right away just to make sure I’d given him the right one. Harsh but fair.
“I have to catch the bus,” I offered as an excuse to break the void of quiet hanging between us.
“You don’t have a car?” he asked.
“Working on that.” Up until two months ago, I did have a car.
It was a mostly working Jeep that was about ten years older than me.
It was great and very cool—people with old Jeeps always act like you’re in the same book club when you drive past them, I loved that—but it wasn’t that safe, nor reliable.
I sold it and was saving for a new car—something with a higher safety rating, something like Kate’s car.
Good gas mileage, electric or hybrid maybe, a car with more than two doors so I could easily fit a bulky baby seat.
In the meantime, the bus was fine, or the Harvey Janitorial van if Dad or Kate didn’t need it.
“I don’t mind the bus,” I said. Barry looked very concerned at this prospect of me taking public transportation in this city.
“Is that safe?” he asked.
“Yes? Barry, we live in Salt Lake.”
I’d never run into trouble before, plus I didn’t take the bus everywhere. Kate lives a few blocks away and goes with me most places. Grocery shopping, doctor’s appointments, dinner at Mom’s or Dad’s house, pizza night, wherever. We hang out a lot. It helps that her main friends are me and Jeremy.
Another person walked in as Barry and I looked at each other—Barry serious, me wary—and called out a booming and excited “Welcome, Wright!” to him. Of course they were excited to see him, it was his first day on a new team.
Fuck, had I ruined his first day?
“Be right there,” Barry said as the man walked past. Then, to me, “I’ll call you later.”
When it became clear that Barry wasn’t going to move until I did, I started walking backward away from him, waving my phone in my hand as I went.
“Bye,” he said.
“Yep.” I nearly ran into the door on my way out.
As phones are known to do, mine was constantly watching me, and I knew this because my targeted ads and social media feeds all were tuned into the fact that I was pregnant, probably from all the googling I did.
While eating lunch with Kate that day, both of us scrolling quietly on our phones as we finished our food, I saw a woman pregnant with triplets on Instagram.
Thirty-three weeks, she said, which was only seven weeks further than me, and I was horrified.
She held her belly with both hands, it stuck out like two feet from her body.
Totally great that she can grow three people, pregnancy is cool, magic of life, whatever, but it was also terrifying because with three people in her, how did she have anything left for herself?
I showed the video to Kate and she just said, “Wow the beauty of the human body,” as if it wasn’t like actual science fiction body horror on the screen with fifty thousand likes.
The beauty?
“You’ll look like that soon. Sort of.” She laughed at whatever face I made. “Only sort of.”
I glanced down at my stomach, which already felt like a basketball, but still had fourteen weeks to grow bigger. Woof.
“There’s no world where I’m actually growing twins but the doctors just missed it somehow, right?”
I immediately started scrolling through my photos app to find the last ultrasound pictures to zoom in on.
Kate laughed again.
“They would know,” she assured me, but now I wasn’t sure. I typed “pregnant with twins and not know?” into my search bar and felt relieved to see that I could be almost one hundred percent sure I was only having one baby at this point.
I put my hand on my stomach, where I knew the one baby was.
She didn’t kick all the time, but I could definitely feel her moving around throughout the day, sometimes more dramatically than others.
Kate, Mom, and I spent a good twenty minutes pressing around my belly marveling at the tiny baby’s movements against our palms last week. It felt a little bit like magic.
Kate was back to looking at her phone, no doubt responding to Harvey Janitorial inquiries or organizing various lists in her notes app.
Kate managed the fuck out of Harvey Janitorial but never cleaned unless she had to.
Sometimes she went in for me if no one else could, which was helpful for the first thirteen weeks when I was sick constantly and the the usual cleaning supplies made it worse.
There’s not a doubt in my mind that Dad is praying nightly that Kate will want to take over the company, and I suspect she will.
She does practically everything: scheduling, ordering supplies, interviews, whatever’s needed.
I helped on marketing sometimes, wrote whatever ads needed writing, helped throw together copy for a new website last year, but Kate is the real heavy hitter when it comes to HJ admin needs.
I used to feel jealous about all the responsibility Dad let her take on, but she was the responsible one, after all. I was the cooler, younger, disorganized one. Well, for now. I was working on it.
A text from Barry showed at the top of my screen asking if we could meet tonight. I dodged his last two calls, texting to say that I needed to nap after the early shift, even though really, I was just watching TV.
I put the phone face down on the counter and focused on the lunch Kate brought—tuna sandwiches, apple slices, carrots with hummus, and Cheez-Its because I’d complain if she only got healthy stuff. I took a bite of a carrot before turning to Kate.
“I saw the baby’s father today,” I said.
“Oh?” Kate was still looking at her phone so I knew she hadn’t processed it. I stayed quiet until her chewing came to a halt and she slowly turned to look at me.
“What did you just say?”
I took another bite of carrot. “He works at the practice facility as of today.”
“He lives in Utah?”
“As of this week, he does.”
“Doing what?” she asked.
I took a long, deep breath to prepare for this one. After the trip, I told her about Barry, the nice stranger from New York; I never told her he was also Barry Wright, a man who was famous to a select group of sports-enjoying people.
“Well.” I shrugged. “Playing.”
Kate’s mouth hung open, but I pushed her bottle of water toward her, and she drank.
“He’s a fucking hockey player? On the team?”
“He was on another team in Columbus, but now, yeah, he’s on the team.”
Kate grabbed her phone immediately, already halfway through searching his name, and I put my hand on the screen to stop her. “Do you want to hear the rest of the story, or…”
She agreed and put the phone face down, crossing her hands in front of her and nodding for me to please continue.
“I ran into him this morning, and I was wearing the blue polo.”
“The tight one?” Kate asked.
“Yeah, it was very obvious that I am with child, and I sort of blurted that it was his baby.”
“Oh my God.”
“I know,” I said and took a long drink. Kate poured this prenatal powder into my bottle, which tasted weird and always made me wince. It was supposed to be “pink pear” flavored, whatever the hell that meant.
“Why didn’t you text me?” she demanded.
“He took me to breakfast. I was in shock.”
“That was hours ago!”
“Okay, focus, Katie.”
Kate took a breath, like she was being the bigger person by not pressing that I hadn’t texted her live updates through breakfast or immediately afterwards. I suppose I would’ve demanded the same. I gulped the rest of the pink pear water and moved to take her empty plate and mine from the counter.
“Can we walk?” I asked before Kate could ask another question.
Kate has this old dog—Greg—who she brings over for lunch and a walk on most warm days. The cat who walked into my house one day a couple years before and never left, whom we call Greg Junior (Junior for short), likes Greg Senior just fine.
At even the word “walk,” Greg’s tail started thumping against the floor.
“Fine.” Kate closed her Tupperware, stowed them in her lunch box, and grabbed the leash for Greg Senior.
“What did he say about the baby?” Kate asked as I shoved my feet into sneakers, stomping a few times to get the backs right.
“He was mad I didn’t tell him.”
“Makes sense,” she said, and then, “lock the door, you’re always forgetting to lock the door.”
“Well sorry, damn,” I dug the key out of my pocket. “He said he got traded, is that because he’s, like, bad?”
“Could be because he’s really good, but I’ll have to do some research. Jeremy would know.”
I groaned. “Don’t tell Jeremy, he’ll be insufferable.” Our brother could talk at length about many things, but sports were a special interest of his that we learned to tune out at a young age.
“He’ll be able to tell us like fifteen fun facts about the guy, come on.”
“No, focus.”
“Fine, what happened after breakfast?” Greg led us down the sidewalk, slower than he used to be, but still just as weird, marking his territory every twenty feet even though it was the same path we walked every day.
I tried to relay as much of the conversation as I could, Kate stopping me to gasp or smack my arm all the way through.
“Is he still into you?” she asked.
“No,” I said, decidedly. “I think I hurt his feelings by ghosting him and then only telling him I was pregnant with his child after running into him by luck at his new place of employ.”
“Well, at least you told him,” Kate pointed out, ever the optimist.
“He said he wants to meet again tonight,” I said.
“Like as a date?”
“No, come on. For, like, a baby DTR chat,” I said. “I think.”
“What is there to determine about that relationship? He’s literally the father,” Kate said.
She pulled on Greg’s leash, tugging him away from a bit of dry brush sticking out from beneath a fence.
The neighborhood we both lived in was mostly charming old houses and duplexes; there was a park not too far, which meant big shady trees in the summer and lots of crunchy leaves in the fall and winter.
I inherited our grandma’s house after she died three years ago, which might have gone to Kate if she had any interest in fixing up a home and hadn’t already owned a townhouse a few blocks away.
That was another thing about my sister: she’d always been terrific at money management. So much so that she became a homeowner before she turned twenty-four. I both admired and feared her for this.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I thought he’d be glad to be free of the responsibility, but I guess not. I think he’s freaked out.”
“I would be too if I just found out I’d sired a child,” Kate said, and we huffed twin laughs. “What if he says you should put the baby up for adoption?”
“I already told him I’m not going to.” I tucked my hands further into my jacket pockets, feeling the little hole in the lining in one pocket and the folded sticky note with Barry’s number in the other.
“What if he wants to be in her life?”
I sighed and kicked a rock from the sidewalk.
He surely had the right to be in her life if he wanted to.
I didn’t know all that much about paternity rights, but that sort of thing was in enough TV shows that it to be at least a little true.
If he wanted to be in the baby’s life—and I mean really wanted to, not just felt like he had to—well then, I shouldn’t stop him.
But if he felt like he was obligated to, would he start resenting her? Resenting me? Did he already resent me?
I didn’t want him to be around her if he didn’t actually want to be. My parents divorced when I was eight, but they both always really wanted to be our parents, I never doubted that.
“I guess I’d have to let him,” I said. “I don’t know him all that well, but I think he is a good person. Probably.”
“You should hear him out either way.”
“Yeah.” We were almost back to the house and Kate would want to get back to working soon. I’d probably do a couple hours of nothing before thinking about texting Barry back. “I’ll hear him out.”