8. JACKSON #2
Jamie trails behind me, touching things absently. "This is surreal," she murmurs. "Shopping for maternity clothes. Yesterday I was making éclair shells and complaining about the consistency of my pastry cream, and now I'm shopping for clothes to accommodate a baby."
"Yesterday you were pregnant," I point out. "You just didn't know it."
She stops walking. "You're right. God, that's weird to think about." She picks up a dress with an empire waist and holds it up against herself, studying her reflection in a nearby mirror. "Do you think I'll look ridiculous in this?"
"Try it on."
"Jackson."
"Try it on."
She sighs but heads toward the fitting rooms. I follow, settling into a chair outside the changing area that's clearly designed for husbands and boyfriends killing time while their partners make decisions about elastic waistbands.
She emerges a few minutes later wearing the dress. It's blue, darker than the pastels I was expecting, and it makes her eyes look greener. The cut accommodates a belly she doesn't have yet, but I can see what she'll look like in it when she does.
"Well?" She turns in front of the mirror, studying herself from different angles.
"Good."
"Good?" She raises an eyebrow. "That's your fashion critique? Good?"
"It looks like you, but different."
"Different how?"
I consider how to explain what I'm seeing. She looks like herself, but there's something about the cut of the dress that makes her look like the future version of herself. The woman she'll be when the baby is visible and her body has changed to accommodate it.
"Like you're already growing something."
Her hand goes to her stomach automatically, pressing against the fabric. "I guess I am."
She tries on more things. A pair of jeans with a stretchy panel where the waistband should be. A sweater that's designed to stretch across a growing belly. Everything fits her differently than her regular clothes do—roomier, more forgiving, designed for a body in transition.
I watch her evaluate each piece, turning in the mirror, considering angles and fits and how she looks.
She's thorough about it, the same way she's thorough about everything.
Testing recipes, arranging ingredients, deciding whether a flavor combination works.
She applies the same focused attention to maternity clothes that she applies to brown butter ganache.
"What do you think about this one?" She's wearing another dress, green this time, that makes her look like she's already several months along.
"I like it."
"You like everything."
"I like how you look pregnant."
The words come out more honest than I intended. She goes still in front of the mirror, her eyes finding mine in the reflection.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
She studies my face for a moment, then turns back to the mirror. Her hand is on her stomach again, and she's looking at herself differently now. Not evaluating the fit of the clothes, but imagining herself in them when they're necessary rather than speculative.
"Okay," she says quietly. "We'll get this one too."
By the time we're done, we have enough clothes to outfit her through most of the pregnancy. Dresses and pants and tops designed for bodies that are changing. Shoes that will accommodate feet that might swell. Everything she'll need for the next months, purchased in advance and ready.
At the register, she tries to object to the total. It's a familiar dance—she pulls out her card, I move her hand away from the reader, she argues that she can pay for her own clothes, I ignore the argument and handle the payment myself.
"You can't buy me an entire maternity wardrobe," she says as we load bags into the truck.
"Just did."
"Jackson."
"What?"
She's standing next to the passenger door, looking at me with an expression I can't quite read. "Thank you."
I nod. She gets in the truck, and I close the door behind her, and we drive toward dinner with bags full of clothes for a future that's suddenly months closer than it was this morning.
The Italian restaurant is busy, but they have a table for us in the back corner that's quieter than the rest of the dining room. Jamie sits across from me studying the menu like she hasn't been here enough times to know it by heart.
"I'm starving," she says. "Which is weird, because I threw up this morning, but apparently pregnancy makes you hungry and nauseous at the same time. How does that make sense?"
"Doesn't have to make sense."
"I guess not." She sets down the menu. "I know what I want anyway. The carbonara, but I'm going to ask them to go easy on the garlic. Garlic has been smelling wrong to me lately."
The waitress takes our order. Wine for me, water for Jamie, who makes a face about giving up alcohol for the next several months but doesn't argue about it. When the bread arrives, she tears off a piece and examines it critically.
"This is good bread," she says, chewing thoughtfully. "Not great, but good. They're using a decent flour, and the crust has the right amount of chew. But they're not letting it rise long enough. See how the texture is a little tight? That's insufficient fermentation time."
I watch her analyze the bread. After three months, I've learned to recognize the signs—the slight frown of concentration, the way she chews more slowly when she's identifying flavors, the running commentary that comes without conscious thought.
"You do this with everything," I observe.
"Do what?"
"Take it apart. Figure out what went right and what went wrong."
She pauses mid-chew. "Do I? I guess I do. It's just automatic at this point. I taste something and I want to understand how it was made." She takes another bite of bread. "Does it annoy you?"
"No."
"You sure? Because I know I talk a lot about food. My mom used to say it was like living with a very chatty cookbook."
Alice. The first mention of her mother. Jamie's face doesn't change when she says it, but I catch the slight shift in her voice—the way she mentions Alice like she's referencing someone from a long time ago rather than the woman who raised her.
"Your mom says a lot of things."
"She did." Jamie's tone is neutral, matter-of-fact. "Most of them were observations about how I was too much of something or not enough of something else." She shrugs. "Ancient history."
The carbonara arrives, and Jamie takes a bite and makes the face that means she's found something to critique.
"Too much cream," she says. "Carbonara shouldn't be creamy like this. It should be silky from the egg and cheese, not heavy from cream. And they definitely didn't go easy on the garlic like I asked."
"You want to send it back?"
"No, it's fine. It's not bad, it's just not right." She takes another bite. "I can eat around the garlic. And honestly, I'm so hungry I could probably eat anything right now."
She's right about the hunger. She works her way through most of the pasta while telling me about the dessert version of carbonara she's been thinking about—something involving vanilla custard and candied pancetta that sounds both disgusting and like something she could probably make work.
"The trick would be getting the sweetness to balance the saltiness without making it taste like breakfast," she explains. "Maybe a brown butter base for the custard? And some kind of crispy element that mimics the texture of the pancetta but reads as dessert instead of dinner."
I listen to her work through the problem, watch the way her face lights up when she hits on an idea that might work. This is what she does—takes familiar things and reimagines them as something unexpected but still recognizable.
It's the same impulse that makes her critique the restaurant's carbonara. She sees how things are and thinks about how they could be different.
"What?" she asks, noticing me watching.
"Nothing."
"You're looking at me weird."
"I'm looking at you normal."
She laughs. "That's your normal? Intense staring while I talk about dessert carbonara?"
"That's my normal."
She reaches across the table and touches my hand. "Good day?"
The question is simple but the answer is layered. This morning she was throwing up and insisting it was nothing. Then we were in a hospital getting confirmation of something we both wanted but weren't quite expecting yet.
Tonight she's pregnant and we have bags full of maternity clothes in the truck and she's sitting across from me making plans for desserts I can't imagine while unconsciously cradling a baby that's barely big enough to exist yet.
"Yeah," I say. "Good day."
She smiles, and the expression transforms her whole face. "The best day."
The restaurant hums around us. Other couples at other tables having other conversations about other things.
The waitress brings the check and I pay it while Jamie protests halfheartedly that we should split it, a ritual we've performed so many times it's become comfortable rather than contentious.
Outside, the air is cooler than it was this afternoon. Jamie walks close to me across the parking lot, her hand in mine, and when we reach the truck she stops and looks up at me.
"Thank you," she says. "For today. For all of it."
I don't answer with words. I kiss her instead, there in the parking lot under the restaurant's neon sign, and she melts against me the way she always does, like her body recognizes mine as home.
When I pull back, she's looking at me with an expression I can't name but recognize anyway. Something soft and certain and entirely focused on me.
"Ready to go home?" she asks.
Home. The word sits between us like something that's been true for longer than either of us has been willing to say it. My apartment that became our apartment, my life that became our life, my future that became something bigger and better than what I had planned for myself.
"Yeah," I say. "Let's go home."