51. Callie
Callie
"If you eat one more breadstick before the food comes, I am telling the waiter to cut you off."
"Callie Morgan." Tessa pointed a breadstick at me like a medieval sword. "You are months behind me. Whatever you say now, I am going to say back to you in the spring, except meaner, because by then I will have a newborn and be a walking zombie."
"Joke's on you. When my newborn arrives, I’ll have three men to get up for night feedings. I'm going to sleep like royalty."
"Okay, that one actually hurt." She tore the breadstick in half. "Vaughn, are you hearing this? She's doing polyamory math at me."
"I'm staying out of it," Vaughn said, in the voice of a first-time father who had read four pregnancy books cover to cover and highlighted the chapter on which conversations to exit.
He buttered a roll for Tessa without being asked, and she took it without acknowledging him, and honestly it was heartwarming.
Down the table it was chaos in every direction, and I had never loved a sound more.
Beth was ranking every dessert on the menu for anyone who would listen.
Noah and Oliver had their heads bent over a napkin where Oliver was diagramming something that was either the solar system or a battle plan.
Emma had brought a book and was reading it under the table where she thought nobody could see.
Cole slid the pepper away from my plate and replaced it with a glass of milk.
"I'm sorry, what is happening here."
"You said the heartburn was bad yesterday."
"I said it once in passing, at like two in the morning. I was probably eating Ben’s hush puppies in my dreams."
"I heard it," Cole said, and went back to his food like the conversation had concluded.
Ben was grinning at me from the end of the table.
Luke had already opened his phone, and I would bet the stuffed bear Oliver had named Gerald after our favorite goat, that he was adding heartburn triggers to the shared document he swore he didn't have.
I looked around the table at all of them, their silly noises and the napkin diagrams and the confiscated pepper and my hand resting on a bump that was still mostly theoretical, and it occurred to me that if I could go back and show this exact dinner to the woman crying on Tessa's bathroom floor a week ago, she would have never believed me.
She would have assumed it was a scam. She would have asked what the catch was.
"MOM." Oliver had surfaced from his napkin. "We forgot to tell you the news."
"We have news?"
"School news. It's big." He laid his hands flat on the table the way he did when he was about to deliver a briefing. "Mr. Beauford doesn't work at our school anymore. We have a new principal."
"You don't say."
"Mrs. Marjorie Smith is the principal now.
Interim principal," he corrected himself.
"She has different bell bottoms for every day of the week and she can't hear anything, except she heard Madison say a bad word from across the whole cafeteria, so I have a hypothesis about her hearing that I'm still testing.
Also, her office doesn't smell like cologne. "
"She told Tommy Herrera that if he ran in the hallway one more time she would come to his birthday party," Noah reported, eyes huge. "And he stopped running. She seems really good at her job."
"The bar was on the floor," Tessa murmured into her water.
"Nobody knows what Mr. Beauford did," Beth announced to the table, thrilled. "But it was BAD. Tommy Herrera says he stole a car. Madison says he stole a TEACHER'S car."
"AND," Noah said, leaning in with the gravity of a nightly news anchor, "Tommy's mom saw him carrying his boxes out, and he had a black eye."
"TWO black eyes," Emma corrected. "Who do you think gave him those?"
There was silence across the table until Cole swallowed audibly.
"Audible swallowing can indicate dry mouth, emotional tension, heightened awareness, or emotional restraint," Oliver said, without looking up from his diagram.
Cole picked up his water and drank all of it. Every other adult at that table became extremely interested in finishing their food at the exact same moment.
"Maybe he walked into a door," Vaughn offered.
"Twice," Ben agreed.
"Also Miss Karla got fired," Emma offered quietly, from behind her book. "She cried in the front office. Beth saw."
"I saw," Beth confirmed. Then she pivoted to me with zero warning, because Beth's conversations have no seatbelts. "When are you coming back to be our teacher? Mr. Donaldson is fine but he’s not as fun as you."
"Next year, sweet girl. This year I've got a different project.
" I put my hand back on the theoretical bump.
"Marjorie, your new principal, asked me to come back and I told her I'd take the year renovating the house for the new baby on the way.
But nobody escapes me completely. I'm still running the play, which means all of you are still mine on Friday. "
"And as for Mr. Beauford," I added, in my best teacher voice, the one that could iron a wrinkle out of any conversation, "sometimes grown-ups make choices, and choices have consequences, and the school is going to be just fine.
Better than fine." Vaughn raised his glass.
"To new management," he said. "And to the doorknob that ran into Beauford's face. Twice."
The guys laughed and clinked their bottles, and I made a point of starting to put all the kids’ leftovers into the little cardboard to-go containers, because there are questions a pregnant woman does not need answers to.
“I can’t wait to be a big brother," Oliver suddenly announced to the table. "I've already decided the baby can share my room if the house renovation runs behind schedule. Babies don't take up much square footage. I measured my floor."
"I CALL BABYSITTING," Beth said as her hand shot straight up.
"You can't call babysitting," Emma said, scandalized, lowering her book for the first time all dinner. "I already know how to swaddle. I practiced on my rabbit."
"Can the baby be on our paintball team?" Noah asked. "Miss Morgan's team wins every time and the baby is basically already on it."
"The baby will not be playing paintball," I said, "for several years, at minimum," which all four of them correctly heard as eventually, yes, and celebrated in cheers.
Cole caught my eye across the table and held it.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.
Luke's hand found my knee under the table, and Ben winked at me from the end of it, and I sat there in the middle of all that attention and the kids excitement about the new baby on the way feeling more loved than I ever had.
Down the table, the babysitting negotiation had escalated into a bidding war, and Beth was now offering to throw in free hair braiding.
"Before you start World War III," Vaughn said to all the kids, "if you all volunteer to help out with our little one on the way we’ll take you all out for ice cream right now."
The kids all cried out “YAYYY!!” in unison and stampeded for the door with Tessa and Vaughn herding them, and I hung back to grab the leftover boxes, which is how I ended up alone by the hostess stand when a voice I knew better than I wanted to said my name.
"Well, look who it is. Miss Callie Morgan."
Karla. In a crisp black Harborline polo with a name tag so new it still had the shine on it and a lanyard that said TRAINEE, standing behind the hostess stand of the restaurant where I had just eaten the happiest dinner of my life, on what was clearly her very first shift.
"I see the rumors and my suspicions about you were very true.
" Her eyes went down me and back up, the way they used to over the front office counter.
"Out to dinner with all three of those fathers at once now.
Bold. You know, everything I ever said about you in that office, I said because somebody needed to say it.
Where I come from, a woman who spreads herself across three men has a name, sweetheart, and it isn't 'Miss Morgan. '"
My men came up and stood behind me out of nowhere.
"Karla," Ben said pleasantly. "Careful with the customer service. It's tricky holding down a job when you spent ten years as Darren Beauford's flying monkey and the whole flying monkey division just got shut down."
Karla's mouth opened.
"Boys." I put one hand on Ben's arm and moved him aside. "I've got this one."
And I looked at Karla Chism, the woman who had spent years narrating my failures to anyone in the front office who would listen.
"You're right, Karla. I do have a name. A few of them, actually.
Mama. Miss Morgan. Cupcake. And by summer, whatever these three decide to put on the paperwork.
" I smiled at her warm as sunrise, not letting her coldness get to me.
"You know, I spent years being afraid of you.
You perched behind that front office counter like a chain-smoking vulture, logging my copy machine minutes and narrating my outfits and telling anyone who couldn't escape fast enough that I was a shameless mess who'd come to no good, and then you dragged my eight-year-old down a hallway by the collar of his shirt like he was a bag of trash, and I smiled at you and apologized, because you had a desk and I had a mortgage.
Well. I don't have to smile at you anymore, so hear this instead.
You were right, Karla. I am a shameless mess, and the shameless mess has three men who worship her, a baby on the way, a son with an IQ higher than yours, and the happiest table in this restaurant.
And you have nothing but a trainee lanyard.
" I leaned in. "One more thing. We plan on eating here every week.
So every single week for the rest of your natural life, you are going to seat us, and smile at us, and bring the shameless mess her breadsticks, and you are going to be nice to me, Karla or else your ass might find yourself FIRED.
" I patted the hostess stand. "Welcome aboard. I'll see you next Friday."
Then I turned and walked, and I did not look back, because behind me I heard Cole smile and say, "Have a good night and go fuck yourself, ma'am."
I made it four steps out the door before Ben scooped me clean off the sidewalk.
"Ben careful I am carrying all the leftovers."
"And I'm carrying the mother of our baby, everybody has an important job." He hoisted me higher, grinning like a man at a parade, and Luke and Cole walked ahead of us doing absolutely nothing except radiating pride in every direction, and down the sidewalk the kids turned around at the commotion.
"Why is Miss Morgan being carried?" Noah hollered.
"Because she won," Ben hollered back.
Oliver looked at me, airborne, clutching leftovers in the golden hour light. "Won what?"
"Everything, buddy," Cole said. "She won everything."