34. Carolina
Chapter thirty-four
Carolina
“ W hat are you rugrats doing here?”
I hear my brother before I see him, greeting Natalie and Louisa as they burst through my parents’ front door in search of Chris. Apparently, they’ve been over before to help my mom in the garden or learn a thing or two from Dad in his impeccable garage. When I walk in next, Chris peers over the top of Louisa’s head, her arms and legs wrapped around him like a koala.
“Hey, Berg busy tonight…”
His voice trails off as a shadow stretches in front of me, Berg standing close at my back.
Chris turns and lets Lou slide down to the ground. “What’s going on? ”
“Nothing!” My tone is a little too bright, so I clear my throat and try again. “Just here for family dinner.”
“Right,” he says, slowly.
“Girls,” I hear my mom call. “Come help me with dessert.”
They don’t hesitate, making themselves right at home in the same kitchen I grew up in.
“Where’s Anna?” I ask, really hoping she’s here somewhere.
She’s become a friend of mine during the last few months, and she’d be a great buffer between my brother and I for when I drop this bomb.
“Late client. She’ll be here shortly.”
Berg climbs the stairs and clasps my brother on the shoulder before we all move to the living room. The three of us surround the coffee table, nobody making a move to sit on either of the couches or arm chairs.
“Couldn’t give her the night off, man?” Chris asks, a smile on his face as he glances at his phone.
If Berg makes some sort of joke about me working all night, I’m gonna kill him. Right after my brother does.
“We’re, uh, not really here tonight in a working sort of way.”
He stuffs his phone in his back pocket, looking up. “Huh?”
When I rest my hand on Berg’s bicep, my brother’s eyes dart to it immediately.
“Remember when you brought Anna for supper the night I got home?” I ask, remembering how weird it was to show up to see that my brother actually brought someone home to meet Mom and Dad .
He scratches his chest. “Yeah…I remember.”
“This is sort of like that.”
Berg clears his throat. “Chris, I really care about her.”
My brother rubs his eyes with the heels of his hand.
“So, you’re dating? I just want to figure this out.”
Berg answers for me. “Well, we’ve been spending so much time together. Yeah. We’re a couple.” He turns to me, sincerity in his eyes. “It’s serious.”
I tuck my hair behind my ear. There’s no hiding the bright blush of my cheeks. Serious has never sounded so sexy.
“My sister. My little sister.”
I pipe up before my brother can work himself up about this. “Okay, um, first, I’m right here.”
Chris falls back on the couch, elbows on his knees as he leans forward and squints at me.
“Second,” I also sit, jerking my head at Berg when he doesn’t follow suit. “I understand that in terms of birth order, I will always be your little sister, but I’m not a child, Chris. Not even close.”
“I know that,” he mumbles.
Mom peeks her head out of the kitchen, apron around her neck.
“Hi, honey! Berg.” She wiggles her fingers at him.
Chris twists in his seat, and when he sees the beaming smile on our mother’s face he groans again.
“Oh, lovely. She knows. I’m the only goddamn person who didn’t know, right? ”
I suck air between my teeth. “Kinda?”
Berg nods along next to me.
“Anna?”
“Literally everyone, man.”
Mom calls out from the kitchen. “It’s really obvious, honey.”
“Well, like,” Chris fiddles with the hem of his shorts. “I’m really happy for you guys, or whatever.”
I have to laugh behind my hand because his sullen expression is the farthest thing from happy.
I stand, walking around the coffee table and plopping myself down on his knee.
“What are you doing?” He groans, holding his arms out awkwardly like a bird attempting its first flight.
“Hugging my big brother.”
“As a big brother, do I have to do that thing where I threaten Berg if he hurts you?”
“Uh…that’s optional?”
“Thank fuck,” he says as I break the hug and stand up again. “Because I don’t think I could take him in a fight.”
I return to my spot next to Berg as he laughs, a rumbly vibrato that makes me want to press my ear to his chest.
All three of us turn our heads at the sound of the front door. Anna bobs up the stairs a minute later.
“I’m sorry I’m late! I’m here! Sharon, can I help?”
She freezes on the landing, eyes darting between my brother on one side of the room and Berg and I on the other .
“Oh, are you telling him?” she asks, before clasping her hand over her mouth.
Chris groans, shaking his head as a slow smile spreads across his face.
Throughout dinner, I can't get Berg’s words out of my head. ‘It’s serious.’
I smile between bites, and probably during them, too. Nobody said anything about it being rude to smile with food in your mouth. When Berg isn’t cutting Louisa’s steak into tiny bites or reminding Natalie not to use her jeans as a napkin, he places his hand on my thigh and it makes me feel loved and cared for, like he’s always thinking of me. The table is full of all the people I love. The way my mom is doting on the little girls, I know she’s probably desperate for the grandchild era of her life to begin. I’ve not thought that seriously about whether I feel the urge to have biological children. It’s something for me to reflect on and maybe discuss with Berg, but at the moment I’m content.
After supper, Berg and Anna walk the girls to the playground around the corner, and I suggest to my parents and Chris that we light the fire pit in the backyard. My palms are sweating as I try to scrape up the courage, to be honest.
“I have something to tell you,” I blurt.
Here we go.
My mom presses her hand over her heart.
“Are you pregnant?” she whispers, without a trace of disappointment lacing her voice .
“No! Mom!”
Dad rubs his temples and there’s a vein sticking out of my brother’s forehead as they process mom’s assumption.
“I’m just asking!”
“Okay, well, it’s not that.”
All three of them are staring at me expectantly, so I suck in a deep breath.
“I made a really dumb decision when I was abroad. I…um, loaned money to somebody that I probably shouldn’t have loaned money to. And I haven’t gotten it back.”
God, this is hard.
“Actually,” I add. “I’m not going to get it back. It’s gone.”
It took me so many months to accept this truth, but I recognize that they are hearing it for the first time. Dad’s cheeks are pale and I feel god awful for worrying him.
Chris leans over from his lawn chair and nudges my knee. “That’s why you needed money?”
I nod.
Mom’s head bounces between my brother and I. “What are you two talking about? When did Carolina need money?”
Chris bows his head. “You could have told me, Caro.”
“Told you what?” Mom sighs, resting her chin in her palm.
“I couldn’t bring myself to do it! You’d already warned me about Emilio.”
“I’d ask, ‘who is Emilio?’, but nobody would answer me, would they?”
“I’ll catch you up in a sec, Mom.” I lean over to pat her knee .
“And you thought I’d say I told you so?”
I shrug. “Something like that.”
“I thought you’d been careless with your spending.”
“I probably was careless, to be honest. But it wasn’t serious until everything happened.”
“He used you, Caro.”
I focus on the blades of grass tickling my feet and the warmth of the fire on my thighs. It’s all in the past.
“I blamed myself and figured I wasn’t a very responsible person.”
Mom gasps like I insulted her.
“You are very responsible, thank you very much. I raised both of you to be that way.” She points at Chris and I. “You always had chores and were in charge of managing your own homework. You both had part-time jobs by the time you were sixteen.”
“Do you need money for school?” Dad asks.
“I–um, I’ve been saving up again. I think I’ll be okay as long as I can keep nannying part time for Berg.”
“Honey,” Mom gets up from her spot and shoos my brother out of his chair so she can be next to me. She pauses before waving at Chris and Dad. “Go away. Girl talk.”
When they’ve scurried off toward the fence line, mom takes my hand in hers.
“You can’t keep working as his nanny, honey.”
I smile, realising I’ve been calling Natalie and Louisa the same thing lately .
“Why? We wouldn’t be the first couple to work together while dating.”
She applies gentle pressure to my hand as she pauses, selecting her words. “Because this isn’t a conventional workplace. And you too aren’t simply dating, you’re in love.”
Mom’s eyes are shiny.
“You know we still have money set aside for your education, right?”
I splutter, “W-what? No, I didn’t know that!”
Why didn’t I know that?
“It’s not a lot. But it should pay for a year of tuition.”
I could cry, actually, I am crying. A hot tear rolls along my nose, but my mom swipes it away.
“I think you’re going to be taking on a very important role in those girls' lives, Carolina, but it won’t be as a nanny.”
“I really love them, Mom. All three of them.”
“I know you do.”
I think of Natalie earlier and how she didn’t want to talk to me, and it shakes my confidence for a second.
“Earlier, before supper, Natalie was upset and didn’t want to talk to me at all. It made me worried that I don’t have what it takes.”
Mom laughs, and it catches me off guard.
“Oh, Caro, do you remember how often you and your brother gave me the silent treatment?”
I bite my lip, recalling slammed bedroom doors and exasperated sighs .
“Were we assholes?”
She laughs again, holding her arms out wide. “Oh, yeah. Big ones. Being biologically related to your child doesn’t make them any less likely to give you the attitude of the century. Just give them some time, some space, and whatever you do, don’t bicker with Berg while it’s happening.”
It’s almost freaky how accurately she’s depicting my afternoon.
“Just because the kids are in a mood doesn’t mean you have to jump on that train with them.”
“I need a notebook,” I joke, wishing I had a way to bottle all this experienced mom wisdom.
“No, but you might need a night off. Want me to see if the girls want to spend the night here?”
They’ve been glued to my mom’s side all evening, sporting aprons I used to wear when I was a little girl and enjoying the big backyard.
“I’ll ask Berg.”
She smiles conspiratorially. “I already did.”
***
“I don’t know, Berg,” I call out so he can hear me over the popcorn machine, “it feels sort of wrong to do movie night without them. ”
He pokes his head around the corner. “They’ll live. Besides, you don’t think your mom has a movie or something turned on for them by now?”
He’s right. I know my parents will dote on those girls all evening, spoiling them rotten. We’ll probably have to drag them kicking and screaming back home tomorrow. But tonight, we can enjoy each other’s company, even if my mind keeps floating to how the girls are doing every ten minutes. Berg zipped home to grab their jammies and toothbrushes and favourite stuffed animals, and then we headed back together. While Berg is on snack duty, I thumb through one of the many leather bound photo albums that live on a shelf near the television. The girls and I have looked through a few of them together. They love to show me Berg and Trudy’s wedding photos and they burst out laughing every time they see the picture of Berg holding his nose while trying to change one of Natalie’s first diapers. This particular book seems to be full of birthday parties. Page after page documents photos of amazing birthday cakes. At first I wonder if that was Trudy’s specialty, but these are more recent, and the cakes only improve with each year.
“Berg?” I call.
“What’s up?”
“Who made these cakes?”
The living room curtains are drawn shut against the last of the evening sun and soft blankets line the back of the oversized couch. He saunters into the living room with no shirt on and low slung sweatpants, a massive stainless steel bowl of popcorn in one hand. My eyes widen in appreciation.
“Delicious,” I say, grinning at him.
We both know I’m not talking about the snacks.
I refocus on the photos.
“The cakes. Who made them?”
Berg rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “Oh. I did.”
I tap my index finger against one with icing done in a perfect rainbow gradient.
“You can make cakes like this?”
“Yeah, that one is from Louisa’s birthday. But most people left, including you, by the time we cut it.”
I made a mental note to sing her happy birthday tomorrow.
I laugh, flipping to another page. “You’re telling me you let me make that absolute monstrosity of a cake for the auction when you had the freaking talent to make something like this?”
He smirks. “But Natalie asked you.”
“Why on earth would she ask me when she knew you had this…this talent?”
He shrugs, setting all the food down on the coffee table.
“Don’t think it was about the cake. I think she just wanted you.”
There’s so much to unpack. Berg didn’t dare say a thing about his ability to decorate cakes because he knew it would make feel even worse about the way mine turned out. And Natalie included me in something that was important to her, even though I told her I had next to no baking skills. The MacMillans have been including me in their family long before Berg and I declared ourselves ‘together’.
“That’s so sweet of her. I’m honoured.”
I return the precious albums away in their home and find my spot on the couch. Berg wasn’t lying when he said he never skips movie night. But I admire that about him. His commitment to the high and lows of supper, the traditions, the love. The scent of buttery popcorn permeates the air as he settles onto the couch next to me. I lift the blanket I’m cuddled beneath and he settles in next to me. My stomach squeezes when he presses a kiss to my temple.
He points the remote at the television. “Ready?”
The couch feels extra comfy in the dark with only the light of the television casting shadows on the living room walls. The house is so quiet as he cuddles up next to me, his arm around my shoulder. Berg presses play and I’m only half listening to the dialogue because he’s so warm and smells like his smoky shower gel. I shiver at the thought of those sweatpants that are snug in all the right places sliding down over his well sculpted butt and–
“Are you cold?” he whispers, still watching the television but clearly tuned into me enough to notice the slight movement.
More like hot. Very hot.
“Here,” he says, reaching behind us to snag another fleece blanket and shaking it out across my lap.
I’m roasting from the inside out as I imagine watching the movie from the comfort of Berg’s lap, being supported by those strong legs and leaning against his broad chest. But who’s gonna stop me? I set aside the popcorn bowl and scoot over, depositing myself directly in his lap.