Chapter 3 #4
I didn’t need or want him worrying, so I kicked him in the butt, immediately shoving my neighbor’s business aside. “Come on. Let’s get started on dinner before we have to put Mac on the grill.”
“Gross!” Lou gagged.
I swear I loved messing with him. There was something about being young and innocent and gullible that I loved, and to be fair, I used to do the same thing to Josh before he’d gotten old enough to realize I was usually full of shit.
The boys had just gone inside the house when my phone started ringing. It was my best friend, Van.
“Diana” was the first thing out of her mouth. “I’m dying,” the too familiar voice on the other end moaned.
I snorted, locking the front door behind me as I held the phone up to my face with my shoulder. “You’re pregnant. You’re not dying.”
“But it feels like I am,” the person who rarely ever complained whined.
We’d been best friends our entire lives, and I could only count on one hand the number of times I’d heard her grumble about something that wasn’t her family.
I’d had the title of being the whiner in our epic love affair that had survived more shit than I was willing to remember right then.
I held up a finger when Louie tipped his head toward the kitchen as if asking if I was going to get started on dinner or not. “Well, nobody told you to get pregnant with the Hulk’s baby. What did you expect? He’s probably going to come out the size of a toddler.”
The laugh that burst out of her made me laugh too. This fierce feeling of missing her reminded me it had been months since we’d last seen each other. “Shut up.”
“You can’t avoid the truth forever.” Her husband was huge. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t expect her unborn baby to be a giant too.
“Ugh.” A long sigh came through the receiver in resignation. “I don’t know what I was thinking—”
“You weren’t thinking.”
She ignored me. “We’re never having another one. I can’t sleep. I have to pee every two minutes. I’m the size of Mars—”
“The last time I saw you”—which had been two months ago—“you were the size of Mars. The baby is probably the size of Mars now. I’d probably say you’re about the size of Uranus.”
She ignored me again. “Everything makes me cry and I itch. I itch so bad.”
“Do I… want to know where you’re itching?”
“Nasty. My stomach. Aiden’s been rubbing coconut oil on me every hour he’s here.”
I tried to imagine her six-foot-five-inch, Hercules-sized husband doing that to Van, but my imagination wasn’t that great.
“Is he doing okay?” I asked, knowing off our past conversations that while he’d been over the moon with her pregnancy, he’d also turned into mother hen supreme.
It made me feel better knowing that she wasn’t living in a different state all by herself with no one else for support.
Some people in life got lucky and found someone great, the rest of us either took a long time… or not ever.
“He’s worried I’m going to fall down the stairs when he isn’t around, and he’s talking about getting a one-story house so that I can put him out of his misery.”
“You know you can come stay with us if you want.”
She made a noise.
“I’m just offering, bitch. If you don’t want to be alone when he starts traveling more for games, you can stay here as long as you need.
Louie doesn’t sleep in his room half the time anyway, and we have a one-story house.
You could sleep with me if you really wanted to.
It’ll be like we’re fourteen all over again. ”
She sighed. “I would. I really would, but I couldn’t leave Aiden.”
And I couldn’t leave the boys for longer than a couple of weeks, but she knew that. Well, she also knew I couldn’t not work for that long, too.
“Maybe you can get one of those I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up—”
Vanessa let out another loud laugh. “You jerk.”
“What? You could.”
There was a pause. “I don’t even know why I bother with you half the time.”
“Because you love me?”
“I don’t know why.”
“ Tia ,” Louie hissed, rubbing his belly like he was seriously starving.
“Hey, Lou and Josh are making it seem like they haven’t eaten all day. I’m scared they might start nibbling on my hand soon. Let me feed them, and I’ll call you back, okay?”
Van didn’t miss a beat. “Sure, Di. Give them a hug from me and call me back whenever. I’m on the couch, and I’m not going anywhere except the bathroom.”
“Okay. I won’t call Parks and Wildlife to let them know there’s a beached whale—”
“Goddammit, Diana—”
I laughed. “Love you. I’ll call you back. Bye!”
“Vanny has a whale?” Lou asked.
I tugged on his earlobe. “God, you’re nosey. No, she’s having a baby, remember? And I told her she is a whale right now.”
He made a funny face. “That’s not nice.”
“No, it’s not, but she knows I’m playing. Come on then and grab an onion and celery for me.”
“Celery?” He scrunched up his face.
I repeated myself, getting a nod from him before he turned to get what I asked of him.
I had just started slipping my phone back into my pocket when it started ringing again.
I had no idea that in about two minutes, I would be calling myself an idiot for not looking at the screen before I hit the answer button without looking.
My muscles had the placement memorized, so I didn’t have to. “Did you fall over already?” I joked.
“Diana?” the female voice came over the phone. The voice sounded familiar. “Don’t hang up—”
And just like a slap to the face, I realized why it was familiar. Smiling at Louie, I said in a bright voice, “You have the wrong number.” And I hung up even as my heart started going double-time.
She had called me maybe once over the last two years— once— and this was the second time she’d called in less than two weeks. I wanted to wonder why she would be calling now of all times, but I knew why. The why was probably in the living room setting up his Xbox for a game.
The thing was there were plenty of things in life you couldn’t escape, including the stupidest thing someone you loved very much did.
“ Tia , the trash is full.”
Hopefully, my smile didn’t look as fake as it felt and Louie wasn’t paying enough attention to me to notice it was.
The second to last person who needed to know who just called was Louie.
“I’ll change it real quick then. Wash that for me, would you, Goo?
” I asked, already heading toward the trash can as a ball of dread formed in my belly.
He wasn’t big enough to lift the bag out of the can; we’d learned that the hard way, so I didn’t mind being the person in charge of taking it out.
I shoved the phone call aside until later when I was in bed, alone without anyone to see me freaking out.
In no time, I took the bag out and replaced it with a new one, carrying the old one out the kitchen door to dump it in the big trash can outside. I had seriously just taken the first step down toward the trash cans when I heard, “—take your ass and go.”
Say what?
I stopped in place, fully aware that my fence was only a four-foot-tall chain-link one that anyone on the street could see through. A female voice hollered, “You’re a piece of fucking shit, Dallas!”
Dallas as in my neighbor? Was it the lady in the red car out there talking?
“You’re not telling me something you haven’t called me a thousand times before,” the male voice drawled in a loose laugh that somehow didn’t really sound very carefree at all. Jesus. How loud were they talking that I could hear their conversation so clearly?
The curse word that exploded through the air had me raising my eyebrows as I stood there with my bag.
Carefully, I made my way down the steps from the kitchen door to the yard and paused by the trash cans, mere feet from the fence that would let me look at my neighbor’s house.
Setting the bag down, I let my curiosity get the best of me as I tiptoed over the grass to the corner of the fence and tried to take a peek, convincing myself they wouldn’t see me in the shadows.
The man apparently named or nicknamed Dallas was standing on the porch, and the woman was on the sidewalk, leaning forward in a confrontational gesture. I tried to squint to see them better, but it didn’t help.
“I wouldn’t call you that if you didn’t act like one,” the woman shouted.
The man with the short hair seemed to look up at the sky—or the ceiling of his deck, if you wanted to get technical—and shook his head. His hands went up to palm his forehead. “Just tell me what the hell you came all the way here for, would you?”
“I’m trying to!”
“Get to the fucking point then!” he boomed back like an explosion, whatever control he had disappearing.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t think it was okay for a man to yell at a woman like that, but they were standing far apart and the woman was yelling like a damn crazy person, too. Her pitch was all shrieks and squeaks.
“I’ve been calling you over and over again—”
“Why the fuck would you expect me to answer?” he barked back. “I haven’t heard from you or seen you in three years. We agreed to go through our lawyers, remember that?”
To be fair, I had no idea what was going on and who was really at fault, but he had a point. If I hadn’t spoken to someone in so long, I more than likely wouldn’t answer the phone either.
But lawyers?
Lawyers, yelling at each other, his wedding ring… was this his wife? I’d been in enough relationships to know you didn’t yell at another person with so much hatred unless you’d slept with them at some point.
“Why would you see me? I told you before you left I was done ,” the woman yelled back with so much emotion in her voice, I actually started to feel guilty for eavesdropping.
“Trust me, I knew you were done—not like you ever really started anything to begin with,” the man replied.
Yeah. Definitely his wife. Why else would they have lawyers and go so long without talking to each other?
And why would he still be wearing his ring after so long?
“ What are you doing?”
I jumped and turned to glance at Louie who was standing on the other side of the screen door, looking at me. “Nothing,” I told him, taking the two steps over to open the trash can and put the bag inside like he hadn’t just caught me eavesdropping.
He waited until I was on the first step to ask, “You were listening to them, huh?”
“Me?” I made my eyes go wide as I opened the door and stepped inside as he backed up to give me room. “No. I’m not nosey.”
Louie scoffed. This five-year-old literally scoffed at me.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You think I’m nosey?”
Louie had already gone through his lying phase as a toddler, and even if he hadn’t, he knew I didn’t like it, and he didn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings.
Especially mine. But what he said next left me trying to figure out whether I should high-five him or be scared at how manipulative and sneaky he could be.
He walked over to me and leaned against my leg with that beaming smile of his. “Wanna hug?”