23. Andrea
— ? —
Andrea
Jenna and Melissa throw me a baby shower.
It’s a small affair. Close friends, Jenna’s backyard, streamers and balloons and enough food to feed an army.
Kirk isn’t allowed to come (Melissa’s rule), but he sends me off that morning with a kiss and a promise to have the crib assembled by the time I get home, which we both know means he’ll be watching assembly videos in a rage by noon.
“How are you feeling?” Jenna asks, pressing a glass of lemonade into my hand. “And I don’t mean the pregnancy.”
“I feel - good.” The word surprises me even as I say it. “Better than I have in a long time.”
“Things are working with Kirk?”
“Yeah, it’s much better now.” I settle onto one of the cushioned chairs Jenna has arranged in a circle. “It’s not perfect. We’re still learning how to trust each other again. But we’re learning from our previous experience together.”
“That’s what matters.” Jenna squeezes my shoulder. “For what it’s worth, he seems different. More grounded. More present.”
“He’s doing the work. Actually doing it, not just promising to.” I sip my lemonade. “His therapist says he’s made more progress in three months than most clients make in a year.”
“Wow. That’s amazing.”
“I know. I didn’t think Kirk would ever go to therapy, let alone continuously do so. But he’s committed.”
The party unfolds in Jenna’s backyard like a pastel explosion.
“Open mine first!” Melissa shoves a massive box into my lap before I’ve even finished my lemonade. “I wrapped it myself, which you can probably tell because it looks like a toddler attacked it with tape.”
She’s not wrong. The wrapping paper is more tape than paper, and when I finally fight my way through, I find the softest baby blanket I’ve ever touched - pale yellow with tiny embroidered elephants marching around the border.
“Mel.” My voice cracks. “It’s beautiful.”
“Don’t you dare cry, or I’ll cry, and then Jenna will cry, and we’ll flood the backyard.”
Too late. Jenna’s already dabbing at her eyes with a napkin.
The gifts keep coming. Tiny onesies with ridiculous sayings - I’m told I like long naps and milk and Eviction notice: 9 months is long enough. A breast pump that looks like it was designed by NASA. A diaper bag with more compartments than my first apartment.
“Okay!” Jenna claps her hands, cutting through the chaos. “Game time. Everyone grab a blindfold.”
“Why do I feel like this is going to end badly?” Daniel mutters, but he ties the silk scarf around his eyes like everyone else.
Jenna sets five tiny jars on the table in front of each guest. “Taste test. Rank them best to worst. Winner gets the good prize. Loser has to finish the jar they ranked last.”
“What’s the good prize?” Clarence asks.
“A bottle of wine you can’t share with Andrea.”
“Brutal.” He grins. “I’m in.”
The first jar makes the rounds. I watch from my throne of cushions - exempt from participation due to “gestational privilege,” according to Jenna - as my friends taste pureed something and try to keep straight faces.
Daniel gags. “What the hell is that?”
“No commentary until everyone’s ranked!” Jenna brandishes her clipboard. “Those are the rules.”
“There are rules?”
“There are always rules, babe.” Clarence pats his fiancé’s arm. “Just accept it.”
By jar three, alliances are forming. Melissa and Jenna are whispering strategy. Daniel is taking notes on his phone, which Clarence insists is cheating, which Jenna rules is “within the spirit of competition.”
The final reveal is carnage.
“That was BEEF AND GRAVY?” Melissa shrieks, staring at her rankings. “I put that first! I said it tasted like dessert!”
“Your palate is broken,” Daniel says solemnly. “I’m so sorry.”
“You ranked the peas last,” Clarence points out. “The peas. They were clearly the best.”
“The peas tasted like lawn clippings.”
“LAWN CLIPPINGS ARE NUTRITIOUS-”
“Okay, okay!” Jenna consults her clipboard. “The official loser, by unanimous decision of the judges - which is me - is Sarah, who somehow ranked prune puree as ‘surprisingly refreshing.’”
Sarah stares at the jar being placed in front of her. “I have to eat this? The whole thing?”
“Those are the rules.”
“I’m never coming to your parties again.”
She eats it anyway, grimacing with every spoonful, while the rest of us cheer her on like she’s completing an Olympic event.
Next comes the ribbon.
“Belly circumference,” Melissa announces, holding up a roll of pink satin like it’s a weapon. “Cut the length you think matches Andrea’s current situation. Closest without going over wins.”
“What do we win?” someone asks.
“The satisfaction of being right.” Melissa narrows her eyes. “And a candle. Now line up.”
The guesses range from reasonable to absurd. Jenna cuts a piece so long it could wrap around me twice. Daniel’s is suspiciously precise - he’s been eyeballing my belly all afternoon, I realize, preparing for this moment.
When it’s Sarah’s turn, she cuts a piece barely longer than my forearm.
“Sarah.” Melissa stares at her. “You’re disqualified.”
“What? Why?”
“Flattery. I’m citing the integrity of the sport.”
“The integrity - it’s a ribbon game!”
“Rules are rules.” Melissa points to the loser’s corner, where Sarah joins another guest who apparently committed the same crime. “Andrea is magnificent and enormous. Respect the belly.”
I’m laughing so hard my stomach hurts - which makes the baby kick, which makes me laugh harder.
The diaper relay is where things get serious.
Jenna sets up two stations with baby dolls, diapers, and timers. “Teams of two. Fastest time wins. And before anyone asks - yes, the diaper has to actually stay on the baby. No shortcuts.”
Daniel cracks his knuckles. “I’ve been practicing.”
Clarence stares at him. “You’ve been what?”
“I watched videos. I have a system.”
“We’ve been engaged for a year and you never mentioned a diaper system?”
“It’s proprietary.”
The relay begins. Melissa and Jenna fumble through their attempt, arguing about which tab goes where. Sarah and her partner - rehabilitated from the flattery incident - do a respectable job, though the diaper ends up slightly crooked.
Then Daniel steps up.
His hands move with surgical precision. Lift, slide, fasten, adjust. The whole thing takes maybe eight seconds. The diaper is perfect - snug but not tight, tabs symmetrical, no gaps.
The room goes silent.
“How,” Clarence breathes. “How.”
Daniel shrugs modestly. “Proprietary.”
“I demand an investigation.” Clarence turns to Jenna. “There’s no way that’s legal. He definitely cheated.”
“How would you even cheat at diaper folding?”
“I don’t know, but he did it. Look at that technique. That’s not natural.”
Jenna makes a show of examining Daniel’s handiwork. “The investigation will be ongoing. In the meantime, Daniel is the provisional winner.”
“Provisional!”
“Pending the results of the investigation.”
“Which you’re never going to conduct!”
“Correct.”
The argument is still raging when the cake comes out - a three-tiered masterpiece with pale yellow frosting and a fondant baby sleeping on top. Everyone abandons the diaper controversy immediately.
“Oh my God.” I stare at the tiny fondant shoes. The even tinier fondant fingers. “Jenna, this is too much.”
“It’s exactly enough.” She lights the single candle on top. “Make a wish. For the baby, not yourself - those are the rules.”
“You and your rules.”
“Make the wish!”
I close my eyes. Think about the tiny person growing inside me. Think about the life we’re going to build together.
Be happy, I wish. Be so, so happy.
I blow out the candle, and my friends cheer, and for a moment everything is perfect - the laughter, the chaos, the ridiculous amount of love packed into this backyard.
“Speech!” Melissa yells. “The mom-to-be has to give a speech!”
“That’s not a rule-”
“It is now!”
I look around at their faces. Jenna, who planned all of this. Melissa, who’s been my rock. Clarence and Daniel, who became family when I needed it most.
“I just-” My voice wobbles. “Thank you. All of you. For being here. For believing in me when things were hard.” I press my hand to my belly. “This baby is so lucky to have you as their village.”
“Oh, damn it.” Jenna’s crying again. “I said no speeches that make me cry!”
“That’s definitely not a rule.”
“It should be!”
We eat cake and laugh and argue about whether Daniel’s victory will ever be officially certified.
The investigation remains pending. The afternoon stretches into evening, golden light filtering through the trees, and I sit in the middle of all of it - surrounded by the people who matter most - and feel, for the first time in months, like everything might actually be okay.
I’m opening a box of impossibly small socks, Melissa’s, of course, all seventeen pairs of them, when the backyard gate opens, and the party’s volume drops by half.
Katherine Ellis stands at the gate in a pale gray dress, holding a wrapped gift, looking like a woman who has rehearsed this walk in her car for twenty minutes.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Melissa mutters, already rising.
“It’s okay. I knew she was coming.” I put a hand on her arm and stand. Every pair of eyes tracks me across the lawn. “Katherine.”
“Andrea. I’m sorry to crash. I called Jenna and she said-” Katherine glances at Jenna, who gives a small, unapologetic shrug. “She said if I had things to say, I could say them to your face or not at all.”
“That sounds like Jenna.”
“It does.” She holds out the gift. “For the baby. And an excuse to be standing here, honestly.”
I take it. It’s wrapped better than anything I’ve ever wrapped in my life. “You didn’t have to.”
“I did, actually. That’s rather the point.” She smooths her skirt, and I watch a woman assembled from thirty years of composure work to hold the assembly together. “I owed you an apology at the Grandview and I gave you two sentences of one. You deserve the rest. May we?”
We step away from the tables, toward the rose trellis at the edge of the yard. Behind us, Melissa keeps watch with the subtlety of a lighthouse.
“I believed her for fifteen years,” Katherine says.
“That’s the part I can’t stop turning over.
Ethel told me you were a fortune hunter, and I believed it, because believing it meant Kirk hadn’t simply - chosen someone else.
It was a kinder story about my own life, and I swallowed it whole.
” She looks at me directly. “I never checked. Fifteen years, and I never once checked. So when she called me about the hotel, I put on my good pearls and came to collect a man whose marriage I’d been assured was already dead.
That’s who I let myself become. I’m ashamed of it. ”
“You walked out,” I say. “When you heard the word ‘forged,’ you walked. That’s more than most of that room would have done.”
“It was the bare minimum.”
“You’d be amazed how rare the bare minimum is.”
Katherine’s laugh comes out short and real, and for a second I can see the person she might have been if Ethel Graham hadn’t spent fifteen years using her as a chess piece too.
“Now the rest of it,” she says, and the composure tightens again.
“I gave you the shape of it on the phone at the courthouse. You deserve the whole of it, and not secondhand. My aunt winters in Palm Beach. Same circuit Ethel’s landed in.
” She hesitates. “Ethel’s telling the story down there, Andrea.
Her version. In her version there was an affair, and a hushed-up scandal, and a paternity question that was never ‘properly resolved.’ She’s three states away rebuilding the lie for a fresh audience, and some of those women summer up here. ”
The lemonade turns to acid in my stomach.
“She never stops,” I say. “She just finds new rooms.”
“She finds new rooms.” Katherine nods. “I thought you’d want to know which doors they’re behind. My aunt is loud, disloyal to everyone equally, and adores me. If it would help, I can make sure the Tribune announcement and a certain video circulate down there too. Sunlight travels.”
I study her. The pearls, the perfect gray dress, the fifteen wasted years.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because she used me too.” Katherine’s chin lifts, and for the first time she reminds me of no one but herself. “And I’ve discovered I don’t care for it.”
She stays twenty more minutes. She’s stiff and formal and completely out of place among the streamers, and Jenna feeds her cake anyway, and when she leaves, Melissa watches her all the way to the gate.
“I don’t trust her,” Melissa announces.
“You don’t trust anyone.”
“I trust you. I trust cake.” She sits down beside me and takes my hand, and her voice drops. “You okay? That was a lot of gray dress.”
“Ethel’s still telling it, Mel.” My hand finds my belly, where my daughter rolls and stretches, oblivious. “A thousand miles away, to strangers by a pool, she is still telling the lie about my baby.”
The party swirls on around us, bright and warm and full of tiny socks.
But I sit in the middle of it doing the math Katherine handed me: how far a whisper travels, how long a lie can live in a warm climate, and what it will take to finally, permanently, put it in the ground.