2. Court
2
COURT
L iterally nobody at Pickle Media likes their job.
I stare at the summary of this quarter’s performance reviews and wonder how the hell I’m going to forward them to Uncle Sherman.
After last quarter’s fell dramatically, I assumed something was wrong with the supervisors conducting the reviews and hired an outside firm.
But this impartial third-party company found things were even worse.
I scan some of the phrases taken from the employees.
Crappy work culture.
Nobody wants to be here.
Only the pay is worth it.
Then the conclusions of the reviewers.
Low work morale.
Little opportunity to showcase their skills.
Planning to move on whenever possible.
I spin away from the monitor. This is on me. Pickle Media was fine when I took it over from the people Uncle Sherman hired to establish it, while I was getting my master’s degree in business.
What can I do to change something that’s clearly poisoned all the way down to the administrative assistants?
I clasp my hands behind my head. This day sucks. Maybe I’ll take the rest of it off. Hit the gym. Get too exhausted to think.
I pick up my cell phone. I could reinstall Tinder, do some swiping.
I haven’t done that in nearly a year. It hasn’t appealed.
Nothing does.
My assistant texts me. There’s a woman to see you.
Now what? Devin never says, “A woman.” He gets their name and credentials. And since when does someone get to pop in to see the CEO without an appointment?
I pick up the desk phone and hit the button to buzz him.
Devin picks up. “I was trying to be discreet.”
“What the hell for?”
“It’s a… situation.” His voice is low. Devin’s voice is neverlow.
I hang up, realizing a second too late I should probably have been polite about it. I text him back.
Me: Who is she?
Devin: She won’t say.
Me: I’m sure it’s some useless sales pitch. Send her to Beth.
Devin: I don’t think so. She has a goat.
I stare at the words a moment. A goat?
Then a curdle of unease spreads in my stomach. I met a woman with a goat once. I was at the Castle Hotel in Colorado, near my family’s house. It’s indirectly in the Pickle empire, since the owner is the sister of my cousin’s wife.
As Uncle Sherman likes to say, every Pickle’s a Pickle.
The Castle staff let the woman keep the goat in the stables with the Avalonian donkeys they raise.
What was her name?
Linda?
Loretta?
No, it was cuter.
Lucy. That’s it. Lucy… something.
Me: Ask her if her name is Lucy.
I wait, wondering why she’s here. I met her in the hotel bar, a funny cantina with a haunted theme. She’d been pushed toward me by two of her friends.
I ended up in her room for an hour or two. Yeah, we did shit. All consensual. Condoms in accordance with the laws of first-name hookups.
Now she’s in New York?
Devin finally replies, Yes. She seems relieved you remember.
I guess I’ll see her. Send her in .
The smell hits before the door is fully open.
Livestock. Earth.
The goat comes in first, looking around like he owns the place. Or, maybe it’s a she. I think Lucy mentioned her goat’s milk supply. Now that’s pillow talk.
But when Lucy enters, belly first, I jump out of my chair.
She’s pregnant. Like, really pregnant. Her colorful skirt covers a huge ball of belly. How many months ago were we together? It was New Year’s Eve, and now it’s August.
Eight months.
Is that eight months pregnant?
My gut tightens. This has to be why she’s here. Did she smell money and decide to pawn the kid on me?
Not without DNA testing.
But what if it is mine?
I’m hosed.
Thoroughly hosed.
Lucy walks into my office with an uncertain smile. She tucks her golden-brown hair behind one ear.
Her feet are… bare.
Is she really showing up here barefoot and pregnant? With a goat?
“Hello, Court,” she says.
I can’t find my voice for a second. She’s mostly as I remember—pretty and friendly, with farm-girl vibes.
But that belly.
I gesture to a chair and clear my throat. “Hello, Lucy. Sit down, of course. Is the goat okay?”
The animal nibbles at the leather padding on the chair next to her.
“Matilda, no! Don’t chew the furniture.” Lucy pulls the goat close. “She’s nervous. She already ate through the strap of my shoes.” She lifts a foot and wiggles her toes.
That solves that mystery. Now for the bigger one, why she’s here.
I sit, glad the imposing desk is between us. “Can I help you?”
“I… uh.” She falters, looking around the room. “This office is nice. I saw you’re the CEO. You didn’t tell me that.”
I specifically left out work details the night we met. “How did you find me?”
“You said you worked in New York. The bartender already told us that you were part of the Pickle family. Turns out Court and Pickle together aren’t that common as names. I mean, once you knock out pickleball, the sport. It led me to your staff picture. I knew it was you.”
“You couldn’t call?”
She shuffles her feet on the rug. The goat has resumed chomping at the leather of the chair.
“I don’t have a cell phone. At least, not anymore. Not when I decided to come. My friend April—you might remember her, the one with red hair—she had the phone. But she’s gone to France.”
And Lucy has no access to one? No email? A growl forms in my throat, ready to accuse her of all sorts of things. Extortion. Playing on my sympathy, like I have any left.
“So you thought it was better to simply show up unannounced? I assume you drove, given the goat?”
Her fingers twiddle with a fold in her colorful skirt. “I, uh, don’t have a car either. Summer drove us to the Castle that weekend we met. She took off in June to Vegas with some guy named Tommy. They got married.”
“So you flew? They let the goat on the flight?” They really were getting permissive on the airlines.
“No. I rode here on a feed truck. A nice man from Ohio. That was after a trucker got me halfway here.”
I almost stand from the shock but force myself to remain planted in my chair. “You hitchhiked from Colorado?”
“It’s not hard. The goat helps. I mean, not for regular people in normal cars. They don’t want you messing up their seats. But delivery people. They like company.”
“Anything could have happened! And you’re pregnant!”
She shrugs. “It makes men less likely to get handsy. They’re squeamish.”
They shouldn’t be. She’s rosy and glowing, and I’m already flashing with everything that happened in that encounter between us in Colorado.
Time to address the elephant in her belly. “Is that why you’re here? The pregnancy?”
She notices the goat gnawing on the chair. “Oh, no!” She pulls her away. “I’ll pay for the damage. Somehow. Oh. Gosh. Oh.” Then the waterworks start.
Bloody fucking hell. She’s going to cry on me. Of course she is. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll have maintenance take it to be fixed.”
She pulls a few stalks of hay from her knapsack and holds it out, tears streaming down her cheeks. “She’s been short on foraging since we got to Queens. The subway ride was hard on her.”
“You took the subway with a goat?”
“How else would I get here?”
This whole thing is ridiculous. Who does this? It’s an episode of a TV comedy. Or a bit in a stand-up routine.
“About the pregnancy,” I remind her. “Is it your assertion that the child is mine?”
She focuses on the goat chewing through the hay. “It is yours. There was nobody before you, not for months. And nobody after.”
“I’m supposed to believe you?”
Her head snaps up at that. “Of course you are. You were there.”
“Properly sheathed in a condom.”
“With eighty percent effectiveness.”
“When used improperly, which wasn’t the case.”
She swipes away her tears. She’s switched to angry. I can see it in her steely posture, the uplift of her chin. “It could have been defective.”
“Why aren’t you on birth control?”
She lets out a huff. “Why would I put unnatural hormones into my body?”
Oh, now I’m remembering. She’s a yoga, vegetarian, crunchy-granola naturalist. Eight months ago, she’d gone on quite a while about the ills of modern industrial society.
Not that she’s wrong. But she takes it to an impractical level. In fact, I think she lives off the grid.
Which explains the no phone, no email, no car.
“When can we do a DNA test?” I ask her.
Her face pales, two bright spots of pink standing out on her cheeks. “I have no idea.”
“You hitchhiked here all the way from Colorado, and you don’t even have a way to prove that this pregnancy is mine?”
Then it happens again. The waterworks. She sniffs. She wipes her eyes.
Holy Christ. I don’t know what to do with this.
She points at my computer. “Can you look it up?”
“Look what up?”
“DNA tests.”
I’m happy to spin away and face my monitor. The impassive glow of technology is vastly preferable to her misery.
She sniffles while I tap and scan the results.
I speed-read the first hits. “You can do it while pregnant, but it’s an invasive procedure.”
“A needle? Like amniocentesis?”
“Yes.”
She makes a little cry.
“But once the baby is out, it’s a simple swab of saliva.”
Another cry.
I want to read more than headlines about how this works, but I turn back to her. I try to imagine what a kinder, gentler person would do. Someone like, I don’t know, my brother Axel. Or my cousin Anthony. Maybe all the patience went to the A names in the family.
“I tell you what. I’ll buy you a ticket home, pay for the test, and we can revisit once the baby is here and you know.”
She sucks in a gasp. “You would miss the birth of your baby!”
“Not if it’s not my baby.”
She stands, planting her hands on my desk. “But it is your baby. You can have your DNA test to prove it, but you’ll regret all your life missing his birth if he is yours.”
My throat tightens, picturing a little boy running around Central Park, climbing the Alice in Wonderland statue, tossing a ball around. “It’s a boy?”
“I think so. I did the string test.”
What? “The string test?”
“Yes, you put a weight on a string and see if it goes back and forth or in circles.”
Motherfucking unbelievable. “Did you even see a doctor?”
“Of course. There are programs for mothers. I applied for WIC.”
“You qualified for WIC?”
“I live in a yurt and sell goat cheese. Yeah, I qualify.”
Jesus. What have I gotten myself into?
“Do you even have enough money to get by?”
She hesitates. “I will. Eventually. When I can teach yoga again.”
“What will you do with the baby during yoga?”
“He can come, too.”
“And the goat?”
“She stays at the yurt. There’s plenty to forage.”
“You really live in one?”
She smooths her skirt. Damn, that’s a big belly. “Most of the year. It gets too cold in the winter.”
I ignore the fact that my dick seems to be interested in her roundness. Surely this is not a fetish I didn’t know about. God help me. “Where do you go in winter?”
She seems uncertain, pressing the goat’s head to her thigh. The hay is all gone. “I used to stay with April and Summer…” She trails off as if this is the first time she’s realized she won’t have a safe home for herself and the baby once the cold hits.
“Okay, okay. Let me think.” I run my hand over my face. The only sure thing here is that I did indeed sleep with her eight months ago. “When are you due?”
“September 20. First babies can be late, though.”
It’s late August. We have less than a month to figure this out. “Where is your family? Your parents?”
She frowns. “My grandmother died when I was fourteen. My parents are not an option.”
“What happened with them?”
She drops back into the chair. “They’re part of what’s wrong with society.”
I feel another one of her rants coming on. They probably use pesticides. Or refuse to recycle. She’s not going to like me any better. I like my steaks rare and my Ferrari full of gas. This is a hell of a mess.
But it’s only a month. Uncle Sherman would kick my ass if he found out I booted a pregnant woman. My dad, too. And my mom would come in behind.
“I’ll have Devin find a place for you. We’ll get you an obstetrician here. When the baby’s born, we’ll do the test. Does that work?”
“What about Matilda?”
“Who’s Matilda?”
“My goat.”
Fuck. That’ll be a tall order. “Let me get Devin in here.”
She nods, then frowns at the floor by her feet. “Do you have a towel?”
Now I really do jump out of my chair. “Did your water break? Are you bleeding?”
She laughs. Actually laughs. Like any of this is funny. “No. Matilda is too full. I need to milk her. Do you have a bucket? Or a big jar?”
Jesus Christ. I’ve fucked up this time.