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“You’d be moving into my house,” she reiterated, and then she sank to the floor. She leaned her back against the wall and stretched her legs out in front of her. “We’re overlooking the small fact that we annoy the crap out of each other.”
“True. But I think this is important enough for us to compromise.”
“We can’t compromise our personalities, can we? For a whole year? We’re so different.” Which is why we’ve never even attempted to date, she added silently. Which is why we’re best friends.
Adam didn’t answer, and Molly realized he wouldn’t. He knew she could argue him into the ground on any point. So he’d rested his case, and it was now up to her.
Marry Adam?
It would be in name only. She knew he’d stick to the rules they set. But wasn’t marriage supposed to be something more, something about love?
She did love Adam. But not in the to-have-and-to-hold way. More like in the to-have-fun-and-to-hold-good-parties-with way. Right. She put a hand over her chest, felt the pounding of her heart. And that, that was merely because she was surprised.
It didn’t seem right to compromise on marriage. If she was ever going to bother taking this kind of step, it should be for the right, idealistic reasons.
“I can’t,” she finally said. “Adam, I can’t. Because you’re my friend, my real friend. Which you’re proving by offering to make this kind of sacrifice. And I will be grateful to you forever, but I just can’t.”
Adam still didn’t respond, and Molly thought for an impossible moment that she might have really hurt him, that he felt rejected. A little pain stabbed at her heart. Then he said, “All right. I thought it was a good idea, but it’s just as well. I’ve heard that you snore.”
It was a typical Adam comment, but the last word fell a tiny bit flat. “I’d better go,” Molly said. “I’m hungry again, which is not to be believed. And, Adam…thank you.”
“Don’t say thank you. Saying no to a marriage proposal is one thing. Saying ‘no, thanks’ to a marriage proposal is another.”
Molly said a hasty goodbye and hung up. She put her head in her hands, and didn’t realize she was crying again until she felt the tears leak out from between her fingers and drip down her wrist. Stupid hormones. If it hadn’t been for all her uncharacteristic boo-hooing, Adam wouldn’t have lost his mind and proposed, she wouldn’t have said no, and things wouldn’t be all strange between them now.
But she couldn’t do what he was suggesting. Even if it wasn’t really real. Adam was not the man she was supposed to marry. She was supposed to marry a man just like her—ambitious and career-oriented, someone who understood her goals not because she had to explain them, but because he had similar ones. That’s what her parents had in each other. That’s why Molly had been one of the only children in her small, elite private grade school with still-married parents. She’d emulated them in so many ways, so why not this important one?
“It’s worth waiting for,” she whispered to her baby, but why did it feel as if she were trying to convince herself? Her eyes overflowed again.
Plunk.
It was the sound of a large drop hitting the floor. A drop too heavy to be a tear.
Plunk.
This time, Molly was looking straight ahead and caught sight of the drop hitting her hardwood floor about six inches in front of her. She got onto her hands and knees, crawled to the spot, looked at the little puddle and sat back on her heels and tilted her head up to peer at the ceiling.
Plunk.
This drop didn’t hit the floor. It hit Molly’s large stomach. She stared at the spot on her sweater.
The ceiling was leaking. Leaking.
She jumped up awkwardly, scrambled into her office and turned over her wastebasket. Crumpled sticky notes and receipts skittered across the floor as she carried the bucket to the hallway, positioning it under the leak, which had quickened into a more regular plunk-plunk-plunk.
A freaking ceiling leak. This was going to cost—well, she couldn’t even guess. All she knew was, roof leaks were not cheap. She was really going to call that inspector she’d used and give him a piece of her mind.
She glanced down again at the wet spot on her shirt, and rubbed it with her hand. Her eyes welled up again.
No. This was going to be under control. She could do this. She was going to be an excellent mother. She was going to be as good at it as she was at everything else. And she was not going to let it rain on her little baby’s head.
She would do whatever it took to keep her future, and the future of her child, secure. And dry.
She snatched the phone off the floor where she’d left it, and hit redial. When Adam answered, she said, “Here’s the thing. If you think you’re going to be entitled to any special, ah, privileges of marriage, you will be mistaken.”
A beat. “Too bad,” he said. “I was kind of looking forward to complaining about my mother-in-law.”
“That’s not the privilege I’m referring to and you damn well know it.”
“Didn’t this conversation end already with you saying no?”
“I take it back.”
“Pardon?”
Molly took a deep breath, squeezed her eyes shut, and told her best friend, “It’s a deal. For one year, you’ve got yourself a wife.”
Chapter Three
Most Saturday mornings, Adam woke up with ideas in his head about how he was going to spend a fun weekend. Basketball with the guys, a romp in the park with Elmer, trying out a new restaurant, taking in an action flick, watching a ball game on TV with a large sausage pizza. Some weekends, he could cram all those things in, if he wanted to. Or he could spend two days sitting in an armchair reading books about topics he’d discovered he found interesting so that by Monday morning, he was a pseudo-expert.
This was definitely the first Saturday morning when he awoke, blinked at the sunlight streaming in on either side of the window shade, and thought, I need to pack a suitcase so I can go get married.
He squinted at the glowing red numbers on his clock. After ten already. Well, he’d been up kind of late. He’d figured he should remain near the phone in case Molly called him back and changed her mind again.
She hadn’t. And he’d stayed on his sofa through two and a half lame infomercials just to be sure.
He rolled out of bed and onto his knees on the floor. He stretched his hands over his head and let out a loud groan, then reached under his bed and slid out his suitcase. He blew a dust bunny off the top of it and Elmer, who’d been quietly sitting in the corner, chased it back under the bed.
Adam heaved the bag onto the still-warm sheets and opened it. He really didn’t know how much to pack. A little piece of him was feeling as if this were a dream. It was a pretty big suitcase, though. He decided to pack it until it was full.
He emptied two large dresser drawers next to the bag, then picked a pair of jeans out of the pile and slid them on his body, leaving the top button open. Then he began to fold without giving much thought to each garment. His brain was filled with Molly, and what she was thinking this morning, but in all the time he’d known that woman, he could never guess what she was thinking.
He wondered if husbands were supposed to know what their wives were thinking. Probably not, but their guesses were likely to be at least in the ballpark.
Right now, he felt like the starting pitcher in a game he wasn’t even originally supposed to play.
He rolled up several T-shirts and tossed them in the bag, picking up his pace, trying to keep his mind busy so it wouldn’t amuse itself with any more bad baseball analogies.
Should he pack towels? Molly would have lots of towels, but could he presume he’d be using them? Would marriage entitle him to towel usage? What about sheets?
Where was he going to sleep, anyway? And why didn’t he think about all this before he proposed?
“This is too much,” Adam muttered in Elmer’s direction. Elmer responded by pricking up his ears, then bounding out of the room.
Adam was shaking out his brown corduroy pants and hoping for a supernatural sign that he was doing the right thing when he heard his name ring out.
“Adam! Where are you?”
For a moment, he allowed himself the luxury of thinking that the divine was summoning him for a heart-to-heart. But unless the divine was taking the form of his mother’s voice, that wasn’t to be.
“Uncle Adam!” The voices of Trevor and Billy, his nephews, echoed through the small apartment, followed by his sister’s bellowing. “Where the heck are you? Still sleeping?”
Last night’s monumental events had completely erased his memory of his family’s scheduled visit this morning. He couldn’t let them see he was packing. He wasn’t in the mood for questions right now, and he couldn’t logically sort things out for them before he sorted them out for himself.
He rushed out of his bedroom and slammed the door hard behind him, colliding head-on with Janine.
“Watch it, buddy,” his sister said. “You forgot we were coming, didn’t you?”
“Heck, no. You wound me.”
“Then you were so excited to see us, you forgot to put on a shirt?”
“That’s right.”
She hugged him and patted his bare shoulders. “Nice to see you.”
“You, too.” His sister’s brown hair was smushed into a girly ponytail thing, which looked cute but was not the kind of thing she would have done with her hair before having kids. He remembered her hours with the hair dryer and curling iron, leaving Adam to hop up and down outside the bathroom, waiting. His sister was still pretty, but in a softer, less deliberate way.
Trevor and Billy flew into Adam, their collisions purposeful. “Oof.”
“Uncle Adam,” Trevor said with all the urgency of an eight-year-old. “I got a goal in soccer. It went right over the goalie’s head.”
Not to be outdone, ten-year-old Billy cut in. “I got first seat trumpet in band this year. I beat all the sixth-graders. I can’t wait for school to start.”
“That’s a new one,” Janine mumbled, rumpling both her sons’ hair.
“You guys rock,” Adam said. “I have the coolest nephews ever.”
They both grinned, and although blond Trevor and dark-haired Billy didn’t look much alike at first glance, their smiles were nearly identical.
“I love it when all my kids are in one place,” he heard, and the kids stepped aside to let Adam’s mother hug him. “How are you?”
“Same, no change,” Adam said, inhaling his mother’s classic French perfume, the kind he got her for Mother’s Day every year, as she rested her head of brunette curls on his chest. He glanced guiltily at the closed bedroom door. “Let’s go see what I have to eat.”
“Probably nothing, as usual,” Pam said. “So we brought plenty.” She headed to the kitchen, two hungry kids scampering behind. Adam went to follow them, but turned to check the door one last time.
It was open, and Janine was stepping out into the hall.
“What are you doing?” Adam asked.
“Tossing my sweater on your bed, where I always put it.”
“Why are you wearing a sweater? It’s like eighty-five degrees outside.”
“Why are you packing? Are you going somewhere?”
Adam pushed his sister back into his room and kicked the door shut.
“Oh,” Janine squealed, balling her fists in excitement. “It’s a secret. What is it?”
“None of your business,” Adam said, pulling on a black T-shirt and trying to sound fierce enough for his sister to back off. He should have known it would only intrigue her further.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she insisted, her threatening tone matching his. She was only a year older than him, but somehow she always managed to make it seem as if it were much more.
“Or what?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Or I’m telling Mom.”
“What are you, five? Besides, you don’t even know what you’re telling her,” Adam countered, getting a bit nervous.
“I don’t have to. I’ll just tell her something’s up and she’ll drag it out of you.”
Adam knew she was right. “Janine, I’m serious.”
“So am I. You can’t just be taking off somewhere, all cloak-and-dagger, with like a month’s worth of clothes, and leave us here to worry about you.”
“I’m not going far.”
“Where’s not far?”
The two siblings glared at each other in a silent standoff, until Janine broke it by throwing open the door and yelling, “Mom!”
“You’re not even my real sister,” Adam said in juvenile desperation. “Mom and Dad just felt sorry for you when your spaceship left without you, and they took you in.”
Janine put her hands on her hips. “For your information, I didn’t even believe that when I was a kid.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said, “because I happen to know for a fact that a pack of mangy wolves left you on our doorstep when you were a baby.”
“Really?” asked Trevor, who had come into the room without the adults noticing. “You’re a wolf, Uncle Adam?”
“I’m not just any wolf,” Adam told his towheaded nephew. “I’m the Big Bad Wolf.” He howled menacingly and lunged, causing Trevor to shriek. Elmer bounded in and added his puppy howls to the fray. Laughing, Janine joined in. Billy ran in to see what the racket was about and began howling too without knowing why.
An earsplitting whistle pierced the air, and the noise abruptly ceased.
“It’s clear I raised a bunch of wild animals,” Pam said to the silence. A few giggles came from the two boys.
“Billy and Trevor,” Pam said, “go to the living room and take Elmer with you.” She turned to the two adults, and Adam detected a twinkle in her eye. “Watch TV for a few minutes. I need to talk to my children.”
The boys, snickering the way kids did when they saw their elders being treated like fellow kids, edged out of the room, Billy gently tugging a still-scrabbling Elmer by the collar.
Adam marveled, and certainly not for the first time, at how his mother, the epitome of homespun living, could put an effective smackdown on a roomful of misbehavior.
“Mom,” Janine said. “Adam has something to tell you.”
“Space-alien girl,” Adam muttered.
