Page 113 of Never Forever

For a second, I couldn’t read his face. It was the face I’d been seeing every time I came back to Calico Cove. The face I’d seen all summer. Removed. Distant. Indifferent.

Then he smiled.

Like the kid he’d been when he saw me on the boat. Or after class. Or…all the damn time.

He smiled like the first guy I ever loved and I was weak and pregnant and it hit me right in the chest.

“Here,” he said, and walked past me onto the lawn to grab one of the old wrought iron chairs that had grown rusty in the sea air. He set it down so I could see inside the boat house. Then he went and got the other one so I could put my feet up. “You good?”

I sat. Kicked up my feet in my grandmother’s stinky wellies and…I was good. My stomach full, I had a bag of candy in my pocket. Some books. He shot me another Matt Sullivan smile and stepped down into the shadows of the boat house.

I flipped open the pregnancy book, surprised to see it so well read and dog-eared. Parts were highlighted.

“Did you do all this?” I asked him. “To the book.”

“Some of it, but most of it was already in there.”

“Is this the same copy…” It couldn’t be.

That had been years ago. That panic filled week and the book that someone left behind on the boat. He’d said it was a sign when we were seventeen. Every day he told me something new from the book.

The baby pees in your womb.

The baby makes eyelashes.

The baby gets hiccups.

I knew what he was doing when we were kids, but I had to tell him to stop. He was stressing me out more. When I ended up not being pregnant, he never said another thing.

But had he kept the book?

“A’yup. I actually thought it was all really cool, so I read it again.”

I shook my head, rolled my eyes. That he’d read it the first time was amazing enough.

“This book was published like forty years ago,” I said.

“I don’t know? Has growing babies changed all that much?” he asked. His head sticking out from the boat house.

“There’s that cheese thing, right?”

“No soft cheese.”

“And something about cat litter?”

“Tell me one time in your life you changed cat litter,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Though, once the demolition starts, you can’t stay here. There’s a mold situation.”

Oh. Right.

“I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. It’s a few weeks away,” I said. I could feel him across the ten feet of scrub grass and sand, want to offer his place to stay again, but I didn’t look up. I didn’t give him the window. I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile this guy with the guy who smashed my heart to pieces.

I opened the book and paged through until I found the first trimester. The pictures were disturbing. A lot of women in mummus. With mustached men standing behind them.

“I’m not wearing mummus,” I said.

“What are you wearing now?”

“One of Gran’s housecoats. It’s very different.”

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