Page 5 of Now or Never

Connie’s phone rang and Connie sent the call to voicemail. “Keep going,” she said to me.

Connie is a couple years older than me, a better shot than me, and caught in a Jersey Shore, eighties time warp with big hair, bright blue eye shadow, and black eyeliner.

“Are you telling me you’re engaged to both guys?” Lula asked. “Because if that’s what you’re telling me, I need a doughnut to calm down.”

Connie pushed the bakery box across the top of her desk toward Lula and turned to me. “Who did you choose?”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “I can’t choose. There are extenuating circumstances.”

“Like someone’s gonna kill someone else?” Lula asked, eating the last stale doughnut.

“No. I don’t think it will come to that. The problem is that when I got engaged to Ranger, we celebrated.”

“That’s to be expected,” Lula said. “Anybody would celebrate getting engaged to Ranger. He’s smokin’, and he’s got a full-time housekeeper taking care of him. And she cooks and irons.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But then I celebrated with Morelli when we got engaged.”

“Okay, I get that,” Lula said. “Anybody would celebrate getting engaged to him, too.”

“Hold on,” Connie said. “When you say that you ‘celebrated,’ do you mean with a glass of champagne?”

“I mean wereally celebrated,” I said.

“So, youreally celebratedwith both men,” Connie said.

“Yep,” I said. “A lot. First with Ranger and then with Morelli.”

“No harm, no foul there,” Lula said. “Totally understandable.”

“Yes, but when I went to take my birth control pill the morning after Morelli, I found out they’d expired.”

“Were they a little expired?” Lula asked. “A little expired would still be okay.”

“They were a lot expired,” I said. “They should have been thrown away a couple years ago, but they were left in a bathroom drawer with the new pills, and I grabbed the wrong packet. I’ve been taking the stupid things all month. I don’t know why it suddenly occurred to me to look at the date.”

“I’d say a combination of guilt and fear,” Lula said. “Nobody was wearing a raincoat?”

“No raincoats.”

“Maybe you need one of them morning-after pills,” Lula said.

“I don’t think I want to do that,” I said.

Lula went wide-eyed. “You mean you want to have a baby?”

“I think I might.”

I couldn’t believe I was thinking this, much less saying it out loud. I couldn’t cook, and I gagged when I babysat Morelli’s dog and had to pick up after him. How was I ever going to take care of a baby?

“For one thing, I’m not getting any younger,” I said to Lula. “It could be now or never.”

“I suppose,” Lula said. “But you haven’t gotten any older either. And now or never is one of them overrated motivational ideas.”

“You still have to pick a man,” Connie said. “Do you know which one?”

“That’s the hitch,” I said. “If it turns out that I’m not pregnant, I know who I want to marry. If it turns out that I’m pregnant, I can’t make a decision until I’m seven weeks in. At seven weeks you can do a paternity test. I googled it.”

“So, if you’re preggers, you’ll marry whoever the baby daddy is?” Connie asked.

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