Page 43 of Troubles in Paradise
Does she tell him that she knows he knows? Or should she just pretend the phone call with Mick never happened and tell him herself?
The latter. Mick is irrelevant.
She thinks about sending a text back, something along the lines ofNot sick, pregnant. It’s yours!
Whoa! The room is spinning. Ayers races for the bathroom and throws up. When she emerges, Winnie is stationed outside the door.
“Do you need to go out?” Ayers asks. Winnie trots over to the front door and waits. “I can’t walk you this second, I’m sorry. Just do your thing and come right back, okay?” Ayers opens the door and Winnie obeys, taking care of business efficiently and then slipping back inside past Ayers’s legs. She’s such a good dog; much better than Gordon, if Ayers is being honest. Gordon would have sniffed around for twenty minutes and couldn’t be trusted if a car or another dog came past. Of course, Winnie is female, so that alone explains it.
Ayers takes a four-seven-eight breath and pours herself half a glass of warm ginger ale. She calls Baker, who answers on the first ring.
“Good morning!”
“Good morning?” Ayers says. He sounds awfully chipper. It occurs to Ayers that maybe Mick lied about telling Baker that Ayers is pregnant. “Listen, Baker, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“If you want to talk in person, I can be there in two seconds,” Baker says.
What she wants is to hang up and go back to bed. She sighs. She can’t put this conversation off much longer. “Okay.”
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three—there’s a knock at the door. Winnie shoots over and starts barking.
“Just a minute!” Ayers says. Is thathim?Had he been standing outside when she called him? Ayers hurries to the bathroom, takes in her pasty complexion, her bed-mussed hair, her rumpled uniform shirt. Does she stink? Probably. She tries to rub deodorant on without taking off her shirt. She piles her hair on top of her head. Better? Worse? Worse, she decides. She lets it go. Oh, well.
When she swings the door open, there’s Baker, looking tan and relaxed. He’s gorgeous—tall, broad, smiling in that gee-whiz midwestern way. Ayers is struck by something she has willfully ignored until now. ShelikesBaker. A lot.
Winnie barks. She wants to jump on him, Ayers can tell; her slender golden body is shimmying with energy, her tail is going nuts. It’s not her daddy, but close—his brother.
“Hey, I recognize you,” Baker says to Winnie. And then, to Ayers, “Hello, beautiful.”
If Ayers weren’t pregnant, this moment would be so sexy. She would be wearing a bikini or a sundress or hiking shorts and they would be heading out into the sunshine to start their relationship.
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
“I know,” he says. “Can I come in?”
Ayers figures she’s about six weeks along. A check of the internet revealsthat her baby is likely the size of a pea.
Will there come a day twenty-five or thirty years from now when Ayers tells Sweet Pea about the morning she invited Baker Steele inside her tiny, disheveled home to discuss Sweet Pea’s very existence? What will Ayers remember? Baker’s handsome face may be forgotten, but what will stick with Ayers is her own sense of bewilderment. She’s attracted to Baker, but she doesn’t know the first thing about him. He might as well be a stranger at the airport who asks her to travel with a mysterious piece of luggage.
They settle on the sofa. Winnie is at Baker’s side now—fickle girl.
“It’s your baby,” Ayers says.
“I heard.”
“I want to make that clear. It’s yours, not Mick’s. Also, I’m finished with Mick.”
“You’re sure? Because you said that last time and it didn’t end up being true. I was gone for two days and you got engaged to the guy.”
When he says it that way, it sounds awful. Itwasawful. In agreeing to marry Mick, Ayers was unfair to all parties involved—Baker, Mick, and, most of all, herself. “I thought it was what I’d been waiting for,” Ayers says. “It was validating after what happened with Brigid to feel like he was choosing me, to feel like I’d won.”
“You told me that story about your parents in Kathmandu. The hiccup, your mother with another man.” Baker’s gaze wanders over to the travel photographs Ayers has on her wall. “In telling me that story, you made me feel like the hiccup.”
Ayers can’t believe she told Baker the story about her parents in Kathmandu. Her mother had had a brief affair with a British expat bar owner…or she hadn’t; Ayers isn’t sure to this day. Ayers pulled that story out, she supposes, because she wanted to justify forgiving Mick. She was making excuses for him. But she was finished with that now.
“This doesn’t have to look any certain way,” Baker says. “First question: Do you want to keep the baby?”
“Oh. Yes. Yes, I do.”
