“I have three teenagers. Tell me about it.”
“Are you picking Toni up from work?”
Toni, much to her irritation, could no longer fit her belly behind the steering wheel of her Mustang. “Yeah. I’m gonna go get her right now.”
“I’ll open a bottle.” There was murmuring in the background. “Baxter said I should just open two.”
“Baxter is a very wise man,” Megan said. “We’ll see you in two shakes of a baby lamb’s tail.”
Katherine was silent for a long time. “I don’t understand.”
“Quickly, Katherine. It just means quickly.”
“Buy why would you say baby lamb? I understand the idiom because lambs shake their tails very quickly, but the word lamb only refers to immature sheep, so I don’t understand baby lamb. It’s redundant.”
“That’s just the way my mama said it. Don’t think too hard on it, okay?”
“So it’s just two shakes of a lamb’s tail. That’s all you need to say.”
“Yes.” And by the time they arrived at Katherine’s house, Megan fully expected that her friend would have a list of things that happened in nature that were even faster than a lamb shaking its tail and Toni would have given her the land-speed record of any number of vehicles that could also match a lamb’s tail velocity.
And that was why Megan adored her friends.
Chapter 2
“Do you know hummingbirds beat their wings over fifty times a second at normal speed?” Katherine ushered Megan and a very pregnant Toni into the house. “So being here faster than a hummingbird’s wing would be an even greater use of hyperbole than a lamb’s tail.”
“I’ll remember that.” Megan hugged Katherine, ridiculously happy to see her. It had been a week and a half since Megan had seen Katherine. Longer than that since they’d all been together; work and life had been piling up.
“How are you feeling?” Katherine asked Toni.
The tiny woman with the giant belly was already in the kitchen, picking at the cheese plate that had been set out. “Hungry. Cranky.” She glared at Megan over her shoulder. “I’m not happy with that one.”
Katherine’s eyes went wide. “Why?” She looked between Megan and Toni. “What happened?”
“She got in the car,” Megan said, “and she asked me, ‘I can’t get any bigger than this, right? My belly can’t get any bigger?’”
“Oh.” Katherine’s frown fell. “And you confronted her with the biological realities?”
Toni turned, showing her belly in profile. It truly was massive. “How? How can it possibly get bigger than this? I can barely fit through doors in my house. I can’t drive. I can’t put on socks. I can’t even wash my feet. How is this natural?”
Katherine walked over and poured a bottle of fizzy water into a wineglass and handed it to Toni. “At least you’re not an African elephant. They’re pregnant for twenty-two months.”
“Oh my God!” Toni’s mouth dropped open. “I can’t even comprehend that.”
“You’re doing really well,” Megan said. “You still have enough energy to work. With my first pregnancy, I—”
“Only.” Toni held up a forceful finger. “I want that made very clear right now. I am only doing this once. If Henry wants more kids, we’re adopting.”
“I’m just saying that I had almost no energy by my last trimester. You still go to work every day.”
“And sleep at my desk between yelling at the guys.” She sipped her drink. “Wait, am I only going so I can yell at the guys? That seems mean.” She took another drink. “Trying to decide if I care. I don’t think I do. They all tune me out anyway.”
“Plus you don’t have a trunk,” Katherine added.
Both Megan and Toni looked at her.
“Like an elephant does. I’m just thinking that if you were pregnant for nearly two years, a trunk would be an incredibly useful appendage. Not that elephants have to wear socks.” Katherine poured a glass of wine and handed it to Megan. “And, of course, elephants don’t have to balance the stresses of modern working life with carrying calves.”
Megan raised her glass and clinked it with Katherine’s. “To all the mama elephants out there in their twenty-first month.” She turned to Toni. “And to Toni, who will be able to drink wine with us soon.”
Toni stuffed a slice of manchego in her mouth. “Not soon enough.”
“We should go to the back deck,” Katherine said. “Do you need jackets? Baxter and Detective Bisset are playing chess in the office.”
A male voice boomed from the room adjoining the kitchen. “I told you to call me Drew, Katherine.”
“And I won’t be able to do that,” she whispered, ushering Megan and Toni down the few stairs to the sunken living room that looked over the glorious grey-blue stretch of the Pacific. “I still call the dean by his title even though we used to teach together.”
“Do you hang out with the dean weekly though? Like Drew?”
“Lately it seems that way.” Katherine grimaced. “They’re revisiting the ethics review of what happened with our Central Coast students during that study that went wrong.”
“Again?”
The tragedy that had brought Megan, Katherine, and Toni together had been prompted by a mysterious biofeedback study at Katherine’s university that had caused students to commit violent acts for no apparent reason.
The very first Wine Wednesday had happened only a week after the first attack, and they’d happened almost weekly ever since, usually at Katherine’s house overlooking the ocean.
Her house sat on the rocky shores of North Beach, surrounded by deep green cedars and other wood-shingled houses turned silver grey by the salty ocean fog. The sun was setting as they walked through the french doors; gold and pink washed over the deck overlooking the ocean.
“Apparently they are reviewing the entire case because former Professor Kraft is protesting her firing. Or at least the record of it.”
“After a year?”
“She’s in Silicon Valley now, and it’s possible that she’s working on something with security implications that are negatively affected by a problematic academic record.”
“That sounds like history I would not like to repeat,” Megan said.
“Me either,” Toni added. “I thought we’d put that to bed.”
Katherine’s goldendoodle, Archie, followed them onto the back deck and settled under the table while Katherine helped Toni into a chair and brought an ottoman for her to rest her feet.
“Her criminal attorney was very good,” Katherine said. “She beat all the formal charges. The only things still on her record—officially—are the academic misconduct charges. She wants them expunged.”
“I miss boots.” Toni flexed her ankles on the ottoman. “I miss my boots and my car. How did you do this three times, Megan?”
“Pregnancy amnesia.” She popped a slice of apple in her mouth and crunched. “Hormones are powerful things.” Speaking of, the breeze coming off the ocean felt amazing. Megan was only forty-seven, but she was beginning to feel hints of “the change” coming. Her mother had gone through menopause right around fifty, so she only had a couple more years to go. “Toni, how are the pre-baby projects?”