Chapter 1
Louise thought it might not go well, so she told her parents she was pregnant over the phone, from three thousand miles away, in San Francisco. It wasn’t that she had a single doubt about her decision. When those two parallel pink lines had ghosted into view, all her panic dissolved and she heard a clear, certain voice inside her head say:
I’m a mother now.
But even in the twenty-first century it was hard to predict how a pair of Southern parents would react to the news that their thirty-four-year-old unmarried daughter was pregnant. Louise spent all day rehearsing different scripts that would ease them into it, but the minute her mom answered and her dad picked up the kitchen extension, her mind went blank and she blurted out:
“I’m pregnant.”
She braced herself for the barrage of questions.
Are you sure? Does Ian know? Are you going to keep it? Have you thought about moving back to Charleston? Are you certain this is the best thing? Do you have any idea how hard this will be alone? How are you going to manage?
In the long silence, she prepared her answers: Yes, not yet, of course, God no, no but I’m doing it anyway, yes, I’ll manage.
Over the phone she heard someone inhale through what sounded like a mouthful of water and realized her mom was crying.
“Oh, Louise,” her mother said in a thick voice, and Louise prepared herself for the worst. “I’m so happy. You’re going to be the mother I wasn’t.”
Her dad only had one question: her exact street address.
“I don’t want any confusion with the cab driver when we land.”
“Dad,” Louise said, “you don’t have to come right now.”
“Of course we do,” he said. “You’re our Louise.”
She waited for them on the sidewalk, her heart pounding every time a car turned the corner, until finally a dark blue Nissan slowed to a stop in front of her building and her dad helped her mom out of the back seat, and she couldn’t wait—she threw herself into her mom’s arms like she was a little kid again.
They took her crib shopping and stroller shopping and told Louise she was crazy to even consider a cloth diaper service, and discussed feeding techniques and vaccinations and a million decisions Louise would have to make, and bought snot suckers and diapers and onesies, and receiving blankets and changing pads and wipes, and rash cream and burp cloths and rattles and night-lights, and Louise would’ve thought they’d bought way too much if her mother hadn’t said, “You’ve hardly bought anything at all.”
She couldn’t even blame them for having a hard time with the whole Ian issue.
“Married or not, we have to meet his family,” her mom said. “We’re going to be co-grandparents.”
“I haven’t told him yet,” Louise said. “I’m barely eleven weeks.”
“Well, you’re not getting any less pregnant,” her mom pointed out.
“There are tangible financial benefits to marriage,” her dad added. “You’re sure you don’t want to reconsider?”
Louise did not want to reconsider.
Ian could be funny, he was smart, and he made an obscenely high income curating rare vinyl for rich people in the Bay Area who yearned for their childhoods. He’d put together a complete collection of original pressing Beatles LPs for the fourth-largest shareholder at Facebook and found the bootleg of a Grateful Dead concert where a Twitter board member had proposed to his first wife. Louise couldn’t believe how much they paid him for this.
On the other hand, when she suggested they should take a break he’d taken that as his cue to go down on one knee in the atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and propose. He’d been so upset when she said no that she’d finally had pity sex with him, which was how she came to be in her current condition.
When Ian had proposed, he’d been wearing his vintage Nirvana In Utero T-shirt with a hole in the collar that had cost him four hundred dollars. He spent thousands every year on sneakers, which he insisted on calling “kicks.” He checked his phone when she talked about her day, made fun of her when she mixed up the Rolling Stones and The Who, and said, “Are you sure?” whenever she ordered dessert.
“Dad,” Louise said. “Ian’s not ready to be a parent.”
“Who is?” her mom asked.
But Louise knew Ian really wasn’t ready.
Every family visit lasts three days too long, and by the end of the week Louise was counting the hours until she could be alone in her apartment again. The day before her parents’ flight home, she holed up in her bedroom “doing email” while her mom took off her earrings to take a nap and her dad left to find a copy of the Financial Times. If they could do this until lunch, then go on a walk around the Presidio, then dinner, Louise figured everything would be fine.
Louise’s body had other plans. She felt hungry now. She needed hard-boiled eggs now. She had to get up and go to the kitchen now. So she crept into the living room in her socks, trying not to wake her mom because she couldn’t handle another conversation about why she wouldn’t let her hair grow out, or why she should move back to Charleston, or why she should start drawing again.
Her mom lay asleep on the couch, on one side, a yellow blanket pulled up to her waist. The late-morning light brought out her skeleton, the tiny lines around her mouth, her thinning hair, her slack cheeks. For the first time in her life, Louise knew what her mother would look like dead.
“I love you,” her mom said without opening her eyes.
Louise froze.
“I know,” she said after a moment.
“No,” her mom said, “you don’t.”
Louise waited for her to add something, but her mom’s breathing deepened, got regular, and turned into a snore.
Louise continued into the kitchen. Had she overheard half of a dream conversation? Or did her mom mean Louise didn’t know she loved her? Or how much she loved her? Or she wouldn’t understand how much her mom loved her until she had a daughter of her own?
She worried at it while she ate her hard-boiled egg. Was her mom talking about her living in San Francisco? Did she think Louise had moved this far away to put distance between them? Louise had moved here for school, then stayed for work, although when you grew up with all your friends telling you how cool your mom was and even your exes asked about her when you bumped into them, you needed some distance if you wanted to live your own life, and sometimes even three thousand miles didn’t feel like enough to Louise. She wondered if her mom somehow knew.
Then there was her brother. Mark’s name had only come up twice on this visit and Louise knew it ate at her mom that the two of them didn’t have a “natural” relationship, but, to be honest, she didn’t want a relationship with her brother, natural or otherwise. In San Francisco, she could pretend she was an only child.