In a Book Club Far Away(36)
When she hung up, she linked her arm around Regina’s. “You can’t do this on your own. This is an SOS situation.”
“But…”
“No buts. Let us take care of you. Grab some snacks, like Twinkies and Bugles or something. And maybe your favorite soda.”
Sophie trailed after Regina as she grabbed exactly the things she loved the most: Fanta. And vanilla ice cream. Little Debbie pies and Funyuns. They upgraded from a basket to a cart, which hadn’t looked so sinful since high school.
That night, she and Adelaide and Regina snacked and watched Regina’s favorite movie, Titanic, which Adelaide happened to have on DVD, and after getting Sophie’s kids to bed in Adelaide’s extra bedroom, they stayed up past midnight to watch Adelaide’s favorite thing: infomercials.
At two in the morning, when Regina finally summoned the courage, she tore the pregnancy test’s wrapper and walked into the bathroom. Sophie sat, her back against the closed door, with Adelaide. Three minutes later, the door behind them opened, and Sophie looked up to Regina, holding up a test stick with a positive sign in the little window.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Adelaide
Thanksgiving Day, 2011
Adelaide took a sip of her beer and suffered through the brain freeze, willing the numbness to spread throughout her body. She was huddled around Frank Montreal’s coffee table for November’s book club, with a portable heater set up behind her. And yet, she felt cold all over, stiff and unfeeling.
Regina was pregnant. Pregnant, and not even on purpose.
The next second she was hit with a wall of guilt—she should’ve been happy for her friend. A million things had to go right to ovulate, to inseminate, to survive. Apparently, it just happened for lots of people, including Sophie, now Regina, and pretty much everyone who came to book club, but not her.
“Thank you everyone for making this a potluck. Otherwise, we’d all just be eating chicken wings and Doritos chips.” Frank entered their circle, carrying a hefty hardback in his hand. “Are you ready to talk The Passage? I personally think that it’s all perfectly timed. The people in the book are doing everything that we’re simply trying to do during deployment and the holidays: survive.”
A round of hell yeses and nods and um-hmms responded back. Adelaide took another swig of beer, because she might as well. Neither being healthy, nor responsible, nor eating only organic, nor sleeping for eight hours had yielded her a baby, so what was the point? She couldn’t seem to get pregnant, and when she was pregnant, she couldn’t bring a baby to term.
And yet Regina, who wasn’t planning to have a baby, got pregnant while on birth control.
Adelaide had been doing fine. After her miscarriage earlier in the deployment, she’d visited her doctor twice to follow up. She’d chosen to keep the incident to herself—only Matt and her mother knew, and telling them was traumatic as it was. As the days passed, the cloud lifted just a little.
That is, until last night, when Regina appeared from the bathroom holding up a positive pregnancy test. Adelaide’s emotions had swept her up like a tornado.
There was a crash in the bedroom area, taking Adelaide out of her thoughts. It was followed by the chorus of children saying, “We’re okay!”
Now that their spouses were gone, it was an unspoken rule that sometimes book club would include babies and children, and that meant interruptions. As the parents around her laughed, Adelaide joined in, because that’s what she did. Smile, dear. No one likes a grumpy goose, was what her mama always said. Patricia Wilson, despite her shy nature, was 100 percent hospitable and gracious 100 percent of the time, never once succumbing to TMI.
“You picked a winner, Frank,” Adelaide said now, pulling the book from her tote bag and willing the meeting forward. “It was meaty but fun, and exactly what I needed to get away from the real world.”
“And thanks for giving us till the end of the month to read this,” said Wendy Proctor, a first-timer. She was a teacher at the elementary school. “Everything was due from the kids the last couple of weeks, and I needed the extra time—especially for a book that’s eight hundred pages.”
“I needed that week, too, to get myself together,” Frank said. “The deployment hit me hard this time. The kids are so confused. The last time Mel deployed, the kids were toddlers and now—well, sometimes they’re angry that she’s not around.”
Frank did have a dark hue under his eyes, and his hair, usually cut short, was shaggy around the ears. Admittedly, Adelaide didn’t think of the guys having a hard time transitioning. And since the unit had deployed, she hadn’t checked in with Frank.
She vowed to do better.
“And are you? Getting yourself together?” Sophie asked, joining the circle, with a plate of dessert in her hand.
“No. Not even.” Frank gestured at his outfit. “I’m really not sure if this shirt made it to the laundry this week. Tuesday, I lost my car keys. Then I thought I would call Mel so I could pick up our spare from her at the office, and then I realized—nope. She’s not here.” Frank rolled his eyes. “I had to call a locksmith, and it was a total scam. Anyway”—he drew out the word, and pressed his palms against his cheeks—“I’ll stop now. We’re all in the same boat.”