The Almost Sisters(74)

“I wish you’d say something,” I said.

“I . . . I . . .” he said, and stopped again. “Can’t talk.”

“Okay,” I said into the phone. “That seems fair.”

It did. I hadn’t wanted to talk about it for months, and now I’d woken him up and blatted the news into his barely conscious ear. But at the same time, a selfish bit of me wanted his immediate reaction to be different, or at least definitive. If he would only yell that this was my damn problem or say he doubted it was his baby and hang up. It would be awful, but at least everything would be decided. Or in some ideal world, he could ask interested questions, say something supportive or hopeful.

I tried to think of the kindest things my pregnancy test might have said to me, if it had been a person.

“I know you need time. It has to sink in. It worked like that for me anyway. It didn’t seem real at first, and so I’m sorry it took me this long to tell you. But it’s happening, so you have to think about what you want to do. Me, I know what I’m doing. I’m having a baby.” I thought I would end there, but I wanted all my cards on the table. I didn’t want him to make some bad decision in a vacuum of what was easiest. I didn’t want to be one of those self-sacrificing talk-show ladies who says to the guy who knocked her up, “You don’t have to be involved. I can do this on my own,” and then the audience cheers and claps, as if it’s noble to tell a man he holds no value beyond a scoop of sperm, to tell a man his own child will have no use for him. I kept talking. “I also want you to know that I’m happy about it. Your kid is so, so wanted over here on this side of the phone. And I’m lucky. I have a good job, a good family, a lot of friends with kids. Babies get born with much, much less, and they still have good lives. . . . I know that. It’s just I love this kid like crazy. I want him to have everything. That’s why I’m telling you. I want him to know his dad. I want him to know your family.”

A longer pause, and then Batman did talk. He said one word, very soft. “Him?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry,” I said, wincing, because that was poorly done. When Rachel was pregnant, she’d planned a reveal party for the day after the ultrasound. Mom and Keith and I gathered with her closest friends to find her house tricked out in stark black-and-white decorations. Rachel brought out an ice-white cake and set it in front of JJ. When he cut it open, we’d all seen that it was pink and stuffed with strawberries. Now Batman had found out he was having a son in a tongue slip in the same fraught conversation where he learned his one-night stand at FanCon had gotten all complicated. “He’s a boy. I’m having a boy.”

Then my phone buzzed and trembled directly in my ear, like an insect. I pulled it away, startled. A text had landed. I opened Messages and saw that he had sent it. While we were on the phone.

I literally can’t talk right now, the text said.

I stared at the words, and I had a flash of fear that he was not alone. I swallowed. His Facebook profile said that he was single, and he’d sounded happy to hear from me when he picked up, but still. I had this image of some other woman that he’d met last night who liked caped crusaders and tequila, too. She could be sleeping beside him right now, exhausted from a long, long night of making Digby’s little sister.

Why not? He owed me nothing. Hell, he barely knew me. So we’d had a fun time on Facebook. So we’d been flirting over texts. He was probably alone right now, but he could have fifty women on strings that were fine and light and never meant for binding. For all I knew, he played Words with Friends every night with different women who’d already had his babies, all up and down the eastern seaboard.

Not that it mattered. What was that to me? Nothing. So why were my stupid eyes stinging, and why did my throat feel so thick and closed?

“Well, call me when you can talk,” I said, and ended the connection.





17




We walked over to Martina Mack’s house right after breakfast, while Birchie had some stamina. She was a little off this morning, but I needed Birchie and Wattie to be seen. Going to First Baptist had shown me that even Birchie’s closest community was divided and most folks were uncertain of how to feel about her. Wattie was to Redemption as Birchie was to First Baptist, and that congregation must be equally astir. Wattie had been leery enough of her reception to skip church entirely last Sunday.

I needed more people, pillars-of-the-community types, firmly on our side. The county prosecutor was asking for a DNA test. If—or when—she proved that the bones belonged to Birchie’s father, what Regina Tackrey did with them next would be shaped by public opinion. Was Birchie an ancient monster caught at last or the most beloved Birch to ever live in Birchville, now too old and too ill to explain herself? Would filing charges be long-overdue justice or the persecution of old ladies?

The town’s answers would spread through the county. So far we’d holed up and left Martina and her ilk to shape this conversation. A bad idea, especially since the Macks and the Tackreys had old ties. If the last day or two had taught me anything, it was that Cody and Martina were pulling us down a path that ended in pitchforks and torches. And shotguns.

We hadn’t been working more than half an hour when Alston Rhodes came walking down Crepe Myrtle Avenue, seemingly oblivious to the great crowd of us in Martina’s yard. I’d played with Alston every summer, so I recognized her the second she turned the corner. Her hair had not changed since 1994, when she’d cut it to look like she had just stepped off the set of Friends. She had on a full face of makeup, but she was wearing sweatpants and Nikes and dragging her fat pug, Punchkin, on a string. Punchkin was being the worst excuse for a power walk I’d ever seen. He tried to sit down twice as Alston marched him along.