Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(58)
And then the baby moved. Carmen had been feeling movements, little tickling flutters, for a week or so, maybe two. With the first of those flutters—she’d read online that they were called ‘quickening’—the truth of her life had hit her hard. She’d had a strange couple of days, swinging back and forth between panic and joy. Panic because now, for certain and forever, the path of want was closed to her. Now, she would never be able to think of herself first. But joy because those flutters made the baby real. There was a little person growing in her belly, making himself or herself known. Carmen had wanted a family. She’d once fantasized about meeting a handsome man in Europe and both of them wandering around the world with kids strapped to their backs.
Her family would look a little different, and it had happened in a way she hadn’t expected—except the part about meeting a handsome man in Europe—but at least it was one thing in her life she’d wanted, one thing she would have. A child.
When that child moved in the kitchen on Caravel Road on the day before Thanksgiving, he or she had not fluttered. He or she had kicked. Carmen, surprised and pleased, had, unthinking, laughed, dropping the wooden spoon in her hand to the floor with a clatter and clutching her belly.
Rosa, in the midst of a description of one of her neighbors in Brooklyn, froze and went silent. And then she’d emphatically recovered her voice. “I knew it! I knew it. Oh my GAWD, I knew it! You’ve never gotten chubby in your whole life until now. You’re knocked up!”
She ran over to Carmen and put her hands on her belly. “Oh. My. Gawd! Is it Theo’s? It’s Theo’s. Right? Does he know?” She looked around the kitchen. “Did everybody know but me?”
Carmen jerked herself away from her sister’s touch. “Rosa, I swear to God, shut up.”
“No! No way!” She looked around the room. “Everybody knew but me, didn’t they?” Now she was pouting and angry, and Carmen wanted to slap her. So like Rosa to turn this around and make it about her.
The big kitchen had been bustling with activity; now it was silent. Sabina stepped forward. “It wasn’t about you, Rosa. Carmen has needed time to decide how to tell the fath—Theo.”
Rosa’s eyes widened with dawning comprehension. “You don’t want Eli to know. This is all a big conspiracy to keep Theo from knowing he’s going to be a father…again.”
“No, Rosa. I’m not trying to keep it from him. I wanted to tell him. Dammit. You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand.” She untied the apron and pulled it over her head. “Bitch alert, Carm. This is the worst thing you’ve ever done! You totally suck!” She was shouting.
She started to leave the room, and Carmen knew exactly where she was going. She grabbed her arm. “Rosie, wait. I will tell him. I will. I need to figure out how to do it. Please. Rosa, please.”
“Tell who what? Rhody, you okay?” And there Eli was, in the hallway between the kitchen and the cellar door. Carmen saw Joey standing just behind him, his eyes eager, and then Carlo pulled Joey away and only Eli stood there, big and blond.
Fuck.
Rosa’s head swiveled to Eli. When she turned back to Carmen, there was malice in her eyes. “Carmen’s pregnant. It’s your dad’s.”
Carmen faced Eli and saw confusion turn to shock. “You are?”
She nodded.
“How far?”
“About five months. Eli—I’m going to tell him. I am. I promise. I need to do it my way. Please. I know I’m asking a lot, but please don’t say anything. Please.”
Eli said nothing, and the whole kitchen stayed quiet while Theo’s son and Carmen stared at each other.
Then, he made a movement that was either a nod of concession or a bow of farewell, and he spun on his heel and walked down the hall. Rosa yanked her arm free of Carmen’s grip and followed him.
Carmen had no idea what to think or expect now. But reality had moved in to stay.
oOo
Carmen kept herself out of the way for a while, wanting to leave but sure that her leaving in the middle of all this would only stoke the family fire hotter. So she fussed in the kitchen, and just found things to do that kept her away from Eli for about half an hour. Then she took Elsa for a quick walk.
When she came in through the back gate, the mingled sounds of laughter and her family’s typical loud voices flavored the air in the back yard. Carmen felt unready to face them, especially since they seemed to have moved on past her scandal, and going back in would only remind them. She liked it better out here, alone in the fall night, the air crisp and strongly aromatic from the smoke of wood fires burning in fireplaces all around.
Though she adored summer sports and had grown up spending virtually all of every summer in a wetsuit or just a bikini, Carmen’s favorite season was autumn. She loved everything about it: the smells, the colors—nowhere on earth was as beautiful as New England in the fall—the way the beach got so peaceful after the summer people had closed up their summer places, the suddenly lazy pace of the town, the way that she knew almost every single person she saw anywhere in town because they were all residents, and the voting population of the Cove was quite small. Even though autumn was seen as a time of ending, of dying, Carmen had always felt a crisp kind of life in the air. Autumn was the time for resting and preparing to revive. Animals packed their dens and settled in. Plants put their energies into their roots and hung on.