Somewhere Out There(11)
“Are you telling me I should get out now?” Natalie asked with a playful edge, suspecting that she understood Kyle better than he might think. She’d dated over the years, of course, but none of her relationships lasted more than a few months, her partners typically calling things off before they got too serious. The comment she’d heard most often was “You’re hard to get to know.”
Kyle stared at her a long moment before answering. When he did, he reached over and took her hand in his. “Please don’t,” he said, and her heart skipped a beat inside her chest. Later, he walked her to her car, kissed her, and suddenly, all of Natalie’s resolve to avoid romance on the job disappeared.
They reported their relationship to HR, and to Natalie’s father, who was thrilled with the match. Only a few months after that, they got engaged. They’d been married just over a year when she got pregnant with Hailey and quit the firm, Natalie’s father conceding that if he couldn’t one day hand his legacy over to his daughter, his more than competent son-in-law was the next best choice.
Now, lying in bed with him, Natalie burrowed her face into her husband’s chest, and her next words came out muffled. “Do you think I should try to find out more about her?”
“Your birth mother?” Natalie nodded, and felt her husband inhale before speaking again. “Do you want to?”
She hesitated only a moment before answering. “Yes.” She paused, and then went on. “But my mom will freak.”
“Your mom’s the most insecure person I know.”
“Yeah,” Natalie agreed, but she drew out the word, hesitant, feeling a little protective of the woman who had raised her. “You know she just has a hard time dealing with any kind of loss.” Kyle understood that a few years before his mother-in-law and Natalie’s dad decided to adopt, Natalie’s mom had suffered a life-endangering ectopic pregnancy that resulted in a full hysterectomy—something Natalie was aware of only because her father had told her. Her mother’s health issues and the lost baby were other subjects she refused to discuss.
“That was more than thirty years ago, Nat,” Kyle pointed out, pulling away from her. “And she wouldn’t be losing you. She has mothered you, loved you, taken care of you, and now you’re an adult, well within your rights to want to know more about the woman who gave birth to you.”
Natalie sat up and looked at her husband. He’d sounded very lawyerly with that speech, as though he was giving emphatic closing arguments to sum up his case to a jury. “Guess what?” she said, teasing him with their children’s much-used phrase.
He shook his head and pretended to scowl. “What?”
“You’re right,” she told him. “Completely and totally right.”
“Was that on the record, Counselor?” Kyle asked with a grin. Natalie gave him a playful push, and he grabbed her, tickling her ribs. She squealed, and he put his hand over her mouth to keep the noise from waking the kids, who both slept just across the hall.
“What are you going to do now, huh?” he said, as she wiggled inside the circle of his strong arms. This kind of roughhousing often led to a session of passionate lovemaking, but tonight, when he finally let her go, instead of climbing on top of him, Natalie fell back against her pillows with a heavy sigh.
“Now,” she said, “I’ll have to go talk with my mom.”
Brooke
Standing beside a table tucked in the darkest corner of the bar, Brooke was certain she was about to be sick. She clutched her pen, pressing it into her pad as she tried to ignore the rolling, twisting queasiness in her gut. The symptoms had come out of nowhere, and her first thought was that she probably ate something that didn’t agree with her. She thought about asking to go home, but couldn’t afford to leave work—it was Friday night and the place was packed. It would be her best tip night of the week.
Located in Pioneer Square, the Market had opened a year ago. It wasn’t the cleanest or fanciest place to work—it was dingy and dim, catering less to Seattle’s rampant hipster population and more to the blue-collar, grease-under-their-fingernails crowd. But the owner was nice enough and didn’t try to get Brooke to sleep with him, which in her experience, was an anomaly. In her twenties, she used to apply for jobs at more upscale bars and restaurants, but when she interviewed and the owners saw her list of experience at biker bars and intermittent stints at Applebee’s, they always passed on hiring her. Now thirty-nine, Brooke had accepted a career as a cocktail waitress, taking pride in the fact that after aging out of the foster care system at eighteen, she’d never taken another penny from the state. At times, she worked two, sometimes three different jobs in order to stay afloat, which was fine by her. It could be worse, she always told herself. She could not have a job at all.
Brooke wove her way to the servers’ station at the bar and quickly punched in a ticket for her newest table—two double Jack and Cokes. She turned around, ready to walk the floor and check on her other customers, but then the gorge rose in her throat and she ran to the women’s bathroom, hand over her mouth, barely able to shut the stall door behind her before she was over the toilet and heaving.
What the hell? she thought as she was finally able to stand up, wiping her lips and chin with a handful of toilet paper. She mentally reviewed what she’d eaten that day: a bagel with the last of the cream cheese, and a double cheeseburger off the McDonald’s dollar menu on the way to the bar. It was likely the burger that did it, and Brooke immediately vowed to never again eat a fast-food meal.