Page 100 of My Favorite Lost Cause
“I’m going to be sick,” I whisper to Charlie in the cab. His eyes widen. “Not literally.”
His sigh of relief is so loud that the cab driver looks in the rearview mirror to check on us. “Maybe don’t use that expression until you’re past the throwing-up stage of pregnancy. And tonight will be fine.”
“You should be just as worried as I am,” I tell him. “My mom’s going to use this as an excuse to leave your dad. And then you’ll be comforting him while I’m keeping my mom from running off with a junkie or a Tinder scammer.”
His lips press to the top of my head. I’m not sure what happened to him this morning, but ever since I got home with the dogs, he’s been fully in. We’re running late because he wasresearching preschools, and when I pointed out that we had a while, he said, “Maren, we really don’t.”
“We have a secret weapon,” he tells me.
“We do?”
“Not one but two grandchildren.”
I hope he’s right, but I’m not positive. My mom seems more the type to be upset that she’s old enough to be a grandmother than the type to be thrilled by it. It also means the end of my modeling career and perhaps the end of my trim waist. Those were the two things about me that my mother liked best.
Everyone is seated at the long table in my mother’s favorite room. There are my two favorite stepdads—Roger and Henry, who are now best friends. Henry’s girlfriend, a twenty-four-year-old publicist that Charlie slept with first. Kit and Miller, the fiancé who’s also my ex. Which makes Kit the only female who hasn’t slept withmultiplemen here.
This room is already flooded with weird overlaps. And we’re about to introduce the weirdest of them all. We greet everyone, but my mother is already on edge.
“I thought you couldn’t leave South Carolina, Charlie,” she says with more than a hint of accusation in her tone. “Here, Maren, come sit by me.”
Charlie snags my hand, holding me in place, and the room goes entirely silent.
My mother rises to her feet, knocking a wineglass off the table in her haste and sending red wine splaying across the rug. “Absolutely not,” she gasps. “Absolutely not.”
“Iknewit,” Kit says to Miller. “And you said there was no way.”
“Maren, you idiot!” my mother screams, dramatically lifting the plate in front of her and smashing it. “Charlie never stays with anyone, and now the family is ruined! I can’t even?—”
“Ulrika,” Charlie warns, “raise your voice to my future wifeagain or call her another name, and you’llreallysee a family dinner get ruined.”
I raise a brow. “Futurewife?”
He huffs in exasperation. “Obviously. We’d have done it anyway, eventually, but my children aren’t going to be bastards.”
“I don’t think anyone even uses that expression anymore, Charlie, and I don’t want?—”
“What?” shouts Kit. “Back way the fuck up. Children? Whatchildren?”
I bite my lip, trying to hold in my tears, but they spill out anyway. “We’re pregnant.”
“Oh my God,” Kit says, leaping from her chair and hugging me, with Roger and Henry on her heels. I’d feel like an idiot for crying, except they’re all crying too.
“This is so amazing,” says Henry, his voice cracking. “I can’t believe I’m about to be a grandfather.”
The tears pour then. I’m not going to tell him why. I’m not going to tell him that I’ve been carrying around this memory of something he said twenty-seven years ago like a stain. Because whatever he said, he’s erased all of it now.
My mother is the only one who isn’t over here. She remains standing at the end of the table, pale, cheeks sucked in. “This is a disaster and you’re all acting as if?—”
Roger steps away, standing between us and her, as if he can shield us. “Ulrika, for once in your damn life, don’t make this about yourself. She’s having a baby. Our grandchild. You always said you wished we’d have a child, and now we sort of are.”
“Grandchildren,” Charlie corrects. “We’re, uh, having twins.”
“Twins?” my mother repeats faintly, sinking into her seat, her eyes suspiciously bright. “God, Maren, you’re going to gainsomuch weight.”
“Jesus, Mom,” Kit gasps.
“I’m gonna kill her,” Charlie hisses beside me.
