Driving With the Top Down (27 page)

The truth was dumb enough. But she’d committed to it, and now she had to follow through.

She took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

Turn back turn back turn back RUN!
ran through her mind like a drumbeat. But she was frozen, rooted to the spot. The sun, nudging toward the west at her back, burned hot, and she felt sweaty and rumpled. She probably smelled hot. She hated the smell of hot human coming into cool air-conditioning.

The door opened, and there she was: Julia Markham. Kevin’s first real girlfriend.

The
real
love of his life.

And she looked gorgeous, of course. Slim, tall, perfect in a pale blue shift dress that, unlike any shift dresses Colleen had ever tried on, emphasized every curve without looking self-consciously sexy at all. Which made it even sexier, of course. This was not an easy person to compare herself to.

There was no comparison.

“Julia?” Colleen said, even though she knew.

“Yes?” The woman frowned her arched eyebrows, not a hair on her head astray, and tilted her head slightly, clearly trying to place the mess before her.

Colleen felt her face grow hot. “I know this is really weird—and, believe me, I am wishing I were anywhere but here at this moment, but here I am and … I’m Colleen Bradley. Kevin’s wife?”

Understanding came into Julia’s chocolate eyes. “Oh, yes! Colleen! I’ve seen your picture.” Understanding left and reality overtook it. “I don’t understand, though—” She searched the landscape behind Colleen. “—is Kevin here?”

“No. I’m by myself. I was hoping to talk to you.” This was crazy. How had this ever seemed like a reasonable idea?

“Of course.” Julia’s composure slipped for just one barely detectable moment. “Where are my manners? Come on in.” She took a graceful step backwards, opening the door to Colleen, and the clean, sun-filled house bloomed behind her. It was almost as if angel music played.

Colleen’s house would never look like this.

Never.

“This way.” Julia led her past an all-white kitchen to an all-white sunroom. There was a pitcher of ice water with lemons in it already on the coffee table and a copy of
Architectural Digest
lying open, facedown, on the sofa. In Colleen’s house, it would have been a Diet Coke and a dog-eared
People
magazine.

“What’s on your mind, Colleen?” Julia asked. There was a slight crispness to her tone, which Colleen took to be caution. Who wouldn’t be feeling cautious under these circumstances? Your college ex-boyfriend’s wife shows up at your door, a thousand miles from where you know they live? She must have been wondering if Colleen was wearing a diaper and packing heat.

Colleen added
brave
to the list of Julia’s attributes.

“Look,” she said quickly, “like I said, I know this is really odd, and it was probably a harebrained scheme, but I wanted to apologize to you. I’ve wanted to, or at least needed to, for a really long time.”

That appeared to take Julia aback. “Apologize to me? What on earth for?”

Sudden, unstoppable tears filled Colleen’s eyes. “For”—words failed her for a moment; she had to choke them out—“for ruining your life. Yours and Kevin’s. I—I think.”

Julia’s shock could not have been more clear. “What are you
talking
about?” She smoothly handed a box of tissues to Colleen from the end table next to her.

Colleen sniffed and dabbed at her eyes. “I didn’t know Kevin had a girlfriend when I met him—”

“Technically, he didn’t,” Julia said carefully.

But he had. They both knew it. He and Julia had just had a fight. After two and a half years of dating, college sweethearts, Julia and Kevin had a fight and Kevin went out and got drunk with his buddies, which was where and when he met Colleen.

All she knew at the time was that he was gorgeous and older and funny and smart—and drunk—and that he was going after her pretty enthusiastically. Egged on by his friends, who were undoubtedly trying to get him to get over Julia by just “getting right back on the horse”—even if it was a different horse. That’s how guys were.

And girls tended to be too blind to see it until it was too late.

“Okay,” Colleen agreed, “that’s true, technically you were ‘on a break.’” Wasn’t everyone sick to death of that old
Friends
reference now? Yet it was completely true. “And I didn’t know about you at first—honestly, I didn’t.”

“Of course not,” Julia said with an ease and distance as if she were talking about a general situation, one not her own. “What guy’s going to tell a new girl that he just had it out with his old one? There was no reason for him to explain me to you, nor for him to explain you to me. We were over. I truly hope you haven’t been carrying that all these years, Colleen. Truly. It was just a silly teenage romance.”

Colleen took a breath. “That’s gracious of you. But I know the truth. Kevin was in love with you. He was planning to get back with you, you were
both
planning a wedding, and before he could tell me—and I realized later he’d been planning to break it to me, maybe even that day—I had to tell him I was pregnant.”

Colleen, the past

It wasn’t possible. They’d used protection. It was 99 percent effective, and the other 1 percent was if you used it as a party hat. Or if it broke or had a pinhole in it, but that almost never happened in real life.

So how could the four sticks on her sink (she’d done two, then decided the package must be faulty and gone out to get another two) all say the same thing?

Positive.

Pregnant.

It was impossible to fathom. A month ago, she had been Not Pregnant, and her whole life was ahead of her—every choice open to her, or at least it seemed that way (there was no telling whether she’d ever
really
want to run for president) and now a huge percentage of those choices were gone. Boom. Like pipe dreams.

Naturally her “options” had occurred to her. She was strongly pro-choice, but she couldn’t imagine choosing to end this in practice and wonder forever what could have been.

Likewise, she admired the hell out of people who were strong enough to give babies up for adoption, but she didn’t think she could live a lifetime constantly calculating the age of any child or person she saw who might look vaguely like her or Kevin or a combination of them both. It was selfish, she knew, but giving her baby away would torture her.

So she decided she was going to keep the baby. She was going to raise him or her, no matter what. She was prepared to do it alone, if need be. And need might be, because she had no idea how her parents were going to react to this tidbit the minute after she completed her costly education.

And a year before the baby’s father completed
his
degree in architecture.

How was she going to tell everyone?

How was she going to tell
anyone
?

Even Bitty had just left for her home in North Carolina, heartbroken over Blake leaving. Colleen couldn’t burden her with this too. She’d feel like she had to
do
something, and when nothing could be done—because, really, nothing could be done—she’d think she failed Colleen. That’s how Bitty was, always dutiful, always trying to be whatever she thought people needed her to be.

Colleen, frankly, couldn’t face telling any of them.

But she had to.

And it had to begin with Kevin.

And first it had to begin with sleep.

When she woke up in the morning, she had that moment of disorientation when she remembered
something
was wrong, but she was too sleep-fogged to recall exactly what it was.

Then it came to her. Crashing down in all its reality, as unreal as it was. She even went into the bathroom and glanced into the trash can, in case it had all been a vivid dream—but no, the four pregnancy tests were still there, and the tampon wrappers she would have expected to be—her period came like clockwork every month—were not.

Later she would not remember the drive over to Kevin’s, apart from the way her hands shook on the steering wheel. This was unreal. It felt like being in an improv class; she had to find a way to say the unsayable. She had to find a way to live with knowing she was about to change someone else’s life—in addition to her own—forever. She had to tell him she was pregnant and that she’d made the decision to keep the baby, so forevermore, no matter what happened between the two of them, he was going to be a father. He would know, whether he acted on it or not, that he was a father. And she would know she’d done that to him.

She parked the car out in front of his apartment, took a deep breath, and went to the door. It took a long moment for her to knock, but when she did, he seemed to open it almost immediately.

“Hey,” he said, clearly surprised.

“Hi. I’m sorry to come unannounced. But we”—she took a shuddering breath—“we need to talk.”

Was that relief that crossed his expression? “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” he said. “Come on in, have a seat. I know it’s only noon, but do you want a beer?”

She gave a dry laugh. “No, thanks.”

“Mind if I have one?”

“Please do.”
Please have six
.

He popped open a can of Bud and sat down at the hexagonal table he and his roommate had gotten from Goodwill. “Have a seat,” he said again.

“That’s okay, I’m a little nervous.”

He nodded. “I think maybe we’re feeling the same way.” Later those words would register for her, but her first reaction upon hearing them was that maybe her nerves were so blaring, he couldn’t help but pick up on them.

“The thing is…” Words failed her. Just stopped.

He waited a moment, then prompted. “What?”

“I…” Her palms grew sweaty, instantly. She felt like she could puke, though it was nerves not the baby. This should be so straightforward. In a way, so easy. But it was like she was a character in a fairy tale who’d lost the ability to speak.

“Maybe I should start?”

She wanted to shake her head, to stop him from what she feared he was going to say, but she couldn’t move. She just felt her eyes widen and burn with unshed tears.

“I think you’re great,” he started. “I mean that, you’re one of the greatest girls I’ve ever met—”

“I’m pregnant!” she blurted, then felt herself stepping backwards. She didn’t know why; she wasn’t afraid of him. Was it some instinct to back out of the place and run? She didn’t know, but she felt behind her with her hand until the wall impeded her, and she stopped and took a bracing breath to try and face him.

He’d gone pale. Seriously pale. All the blood must have left his entire head. “What?”

She nodded spastically.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I took more than one test.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. We used protection. Did you notice anything, ever, that went wrong with that?”

“Obviously not.”

Well, obviously
so,
but she didn’t say that.

“There was that one time we didn’t have anything, so I pulled out,” he said, frowning, thinking.

No, there wasn’t. That had never happened. She never would have taken the chance on purpose.

It must have been another girl.

He must have realized that too, because he amended, “No, we didn’t, what am I talking about? My head is spinning. We were careful every time—this isn’t possible.”

“I know. But it’s true.”

He drained his beer and went to the fridge. “Are you sure you don’t want one?”

“Can’t. Pregnant.”

He came back with two anyway, opened them both, and drained one after the other. “So does that mean you’ve made your decision?”

“Yes, I’m keeping it. But you’re not obligated in any way. I’m only here to tell you so you know, so you can participate as much or as little as you want to. This can be
my
deal alone if you want it to be, but I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t give you the choice to be there as everything … progresses.”

He looked down for a long time, and she watched the muscle tic in his jaw. He did that during sex too, when he was trying not to come. She’d thought it was sexy then. Now it just made her feel small and troublesome.

Finally he looked up. “I want to be there, of course.”

She hadn’t expected that. “What?”

He stood up and came to her. She could smell the beer on his breath as he approached. “I want to be there for you, for you both. I’m not leaving you alone with this, you know that.”

“I don’t expect anything from you.”

“That’s what I like about you,” he said, and pulled her in for a hug. He kissed her forehead. “You’re so kind that you’re worried about what this means for me rather than what you’re about to go through.”

“Well, I’m worried about both,” she said against his chest, and gave a half laugh.

He gave a half laugh too. Nothing was really funny, but what else could they do? “We’ll make this work,” he said.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” she asked. It had sounded serious. The words he had gotten out wouldn’t register until later on, when she tried to piece together her memories of the conversation.

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.” He kissed the top of her head again. “I don’t even remember.”

*   *   *

JULIA LOOKED AT
her glass of water, then back at Colleen. “Would you like something stronger than this?”

“I’d love it, but just one. I’m driving.”

“I’ll just be a moment.” Julia walked over to the kitchen, opened the freezer, and took out a bottle of Belvedere Vodka. She poured a couple of fingers into a juice glass—at least she wasn’t such an immaculate hostess that she happened to have measuring tools and a shaker at the ready. But then, Julia had been a bartender in school. Just one more thing that made her cooler than Colleen. Another skill she had that Colleen didn’t—she tried to make a mojito once when a mint plant got out of control in the backyard, and had ended up with a sugary, alcoholic salad in a glass.

Julia came back to the sofa and sat down, looking only a little bit less gathered than she had when she first opened the door. “I like you, Colleen. And I respect you. And I see no need to try and paint things a different color because I want you to believe everything I say now. Yes, it’s true, Kevin and I got back together shortly before you learned you were pregnant. And yes, there was talk of getting married.”