Shelter (14 page)

Alma was speechless.

Caroline twitched a sad smile. “Guess you’re still not talking. Bye, Alma.”

She watched her friend – former friend she supposed – turn around, blonde locks flashing in the afternoon sun. She thought up five different things to say, and yet she couldn’t make herself call Caroline back.

“What was all that about?” Emily was suddenly at her elbow, a silent, red-headed café ninja.

“All the bad damn decisions I’ve made in my life.”

**

“I push people away, don’t I?”

Carlos had heard Alma’s truck pull into the drive – it was hard not to – and he’d already been frowning up into the undercarriage of his Firebird, trying to choreograph how this would go. Who would speak first, if he still needed to apologize some more, which, he didn’t think he needed to, but she might have that stubborn set to her jaw. So he’d been surprised when she walked around to the nose of his car and said what she just had.

“What?” He pulled the flashlight from between his teeth and rolled out from beneath the car. From his position on his back, he saw her standing with her arms folded, her slim, dark brows knitted together. She chewed at her lower lip, little teeth bright white against the pink of her lipstick.

“I push people away,” she repeated. “Caroline. Mom.
You
.”

Carlos frowned. “What happened at work today?”

“A big freaking slap in the face, that’s what. I was a bitch last night, Carlos.” She sighed heavily and sat down on the work bench pushed up against the wall of the carport. Her hair was fast coming loose from its ponytail, and it framed her thin, pretty face. “I’m sorry. I was unfair to you.”

He sat up and rested his forearms on his knees, wanting to add his own two cents to the evaluation of the night before, but something about her expression told him she had more to say, and no matter how long that took, he was content to sit still and let the words come as they would.

“My mom came into the café today,” she studied her nail polish intently. “She was there with Caroline. You remember my best friend from high school?”

“Yeah.”

“They were together. And apparently they do this all the time: meet for Sunday brunch and talk about…I dunno what.”

He knew that, in some girl code of conduct he’d never be privy to, this was a major issue. That whole behind-my-back thing coupled with Alma’s irritation with Diane.

“They’re friends?” he asked carefully. “No offense, but I can’t see anyone under the age of forty being ‘friends’ with your mother.”

She chuckled. “No, I can’t either. I don’t think ‘friend’ is the right word.” Alma shook her head. “I don’t know. But, point is, pushing both of them away pushed them together. It’s like they have this Alma Hates Us club or something.”

“They know you don’t hate them.”

Her brown eyes flashed up to meet his. “Not sure everyone else is as understanding as you.”

He offered a grin. “I am pretty awesome like that.”

Her tiny, vacant smile widened. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

The silence between them shimmered with apology and gratitude; it was extremely hard to stay angry with her. He knew that Sam’s death had pulled all sorts of emotional strings inside them; his passing may have brought them together, but it would continue to propel them away from one another at times too.

“I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow at three,” she said, the pitch of her voice changing. She sounded almost hopeful. “They’re gonna do an ultrasound and I don’t know what your work schedule’s like, or if you’d even want to, but I thought maybe…and feel free to say no because this is weird and I get it.”

“Of course I’ll come,” he cut off her rambling, chest swelling up with a warm, bright sensation he couldn’t put a name to. She wanted him to be there when she looked at the baby. Wow. “You sure?”

Her eyes flicked away, as if she was afraid he’d see a spark of doubt in them, but they came back, and she nodded. “Absolutely.”

14

“Lot on your mind?”

Carlos tore another flake of pine straw off the bale at his feet and spread it on the ground around him. He shrugged at the question. Salvador was on his right, and he really didn’t want to talk about his personal shit in front of him, but the guy who’d asked, Mike, was a solid dude. Almost a friend. “I guess,” Carlos said, turning his head in Mike’s direction in hopes Salvador wouldn’t hear. He didn’t like to talk about family shit, at least not normally, but when he’d awakened that morning in Sam’s bed, Sam’s widow curled up around him, a weight had settled across his shoulders that he hadn’t been able to shake. At this point, internalizing his stress was giving him indigestion. “Gotta leave early.”

“Everything alright?” Mike asked as he distributed his own straw.

“Yeah. My girl’s going in for an ultrasound today,” he swallowed hard at the referral to Alma as
his girl
. “It just kinda hit me, ya know?”

Mike nodded.

Salvador wasn’t so tactful. “Girl? Dude, you got someone knocked up? Shit! Is it that Jessica chick with the nice ass?”

“No,” he snapped. “It’s not her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Salvador,” Mike said with a sigh. “Leave it alone.”

“Alma.”

“That’s a cool name.” Then the landscaper’s already big eyes nearly bugged out of his head. “Hey! Wasn’t Sam married to a chick named Alma?”

Too late, Carlos realized that his frustration had led to the leaking of too much information. He caught Mike’s gaze and saw his coworker’s sympathy. He at least wasn’t going to judge him for taking up with his dead cousin’s wife.

Salvador, on the other hand, looked like a teenage girl who’d just sunk her teeth into the gossip of the decade. “Bro, seriously? She’s hot! The brunette, right?” He laughed. “Man, that’s
bad
, hooking up with his girl like that.”

Carlos shucked his gloves and left them where they fell – he couldn’t vacate the area fast enough.

“Hey, where you going?” Salvador called after him as he stalked away.

“Carlos,” that would be Mike.

He didn’t care. Fuck it. Their foreman, Good & Green’s owner’s nephew, stood with a shoulder propped against the cab of one of the trucks, looking like the aimless, lazy kid he was. They all knew he only had the job because of who he was, not what he knew: which was jack shit. Todd, though they all called him “little dickhead” behind his back, turned at the sound of Carlos’s boots over the grass.

“What up?” he asked. He had a flat, roofer’s pencil behind one ear for some reason and a steaming paper cup from Starbucks in one hand.

“I need to take off.” Carlos barely managed to keep his voice cordial.

Todd frowned. “Thought you said two-thirty?”

“Got a call. The appointment’s been bumped up.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. Jimmy’s gonna take one of the trucks back. You can ride with him.
”

**

Carlos was quiet in an unhappy way, not a calm, reflective one. At least that was Alma’s estimation as they settled into chairs in the gynecologist’s office. She might have been mistaking his mood – after all, what guy would want to walk through the hall they’d come down lined with photos of naked babies nestled in people’s palms -  but she knew she read him well. And he was agitated about something besides this appointment.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yup.” He picked up one of the magazines off the table in front of them, then frowned after he’d flipped the pages and realized it was a publication for expectant mothers. He tossed it back down and it hit the table with a smack that drew disapproving glances from the other patients.

The OGYN’s waiting room, unlike any other Alma had ever been in, was almost silent. In all her previous visits, she’d wondered why she was the only patient who wasn’t pregnant. Was everyone in the world having babies? Now, she was one of the pregnant masses. No one around them spoke, busy with books or cell phones. One woman was trying to pacify the bab
y who fussed and squirmed in its carrier and she looked fretful, afraid that its cries might disturb the ridiculous, tomb-like quiet that everyone seemed intent on maintaining.

“How was work?” she ventured.

He shrugged. “Work.”

Brooding Carlos was not the man she’d wanted at her side this afternoon. Where had her charming doofus gone? She
frowned. “Are you sure you’re - ”

“Alma Morales,” a nurse called.

Carlos stood and offered a hand to her, which she took, not wanting to look rude, and, moody or not, she was thankful for his support.

The nurse smiled at them in a way that indicated she thought they were both the biological parents of her baby. “Right this way.”

**

The ultrasound technician had little cartoon cats on her scrubs and Carlos kept going back to them because if he focused on what the monitor was showing them, took a moment to absorb what the white and black blobs of static were, a lethal combination of guilt and joy twisted like a hot knife in his belly.
Sam should be here to see this
, he kept thinking. He should have been there to see his own child, tiny and indistinguishable as it was, up on the screen. Should have had the opportunity to see the unshed tears glittering in Alma’s eyes. It should have been Sam’s fingers that were intertwined with hers on the edge of the exam table.

But in the same instant, he was glad the fingers were his. That it was his name on her lips when she breathed in wonder.
The baby was a piece of her, and, through the blood of the man who’d been like his brother, a little piece of him too. He wasn’t so delusional – yet – that he was supplanting himself as the father. But he loved the little blip on the screen. Of all the questions he had, the baby had never been one of them. When it was born – he or she – he was going to be there, in whatever capacity Alma wanted him to be.

“It’s hard to see,” the tech said, “but this is the head over here, and down here are the feet.” She moved the cursor so the arrow pointed to the respective head and feet of the grainy baby. Carlos might as well have been looking at
an underwater sonar scan of the ocean floor for all it resembled a human child, but Alma gasped and squeezed his hand.

“Oh, it’s so little,” she murmured. “Can you tell whether it’s a boy or a girl?”

The tech smiled. “I’m afraid not yet. It’ll be a few more weeks until it’s developed enough to determine sex.”

Alma’s eyes went back to the screen. “That’s okay. It won’t make a difference.”

The experience was so surreal, the spell under which Alma had fallen so tranquil, that Carlos hadn’t had the heart to tell the doctors and nurses that he wasn’t the father. The frowns and apologies would have ruined the moment. So the tech swiveled her head in his direction, still smiling, and then glanced at Alma, giving them that inclusive, you’re-the-expectant-parents look.

“Are you considering names?” she asked.

It was a normal question, one all parents fielded. But Carlos felt a twinge of sadness. It wasn’t his place to name the baby, or even to suggest names.

Alma, though, just smiled, wiggled her fingers inside of his. “I already have one picked out.”

“Boy or girl?” the tech asked.
              “Either. It’ll be Sam either way.”

Which was perfect. Carlos swallowed the sudden lump in his throat. It wasn’t about him or her or revenge anymore, it was about this new, tiny, as of yet gender nonspecific Sam.

It was too late to help the first Sam. But the asshole who’d taken his life was never going to hurt new Sam.

**

On their way out of the doctor’s office, his arm snug around her waist, the warmth from his body seeping into hers and combining with the overflowing abundance of maternal love welling up in her heart, Alma couldn’t have been more content. The doctor had printed her a photo of her ultrasound and it hadn’t mattered that the baby looked like some kind of space creature, it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever gazed upon.

Her Sam.

Carlos’s support had been the magic key that had unlocked all the wonderful parts of the experience she might have missed had she been alone. As they stepped outside into the weak autumn sunshine, for the first time, she felt fully, wholly pregnant. And even excited about the prospect of bringing this new life into the world and getting to meet him – or her – face to face.

That blissful epiphany was being overshadowed, however, as they perused the baby aisles of the nearest Target and she took stock of all the things her new bundle would require. And how much all of that would cost.