The Solomon Sisters Wise Up (34 page)

And each time, Griffen would ask if he could come over, see me, listen to the baby’s heartbeat at least, and every time I would say no. And then there would be silence, and then he’d say, okay, I guess I brought this on myself, and I would say I’m sorry, and then there would be silence and then we’d hang up, and I’d cry and wonder what he was doing.

I’d promised myself and the Sweetpea that we’d be in our new apartment by Valentine’s Day. But at this rate, we’d be celebrating Mother’s Day in the guest bedroom of my father’s house. At least we’d have room to accommodate my getting-huge belly; Ally had moved into her new house a few weeks ago, and Giselle had helped Zoe find an apartment share via a Columbia University bulletin board with a student studying in the same psychology program to which Zoe was hoping to be admitted in September.

“I don’t think you could fit in this kitchen,” Lisa said, looking around the tiny narrow room. “Call the news stations—discrimination against pregnant women!”

“Just don’t call Griffen’s station,” I said with a smile. And then his name did what it always did when I heard it: made me very sad.

“Hey, turn that frown upside down,” Sabrina said, placing her two index fingers on opposite sides of my lips. “Sarah, you’ll find a great place. We just have to keep looking.”

“She’s right, sweetie,” Lisa said. “It took me and George two months to find our place.”

I sighed and grabbed the
New York Times
Real Estate section. There was one circled ad left. “Okay, hand me my cell.”

The moment Sabrina gave me my phone, it rang. The number of a real estate agency I was using but couldn’t afford appeared on the tiny screen. There was no way I was asking my father to borrow money for the agency’s fee, but perhaps I could talk the agent into a one month’s rent fee instead of fifteen percent of the first year’s rent. I was having zero luck on my own.

At my hello, someone who sounded exactly like Griffen said, “Don’t hang up, Sarah. I’m standing in the nursery of the perfect apartment for you. I’m with a real estate agent from CitiHabitats. Can you come see it?”

“Griffen—”

“It’s on Eighty-fifth and Third. Can you come?”

“I can find my own apartment, but thanks.”

“According to your father,” he said, “you’ve been apartment hunting for weeks.”

“So now you’re talking to my father?” I asked.

“I happened to catch him on the phone today when I called for you,” he explained. “He said you won’t accept any financial help from him or let his agent set you up and that he was afraid you’d take a walk-up.”

A walk-up, even on my new salary, was about all I could afford. But at five months pregnant I couldn’t manage one flight of stairs, let alone two or three or four. And there was no way I could lug the stroller I’d registered for up any flights of stairs, even when I got my old body back.
If
I got my old body back.

“Sarah, please come see this place,” he said. “I have a feeling it’s exactly what you’re looking for.”

After telling him no for a few more minutes, I wrote down the address he gave me.

“Just go see it,” Lisa said. “Maybe it will be the one.”

“Yeah, go,” Sabrina said. “You have nothing to lose.”

Yeah, nothing except standing in an empty apartment with Griffen and wishing we would be moving in together.

He was standing in front of the building when I arrived. A doorman in uniform with tassels gallantly opened the door, Griffen introduced me to the real estate agent, who’d been sitting on a black leather settee under a huge chandelier, and then we took the elevator to the twenty-second floor. A small health club was on the second floor, along with a playroom and a meeting room. A large laundry room was on the third. A pool was on the roof.

“Yeah, like I can afford this,” I whispered to Griffen as the lights took us up and up. “What’s the point of my seeing it?”

“Just see it,” he said.

The second I walked into the apartment, I wanted to live there. The living room was huge, and there were two walls of windows, including a set of sliding glass doors to a good-sized terrace. The floors were shiny hardwood, parquet, and the long kitchen was shiny white with new appliances. The bathroom was marble and had Hollywood lights around the huge mirror.

The bedroom was huge. Too huge for one.

“This is where we could build the nursery,” Griffen said, spreading out his arms in a corner of the bedroom. “Either a ten by ten in here, or we could do it in the living room. There’s room either way.”

“Griffen, I might be a well-paid senior editor now, but I still can’t afford this place. I don’t even need to know the rent to know that.”

“It is pricey,” he said. “But you’d only have to pay half the rent.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think the super is going to be interested in weekly pay-off sex with a pregnant woman,” I joked.

He laughed. “No, Sarah, I meant you’d only have to pay half the rent because I’ll be paying the other half.”

“That’s really generous of you,” I said, “but how are you going to afford your place
and
half of this?”

“Silly, I’m planning to give up my place and live here, with you and the baby.”

I slipped on my coat and headed to the front door. “Griffen, unless this is a feel-good movie or you’re suddenly gay, living platonically with the father of my baby is a little too weird for me. And it’s not good enough for me. It’s not what I want. I explained this.”

He ran after me and took my hand. “Sarah, calm down.”

I yanked my hand away. “No, Griffen, I’m done calming down. And I’m getting really sick and tired of you suggesting things that you know I not only don’t want, but hurt me to even hear.”

“Sarah, I’m not talking about living here platonically.”

I looked up at him.

He dropped down on one knee, reached into his pocket and held up a diamond ring.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

“Will you marry me, Sarah?” he asked.

I gasped. Actually gasped. The man of my dreams, the man I loved, the father of my child was kneeling before me, offering me an engagement ring, asking me to marry him.

“No, Griffen,” I said.

He paled. “No?”

“No,” I repeated.

He dropped his other knee and sat up against the wall, wrapping his arms around his legs. “Well, then, I don’t know what you want, Sarah.”

“What I want is that ring on my finger when you can look into my eyes and tell me you love me, that you want to spend the rest of your life with me. That you want to marry me because of me. That’s what I want.”

“I—” He stared out the window.

“What?” I said. “Tell me how you feel.”

He let out a deep breath. “All I really know is that I want to be with you. I want to be with you and the baby. I want us to live together. That’s what I want.”

I leaned against the wall and very slowly slid down next to Griffen. Our thighs touched.

“Being shut out these past few weeks has been hell, Sarah,” he said. “I need to be with you. I need to be with the baby,” he added, placing his hand on my stomach. “I want us to be together.”

I put my hand on top of his.

“Sarah, if you’ll have me, I think this place is plenty big enough for the three of us to grow together in. To be a family in. That is what I want.”

“What do you think, Sweetpea?” I said to my belly. “Should we take him?”

The baby kicked.

Epilogue

Sarah

“C
lose your eyes,” Griffen said as we arrived at our apartment door. “And no peeking until I say open.”

“Close my eyes?” I repeated. “How am I going to see Liam?”

“You only have to close your eyes for ten seconds,” Griffen said, “then you can open them again and make goo-goo eyes at the baby all you want.”

I peered into the infant car seat that Griffen was so carefully holding. Our little son, Liam Maxwell, named for my mother, Leah, lay sleeping in his white cotton union suit and swaddled in a light blue blanket that Giselle had begun knitting for him on Thanksgiving evening.

It turned out that my father had thought Giselle was trying to tell him something by knitting the baby-blue blankie, and it turned out he was disappointed that she wasn’t.

And now Giselle was expecting!

For some reason, my father was actually hoping for another girl. “I understand them just fine,” he’d said.

Maybe he did, at that.

“Liam is so perfect,” Griffen said, gently stroking his blue knit cap.

And he was. Six pounds, twelve ounces. Twenty inches long. Ten fingers, ten toes, and a fuzzing of dark hair, like mine. He had Griffen’s nose.

I should have been exhausted, but I’d never been so wide-awake, so excited. Liam and I had been released from the hospital just an hour ago, and a moment from now, we would be welcoming him into his new home.

“C’mon, close your eyes,” Griffen said again. “Do like Liam.”

“Why?” I asked, shifting my hospital bag from one shoulder to the other.

“No reason,” he said. “Just a little surprise.”

I smiled and closed my eyes. The last few months had been full of little surprises. Like Griffen himself, for one. The first few weeks of living together had been an adjustment, since neither of us had ever lived with someone of the opposite sex, and he’d never lived with a pregnant woman to boot, and one with strange 2:00 a.m. cravings, which he cheerfully fulfilled by saying he might as well get used to being up at 2:00 a.m. anyway. We’d slowly furnished the apartment with exquisite hand-me-downs from Ally’s old house and interesting antique pieces from drives up to Woodstock and Saugerties, and our apartment was now a home, a warm, comfortable, inviting home for a family. We’d built the nursery in our bedroom, and a corner of the huge living room was to be Liam’s play area and filled with all the incredible shower goodies we’d indeed received, like a baby swing and an ultrasaucer and a high chair and a bouncy seat and more stuffed animals, toys, and children’s books enough for six children.

“So we’ll just have to have another baby in a couple of years,” Griffen said.

Like I said, little surprises. We’d settled into a very happy space of excitement, of getting to know each other more and more, being happy in the moment, and anticipation for the baby and the future.

Griffen’s parents had come over once a week for dinner or dessert that Mrs. Maxwell insisted on bringing herself. Comfort food meals of pot roasts and mashed potatoes and creamed spinach and carrots and layer cakes. She’d put in her bid for Harrison, her late father’s name, for Liam’s middle name, and she hugged me for the first time when I told her that Liam Harrison Maxwell was a grand name. Mr. Maxwell still tended to say
What?
quite often and asked just about every week when exactly the baby was due and if we knew if it was a boy or a girl, and each time we’d say May fifteenth and that we didn’t know the sex.

“Sex is what got you into this jam!” Mr. Maxwell would then say and throw back his head laughing with a few hard slaps on his thigh.

“It’s no jam, Dad,” Griffen said every time. “Quite the opposite.”

And his mother and I would both look at him with surprise.

The biggest surprise of all, though, was Liam’s arrival itself. He decided to come into the world early, two weeks early, on May Day. I’d gone into labor on April 30th, in the morning, but Liam had taken his time appearing, as though he wanted to prove he was indeed a stubborn Taurus who’d insisted on waiting until the next day to be born so he could be a May baby like his grandmother and father.

“Are your eyes closed, Sarah?” Griffen asked. “They don’t look closed to me.”

“They’re closed,” I said, shutting them. Hmm, this felt good. Maybe I was more tired than I realized.

He unlocked the door. “Okay, now just walk right behind me into the bedroom, into the nursery. Okay, almost there. No peeking.” He stopped, and then I heard a little whoosh and a little cry and then silence again. “Okay, open!”

In the three days I’d been gone, the nursery had been converted from a plain little room with the basics into a baby boy’s dream world. A mural of the
Where the Wild Things Are
was painted on one of the walls, Max and the monster walking through the woods. The cashmere quilt Ally had bought on her honeymoon was hanging on another wall, on a quilt rod that apparently Mr. Maxwell had been carving in his garage for the past four months. Zoe had arranged all the books alphabetically on the bookshelves that Griffen had put up in my absence, and he’d hung huge colorful block letters that spelled out LIAM along the wall over his changing table.

I looked down into the crib and my heart almost burst. There lay our little Liam, looking exactly like both me and Griffen. One of his arms was up over his head, his little fist against his temple.

Liam opened his eyes and looked at me, and I picked him up and cradled him in my arms and kissed him on the forehead.

“Surprise!” came a group of hushed voices.

I turned around and found my father and Giselle, my sisters, Lisa and Sabrina and Danielle, holding her little Jessie (she’d won on the name), and Griffen’s parents and brother in the living room. Mrs. Maxwell was already slicing pieces of the huge cake she’d brought over.

My sisters took a turn kissing Liam on the forehead. He opened his slate-blue eyes and stared at them and then up at me, yawned a huge yawn, and settled back asleep.

THE SOLOMON SISTERS WISE UP

A Red Dress Ink novel

ISBN: 978-1-4268-4041-8

© 2003 by Melissa Senate.

All rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission. For permission please contact Red Dress Ink, Editorial Office, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the author’s imaginaton, and are not to be construed as real. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in the book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.