A Little Change Of Plans

Chapter Three

Most Saturday mornings, Adam woke up with ideas in his head about how he was going to spend a fun weekend. Basketball with the guys, a romp in the park with Elmer, trying out a new restaurant, taking in an action flick, watching a ball game on TV with a large sausage pizza. Some weekends, he could cram all those things in, if he wanted to. Or he could spend two days sitting in an armchair reading books about topics he’d discovered he found interesting so that by Monday morning, he was a pseudo-expert.

This was definitely the first Saturday morning when he awoke, blinked at the sunlight streaming in on either side of the window shade, and thought, I need to pack a suitcase so I can go get married.

He squinted at the glowing red numbers on his clock. After ten already. Well, he’d been up kind of late. He’d figured he should remain near the phone in case Molly called him back and changed her mind again.

She hadn’t. And he’d stayed on his sofa through two and a half lame infomercials just to be sure.

He rolled out of bed and onto his knees on the floor. He stretched his hands over his head and let out a loud groan, then reached under his bed and slid out his suitcase. He blew a dust bunny off the top of it and Elmer, who’d been quietly sitting in the corner, chased it back under the bed.

Adam heaved the bag onto the still-warm sheets and opened it. He really didn’t know how much to pack. A little piece of him was feeling as if this were a dream. It was a pretty big suitcase, though. He decided to pack it until it was full.

He emptied two large dresser drawers next to the bag, then picked a pair of jeans out of the pile and slid them on his body, leaving the top button open. Then he began to fold without giving much thought to each garment. His brain was filled with Molly, and what she was thinking this morning, but in all the time he’d known that woman, he could never guess what she was thinking.

He wondered if husbands were supposed to know what their wives were thinking. Probably not, but their guesses were likely to be at least in the ballpark.

Right now, he felt like the starting pitcher in a game he wasn’t even originally supposed to play.

He rolled up several T-shirts and tossed them in the bag, picking up his pace, trying to keep his mind busy so it wouldn’t amuse itself with any more bad baseball analogies.

Should he pack towels? Molly would have lots of towels, but could he presume he’d be using them? Would marriage entitle him to towel usage? What about sheets?

Where was he going to sleep, anyway? And why didn’t he think about all this before he proposed?

“This is too much,” Adam muttered in Elmer’s direction. Elmer responded by pricking up his ears, then bounding out of the room.

Adam was shaking out his brown corduroy pants and hoping for a supernatural sign that he was doing the right thing when he heard his name ring out.

“Adam! Where are you?”

For a moment, he allowed himself the luxury of thinking that the divine was summoning him for a heart-to-heart. But unless the divine was taking the form of his mother’s voice, that wasn’t to be.

“Uncle Adam!” The voices of Trevor and Billy, his nephews, echoed through the small apartment, followed by his sister’s bellowing. “Where the heck are you? Still sleeping?”

Last night’s monumental events had completely erased his memory of his family’s scheduled visit this morning. He couldn’t let them see he was packing. He wasn’t in the mood for questions right now, and he couldn’t logically sort things out for them before he sorted them out for himself.

He rushed out of his bedroom and slammed the door hard behind him, colliding head-on with Janine.

“Watch it, buddy,” his sister said. “You forgot we were coming, didn’t you?”

“Heck, no. You wound me.”

“Then you were so excited to see us, you forgot to put on a shirt?”

“That’s right.”

She hugged him and patted his bare shoulders. “Nice to see you.”

“You, too.” His sister’s brown hair was smushed into a girly ponytail thing, which looked cute but was not the kind of thing she would have done with her hair before having kids. He remembered her hours with the hair dryer and curling iron, leaving Adam to hop up and down outside the bathroom, waiting. His sister was still pretty, but in a softer, less deliberate way.

Trevor and Billy flew into Adam, their collisions purposeful. “Oof.”

“Uncle Adam,” Trevor said with all the urgency of an eight-year-old. “I got a goal in soccer. It went right over the goalie’s head.”

Not to be outdone, ten-year-old Billy cut in. “I got first seat trumpet in band this year. I beat all the sixth-graders. I can’t wait for school to start.”

“That’s a new one,” Janine mumbled, rumpling both her sons’ hair.

“You guys rock,” Adam said. “I have the coolest nephews ever.”

They both grinned, and although blond Trevor and dark-haired Billy didn’t look much alike at first glance, their smiles were nearly identical.

“I love it when all my kids are in one place,” he heard, and the kids stepped aside to let Adam’s mother hug him. “How are you?”

“Same, no change,” Adam said, inhaling his mother’s classic French perfume, the kind he got her for Mother’s Day every year, as she rested her head of brunette curls on his chest. He glanced guiltily at the closed bedroom door. “Let’s go see what I have to eat.”

“Probably nothing, as usual,” Pam said. “So we brought plenty.” She headed to the kitchen, two hungry kids scampering behind. Adam went to follow them, but turned to check the door one last time.

It was open, and Janine was stepping out into the hall.

“What are you doing?” Adam asked.

“Tossing my sweater on your bed, where I always put it.”

“Why are you wearing a sweater? It’s like eighty-five degrees outside.”

“Why are you packing? Are you going somewhere?”

Adam pushed his sister back into his room and kicked the door shut.

“Oh,” Janine squealed, balling her fists in excitement. “It’s a secret. What is it?”

“None of your business,” Adam said, pulling on a black T-shirt and trying to sound fierce enough for his sister to back off. He should have known it would only intrigue her further.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she insisted, her threatening tone matching his. She was only a year older than him, but somehow she always managed to make it seem as if it were much more.

“Or what?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Or I’m telling Mom.”

“What are you, five? Besides, you don’t even know what you’re telling her,” Adam countered, getting a bit nervous.

“I don’t have to. I’ll just tell her something’s up and she’ll drag it out of you.”

Adam knew she was right. “Janine, I’m serious.”

“So am I. You can’t just be taking off somewhere, all cloak-and-dagger, with like a month’s worth of clothes, and leave us here to worry about you.”

“I’m not going far.”

“Where’s not far?”

The two siblings glared at each other in a silent standoff, until Janine broke it by throwing open the door and yelling, “Mom!”

“You’re not even my real sister,” Adam said in juvenile desperation. “Mom and Dad just felt sorry for you when your spaceship left without you, and they took you in.”

Janine put her hands on her hips. “For your information, I didn’t even believe that when I was a kid.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t,” she said, “because I happen to know for a fact that a pack of mangy wolves left you on our doorstep when you were a baby.”

“Really?” asked Trevor, who had come into the room without the adults noticing. “You’re a wolf, Uncle Adam?”

“I’m not just any wolf,” Adam told his towheaded nephew. “I’m the Big Bad Wolf.” He howled menacingly and lunged, causing Trevor to shriek. Elmer bounded in and added his puppy howls to the fray. Laughing, Janine joined in. Billy ran in to see what the racket was about and began howling too without knowing why.

An earsplitting whistle pierced the air, and the noise abruptly ceased.

“It’s clear I raised a bunch of wild animals,” Pam said to the silence. A few giggles came from the two boys.

“Billy and Trevor,” Pam said, “go to the living room and take Elmer with you.” She turned to the two adults, and Adam detected a twinkle in her eye. “Watch TV for a few minutes. I need to talk to my children.”

The boys, snickering the way kids did when they saw their elders being treated like fellow kids, edged out of the room, Billy gently tugging a still-scrabbling Elmer by the collar.

Adam marveled, and certainly not for the first time, at how his mother, the epitome of homespun living, could put an effective smackdown on a roomful of misbehavior.

“Mom,” Janine said. “Adam has something to tell you.”

“Space-alien girl,” Adam muttered.

“What is it?” Pam demanded of her son. When he didn’t answer, she scanned the room for a hint, and saw the open suitcase, half filled with T-shirts and boxer shorts. She addressed her daughter. “What is going on?”

Janine shrugged, eyeballing her brother.

Adam threw up his hands in defeat, and walked over to the suitcase. He had plenty to do, and he really couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

“I’m moving out for a little while,” he said. “And I fully intended to tell you. Janine, I was going to ask you if you want to stay here with the boys and keep an eye on the place. For free. I’ll keep up the rent.”

Janine appeared suddenly ecstatic. Adam knew she’d hated to impose on their mother by having to stay with her since her recent divorce. Although Adam suspected Pam didn’t mind in the least.

“For how long?” Janine asked.

“Oh,” Adam said, trying to sound nonchalant, “about a year.”

“A year?” Janine yelled.

“Did you get some kind of transfer?” his mother asked, and Adam noticed she was trying to stay calm. He hastened his explanation.

“No, I’m going to stay with Molly for a while.”

Both women stared at him. “Is Molly okay?” Pam asked. “She’s not sick, is she?”

“No, not exactly. She’s kind of—well, pregnant.”

Silence.

Adam began folding clothes faster. “So I’m going to marry her for a little while. It’s not a big deal.”

The silence continued, and when he ventured a glance up, both women had their mouths wide open.

“She’s pregnant?” Janine finally asked. “She—you and she—”

“No,” Adam interrupted. “Not me. I’m not the father.”

“But you’re marrying her?” Pam asked. “So you’re in love with her?”

“No,” Adam said quickly. “Absolutely not in love. Just helping out. Best-friend duty.”

“Why?” Janine asked. “Molly seems too sensible for weirdness like this. And you, Mr. Serial Dater, making any commitment for longer than twelve hours stuns me.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Look,” Adam said, raking his hands through his hair and looking at his family, “I can’t tell you any more than that. I promised her. She’s in a situation, she needs help, and no one is supposed to know this marriage isn’t a real one.”

“But it will be a real one,” Pam pointed out.

“I mean, a marriage based on—on…”

“On love?” Janine asked.

Adam said nothing.

“Because,” his sister went on, “after all, you are not in love with her.”

“I’m not in love with her,” Adam repeated through gritted teeth. “How many times will I have to say that?”

“Probably about once a day,” Pam said, “if you’re going to be married and living under the same roof.”

Adam wished his mother weren’t so smart, because then he could just ignore her, instead of experiencing an uneasy internal foreshadowing.

“So, when can we move in here?” Janine asked.

“I’m going over to Molly’s tonight. But I’ll have to keep coming back for my stuff every now and then.”

“Sure.”

“When are you and Molly actually getting married?” Pam inquired, sitting on the edge of the bed and picking up a pair of already folded khakis. She unfolded them, shook them out and folded them in a much neater, expert way.

“I’m not absolutely sure. Some time next week?”

“Well, as long as the mother of the groom gets a little advance notice.”

“Mom,” he said. “This isn’t that kind of wedding.”

“Every wedding is that kind of wedding,” Pam informed her son. “I intend to be there.”

“Me, too,” Janine said. “Did you get rings?”

“I haven’t even gotten breakfast,” Adam said. “This was all decided less than fifteen hours ago.”

“You need rings,” Janine said.

“And flowers,” Pam said.

“Molly’s going to kill me that you guys even know about this,” Adam said.

His mother looked surprised. “Surely Molly didn’t think you weren’t going to tell your family you got married?”

“Well, she didn’t want anyone to know it’s not really for real.”

“But you haven’t told us practically anything,” Janine said reasonably. “Besides, we won’t breathe a word. Because what if you guys actually do fall in love?”

Adam dropped his travel alarm clock on the floor and it buzzed shrilly. He picked it up and fumbled with it. “We won’t,” he said over the din. How did something this small make so much noise? Where was the damn button? He found it and the clock quieted in his hands. He almost said, We won’t, because not only did I decide long ago, when Dad died, that I wouldn’t live like him, but I also decided I wouldn’t love anyone who lived like him. And Molly is so, so like him. Instead, he just cut the reply down to, “We won’t.”

His mother and his sister met each other’s eyes.

“Do not do that,” he said.

“Do what?” they both asked him.

“Give each other that female look. You know what I’m talking about.”

“How is Molly feeling?” Pam asked, deftly taking control of the conversation. “How far along is she?”

“I guess fine. Six months.”

Pam looked taken aback. “Six months already? And you didn’t know about this at all?”

“I haven’t talked to her in about that long.”

“Well, if she needs a hand with anything at all, tell her she can always call your sister or me for professional mother advice.”

“She won’t have to. She’s Molly. She’s got everything under control.”

Pam’s eyebrows disappeared underneath her wispy bangs. “You think a woman going through her first pregnancy, and perhaps an unexpected one at that, a woman who also runs her own business and not too long ago bought her own home, has got everything ‘under control’?”

Adam paused midfold and ruminated a moment. Molly popped into his head—pinstriped, efficiently quick-moving Molly, holding a stack of folders in one hand and a phone in the other. “Sure.”

Then his mental picture suddenly warped and changed. Molly’s midsection expanded, popping two blazer buttons. Overwhelming tears rolled down her cheeks, the shocking tears he’d heard on the phone. The tears that drove him to propose marriage to a woman who was his polar opposite in every imaginable way.

“Sure,” he repeated, but this time the word sounded a little bit false.

This plan had made a whole lot more sense before his family started asking questions.

Hadn’t it?

He bent and dragged a pair of sneakers off his closet floor, and emerged just in time to see Janine and Pam exchange another one of those looks, but this time Adam deliberately ignored it. Just because they had a history of always being right, didn’t mean they would be right when it came to Molly. Or him.

Adam parked in front of Molly’s house, but Molly, absorbed in the garden patch underneath a front window with her back to him, didn’t appear to hear his car. He sat and watched her.

The muscles in her back worked underneath her thin white T-shirt as she bent over doing who knew what in the dirt. Every few seconds, she flipped her dark masses of curls over her shoulder, only to have them slip down her front again. And every few minutes, she toppled over.

She was sitting on a little stool low to the ground, and she seemed to be having a difficult time keeping her balance. She kept catching herself before actually hitting the grass, but he could interpret the mounting frustration in her body, just a little bit more with each time she righted herself. He didn’t have to see the expression of grim determination on her face to know it was there. It was her most popular look.

When he saw her pick up a little shovel and fling it with annoyance to the ground, sending bits of soil flying, he decided it was time to save her from herself.

He got out of his car and slammed the door. Her head snapped around. Now, that look, Adam thought, was not a familiar one on Molly. Nervous, unsure, lacking confidence and maybe even a little…scared.

He raised his hand in greeting and she got to her feet, kicking the stool away from her. She turned, and—

Whoa.

She approached him, and a wry smile curved up one corner of her top lip. She tugged down the hem of her shirt as she walked. “Notice anything different about me?” she asked when she stopped in front of him.

“Just the most obvious thing,” Adam answered. “Nice rack.”

Molly’s eyes widened, but then she crossed her arms over her breasts and, Adam noticed, tried and failed to not look pleased. She’d complained as long as he’d known her about what she called her hereditary flat chest, and although he’d never found her physically lacking in any way whatsoever, he had a feeling that she’d consider pregnancy breasts a bonus.

The truth was, there was quite a lot different about Molly today, and it wasn’t just her breasts or the swell of her midsection. Her hair seemed thicker somehow, curls a man could lose his hands in if he ventured to touch them. And her skin, always smooth and clear, seemed somehow purified, bright, like a light had been switched on inside her and was radiating out from every pore on her face, her neck, her arms. A trickle of perspiration ran down between her collarbone and disappeared into the new crevice between her suddenly lush breasts, and Adam felt his own upper lip grow damp in response.

He blinked.

For years, he’d had physical reactions to Molly. A man would have to be blind and deaf and one hundred percent oblivious not to be affected by her in any way. But the reaction was different now, stronger, needier, now that he was faced with the softer, more feminine, more vulnerable Molly. The woman that he was about to marry and live with for a year.

He swallowed and waited for her to speak, but she didn’t appear to know what to say next, either, so they stood regarding each other in silence.

He saw her eyes travel down to his shoulders, down his torso, all the way down to his beat-up sneakers and back up again. Her neutral expression didn’t change, and Adam supposed that was a plus. She could have curled her lip in disgust, thinking, This lazy, unmotivated guy who makes me mental is going to save my career?

It’s you who doesn’t understand me, Adam thought back at her. You don’t know why I am the way I am because I never told you. I never told you everything about my father because I don’t talk about that, ever, with anyone.

But, he continued in his mind, I will rescue you. I will be the hero because I have a feeling this is the only time in your life that you ever needed one.

“Want to see the house?” Molly asked, and Adam was startled at the subject change before he realized it wasn’t one, that they hadn’t been really communicating and that his assurances to her were still only in his head.

“Sure,” he said, and allowed her to lead him inside. “What were you planting?”

“Mums.”

“That’s appropriate. Mums for a new mum. If, you know, you were British.”

Molly chuckled at the weak joke and ushered him through her front door.

The last time he’d been to Molly’s Danbury Way home, she’d just moved in and there were neatly taped, unpacked boxes stacked in almost every corner. Now the boxes were gone and every room was vibrant with color and style—ruby and saffron pillows piled on the sofa, tiny bud vases on end tables sprouting pussy willows, shaggy, ropey throw rugs on the shining wood floors. A stranger would instantly know that Molly paid obsessive attention to the smallest details, and that this house was a manifestation of a longtime dream of how a home should be. Molly’s sweeping hand gesture as they entered the warm living room, the sunny kitchen and the flowery bathroom, conveyed her pride in her hard work.

In all the rooms—except one.

At the top of the stairs, next to her bedroom, one door remained shut.

“What’s in here?” Adam inquired, opening the door.

“Oh,” Molly said, “that’s the nursery.”

Not that you could tell. The walls were a flawless white, the window covered only with open blinds. Early-evening light angled in between the slats, illuminating the bereft emptiness of the rest of the room.

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