“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
