Soon, please?’
‘I’m drinking milk,’ said Mary Kate, ‘because that’s what pregnant women do.’
‘You are not a pregnant woman,’ Kate informed her daughter and reached for her wallet when Lissie appeared. There wasn’t much in it; money disappeared even faster than milk. She found a twenty among the singles, and handed it over. ‘A gallon of milk, a dozen eggs and two loaves of multi-grain bread, please.’
‘Alex hates multi-grain,’ Lissie reminded her as she pulled on her jacket.
Kate put the car keys in her hand. ‘Alex is twenty-one. If he hates what I buy, he can get his own apartment and buy what he likes. Oh, and if there’s money left over, will you get some apples?’ As Lissie left, she handed Mary Kate a stack of plates. ‘Eight tonight. Mike is bringing a friend.’
‘I conceived eight weeks ago,’ Mary Kate said, taking the plates.
Kate studied her daughter. She was pale, but she was always pale. Same with looking frail. The poor thing had the delicate features of an unnamed forebear, but her hair was all Kate – sandy and thick, wild in a way that the child never was. Kate tacked hers up with bamboo knitting needles. Mary Kate tied hers in a ponytail that exploded behind her, making her face look even smaller.
‘You’re not pregnant, honey,’ Kate assured her. ‘You’re only seventeen, you’re on the pill, and Jacob wants to be a doctor. That’s a lot of years before you two can even get married.’
‘I know,’ Mary Kate said with a spurt of enthusiasm, ‘but by then I’ll be older and getting pregnant will be harder. Now’s the time for me to have a baby.’
Kate felt the girl’s forehead. ‘No fever. You can’t be delirious.’
‘Mom—’
‘Mom, did Lissie leave?’ This from Kate’s third daughter who, not seeing her twin, snatched a cell phone from the clutter on the kitchen table.
‘That’s mine, Sara,’ Kate protested. ‘I’m low on minutes.’
‘This isn’t a social call, Mom. I need tampons.’
‘I don’t,’ Mary Kate said in a small voice, but with Sara calling Lissie and Mike choosing that minute to duck in and ask if he could have two friends for dinner, Kate barely heard her.
‘It’s only mac ’n cheese,’ she cautioned him.
‘Only?’ her twenty-year-old son echoed. ‘You said it was lobster mac ’n cheese.’
‘Is that why they’re coming?’
‘Definitely. Your lobster mac is famous. The guys hit me up every Wednesday morning for an invitation.’
‘And if your uncle decides to pull his traps on Friday?’
‘They’ll switch to Friday. So two is okay?’
‘Two’s okay,’ Kate said, and remarked to Mary Kate when Mike and Sara were both gone, ‘Lucky the catch is up and the price is down.’
‘I’m trying to tell you something, Mom. This is import ant. I stopped taking the pill.’
Hearing that, Kate turned. Her daughter looked serious. ‘Are you and Jacob cooling it?’
‘No. I just decided I wanted a baby. Did you know that a woman is more fertile right after she goes off the pill? I haven’t even told Jacob yet. I wanted you to be the first to know.’
Something about her serious look gave Kate pause. ‘Mary Kate? You’re not joking?’
‘No.’
‘Pregnant?’
‘I keep doing tests, and they’re all positive.’
‘For how long?’
‘A while. I mean, I would have told you sooner, only I wanted to make sure. But I’m really on top of this, Mom. I bought books, and I’m getting more info online. They have a support group for teens, but I don’t really need that. I already have a support group.’
Kate frowned. ‘Who?’
‘Well…well, for starters, my family. I mean, we normally have seven for dinner. Tonight it was eight, and now nine. What’s one more?’
Kate would have sent Mary Kate to the back porch for another folding chair, because that was what one more meant in their cramped dining room, if she hadn’t been struggling to process what the girl had said. ‘Is this true?’
‘Yes. Anyway, you love kids. Didn’t you have five in five years?’
‘Not by design,’ Kate said weakly. ‘They just started to come and didn’t stop.’ Not until Will had had a vasectomy, though that wasn’t something they often discussed with the kids. They would have discussed abstinence, if they believed there was a chance the kids would listen. More realistically, they talked up responsibility. ‘But wait, back up, I was twenty-one when I had my first child, and I was married.’
Mary Kate didn’t seem to hear. ‘So now this is the next generation. I like being the first one of us to have kids. I’m always last in everything else.’
‘The decision to have a child should involve both parents,’ Kate said. ‘You need to ask Jacob before you do anything rash.’
‘Oh, Jacob is just so serious sometimes. He would have said no, and he’d have given lots of reasons that made sense, but sometimes you have to just go with your gut. Remember Disney World five years ago? You piled Dad and us in the car and drove us to Florida in the middle of winter, and we didn’t have hotel reservations or anything, but your gut told you the trip would be good.’
‘That was a trip, Mary Kate. This is a baby. A baby is for life.’
‘But I’ll be a good mother,’ Mary Kate insisted. ‘Last summer was such an eye-opener – seeing what those moms did? Like, no patience with their kids, wanting to palm them off on us while they sat way off at the other end of the beach. I’ll never do that with my baby. If it’s a boy, it’ll be a little Jacob. That would be awesome.’
Kate was speechless. The quietest of her five, the most passive and deferential, Mary Kate was rarely this effusive. And what had she just said? ‘A little Jacob?’
Mary Kate nodded. ‘I won’t know the sex for a little while, and I know it could be a girl…’ Her voice trailed off.
Bewildered, Kate looked around. The kitchen was small. The whole house was small. ‘Where would we keep a baby?’
‘In my room. Co-sleeping is big right now. By the time my baby outgrows that, Alex will probably be out of the house and maybe Mike, too, so there’ll be more room. And then once Jacob graduates from medical school—’
‘Jacob hasn’t graduated from high school,’ Kate yelped, struck again by the absurdity of the discussion. ‘Mary Kate, are you telling me the truth?’
