When she finally heard West’s car in the gravel driveway outside, she was seized by a moment of terror. This wasn’t just any trip to the doctor they were embarking on. This was something huge. This was the thing Soleil had been avoiding ever since she’d first learned she was pregnant.
She’d been lying to herself all this time, convinced that somehow the pregnancy, and the baby, belonged to her alone. Now she had to face the truth-West was going to be a big part of her life from here on out, whether she liked it or not.
She heard the vehicle stop out front and a door shut. She barely had time to check herself in the mirror before hurrying out the door. West was a few feet from the SUV.
He smiled and said hello.
“I could drive if you want,” she said.
He patted the hood of the Toyota Highlander. “Great gas mileage. I’ll drive.”
He opened the passenger door for her. She climbed in, then dug a package of saltines out of her purse for emergency motion-sickness use.
“Cracker?” She offered the package to West as he got in the driver’s side.
“No, thanks. You still get morning sickness?”
“No, but I do get carsick sometimes. I probably won’t, but crackers seem to head it off at the pass.”
He drove toward the main road. “So have you seen an ultrasound of the baby before?”
“Once, at twelve weeks. It looked like a tiny alien with a heartbeat.”
“Do they give you a photo or anything to keep?”
“Sure,” she said. “I bet they’ll give a copy to each of us.”
Their baby now. Not hers alone, but theirs.
She watched him sideways, a little surprised how quickly he’d gone from shock and awe to asking for baby pictures.
“So…um, do we get to find out the sex of the baby?”
“If we want to.”
“Do we want to?”
We?
Do we want to?
She popped a cracker into her mouth and chewed furiously as her freak-out quotient shot through the roof of the vehicle.
“I’m not really sure what I want to do. I mean, a surprise is fun, I guess, but part of me is dying to know.”
“Okay, well, it’s up to you. I’ll go with whatever you want.”
Awfully diplomatic of him.
“Have you thought about names at all?” he asked.
Soleil recalled her earlier fear about his naming preferences and popped a second cracker in her mouth. Why hadn’t she thought to bring some seltzer water, too?
“I have a few ideas.”
He glanced over at her. “Care to share them?”
“Maybe later. I’m feeling a little carsick right now.”
“Should I pull over?”
“No, no, that’s okay. The crackers are helping.”
“If it’s a girl, I’ve always liked my mom’s name, Julia.”
Of course he did.
She tried not to visibly wince at how right her fears had been. West was doing exactly what she thought he’d do-barging right in and taking over the whole baby-preparation process as if gearing up for battle. Leaving no detail to chance.
Julia was a lovely name. And a lovely woman. But Soleil wasn’t exactly ready to have this kind of lovey-dovey-couple discussion with a man she didn’t love.
“Not that I’m saying we should use that name. I really haven’t ever thought about what I’d name a kid, frankly.”
“Okay,” she said with another stab of guilt over her lateness in telling him he was about to be a father.
“How about your mom? What’s her name?”
“My mom?”
Naming a baby girl after Soleil’s mother wouldn’t be so different from naming her after a barracuda.
“Anne,” she finally said. “Her name is Anne.”
“You know, you’ve never told me about your mother, or any of your family.”
Yeah, it hadn’t exactly come up when they were sweating and rolling around in bed together.
Ahead, the road curved through a valley between pale yellow hills that bulged like pregnant bellies against the horizon. The sky had mercifully turned blue again today, a clear crystalline blue that promised warm weather. So much easier to focus on than the circumstances of her life.
“Hello? Don’t want to talk about your family?”
“Not really,” she said, staring at a herd of cattle on a distant hillside.
“I understand. But it might be weird if I don’t know anything about my own kid’s grandparents.”
“Anne Bishop,” Soleil said. “That’s my mom. She’s a poet.”
“Wait, you mean like the Anne Bishop? The one I had to study in college?”
“That would be her.”
“Wow. I didn’t realize.”
“When I went to school at Berkeley, there was a whole class devoted to her work.”
“Did you take it?”
“Hell, no.”
“Are you close to her?”
“Close…isn’t exactly what I’d call us. I mean, we tend to butt heads a lot. We’re frighteningly similar people, both way too headstrong and stubborn.”
“You? Headstrong and stubborn? No way.” His wry smile betrayed his earnest tone, and Soleil chuckled.
“I know it’s hard to believe.”
“What about your father? Were your parents married?”
“My dad is a civil-rights attorney. My mom cheated on him when I was a kid, and they split up. But they were so different, I don’t think they’d have survived even without the affair.”
“Different how?”
Soleil laughed at the absurdity of her parents together. “My dad was a Black Panther for a while in the seventies. Having a white wife didn’t exactly fit with his radical leanings back then.”
“Oh.”
“Oddly enough, my parents gave me plenty of reason to swear off interracial relationships.”
West’s eyebrows shot up. “I don’t understand…If you’re half black and half white, which race are you swearing off?”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “Touché. My experience going through the world with light brown skin is, people tend to classify me as black, African-American, whatever you want to call me, and that’s how I identify myself.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“No, it doesn’t totally make sense, but it’s the way the world works.”
And the one time she broke her own rule and let herself fall hard, she’d gotten her heart shattered by a guy who didn’t have the balls to defy his ass-backward white family and stay with her.
“So where does that leave us?”
She shrugged. “I guess the universe has a few lessons to teach me about how we’re all a rainbow of people or some crap like that.”
“Are you close to your father at all?”
“Sadly, no. He moved to Chicago after the split. He’s the type who lives and breathes his work. So it’s hard to develop the distance father-daughter thing.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay. If he’d stuck around, my mom probably would have killed him. So he saved her a prison sentence. He’s a good guy, if absorbed in his life.”
Soleil’s motion sickness hadn’t completely disappeared, so she fixed her eyes forward on the horizon as she ate another cracker.
She normally reserved discussing the family for guys she was really serious about…which was why she’d never talked to West about her parents before. And yet, whether she’d intended to be serious about him or not, they were on their way to see their baby together for the first time.
Just like a real couple.
Wasn’t this about as real as it got?
The truth of their situation struck Soleil again, and a cold sweat broke out on her face. She dug another cracker out of the package and ate it as if it would save her life.