Not My Daughter

Chapter 3

"I'm pregnant."

"Cute," Kate Mello told her youngest and proceeded to pour dry macaroni into a pot of boiling water. "Lissie?" she yelled upstairs to her second youngest, "when are you going? I need that milk." She stirred the macaroni and said more to herself than to Mary Kate, who stood beside her at the stove, "Why is it that I'm always out of milk lately?"

"I'm serious, Mom. I'm pregnant."

Holding the lid in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, Kate simply touched her forehead to Mary Kate's and smiled. "We agreed that you had the flu."

"It's not going away."

"Then it's lactose intolerance," Kate said, setting the lid on the pot. "You're the one who's drinking me out of milk. Lissie? 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 multigrain bread, please."

"Alex hates multigrain," 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 important. 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 pawn 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?"

"About being pregnant?" The girl quieted. "I wouldn't lie about something like that."

No, she wouldn't. She was an honest girl, a bright girl, perhaps the most gifted of Kate's five kids, and she had a future. She was planning to marry a doctor and be a college professor herself.

"I mean," Mary Kate went on, speaking faster now, clearly sensing her mother's horror, "you always said 'the more the merrier,' that a noisy home makes you happy, that you'd have had more children if we'd been richer."

"Right, but we're not," Kate stated bluntly. "Your father and I barely finished paying off our own college loans in time for your brothers to start college, and now with the twins there and you next year-but you won't be going to college if you have a baby, will you? How can you be an English professor without a college degree-without a graduate degree?"

"I'll get one. It just may take a little longer."

Kate couldn't believe what her smart daughter was saying. "May just take a little longer?"

"And in the meantime I'll have Jacob's baby."

"Where? How? Jacob's dad drives a PC truck, and his mom teaches first grade. They're as strapped as we are. If Jacob loves you like he says, he's going to want to be with you and the baby, but his parents can't support the three of you."

"I'd never ask them to," Mary Kate said. "Besides, I don't want to marry Jacob yet. I want to stay here."

"So we can support you and the baby?"

"Fine," the girl said. "Then I'll move out."

Kate grabbed her daughter's shoulders. "You will not move out, Mary Kate. That isn't an option."

"Neither is abortion."

"I agree, but there are other choices."

"Like adoption? I'm not giving my baby to someone else." She plucked at her sweater. "See this? It was Sara's, and these jeans were Lissie's, but this baby is mine." The hand on her middle was pale but protective.

Yes, Kate acknowledged. Mary Kate often got clothes from the twins-okay, usually got clothes from the twins-but didn't large families do that? She was a hand-me-down child in everything but love. Kate had always thought that would make it okay. "Your sisters outgrew those things," she argued. "They were good clothes."

"That's not the point, Mom. This baby's mine."

"Just like you and your brothers and sisters are mine," said Kate. "When I was a kid, I dreamed of being a vet. I love animals. But I loved your father more, and then you kids came along really fast, and I loved you all so much that I wanted to be a full-time mom, which was lucky, because there was so much to do for the five of you that our house was chaotic even without my having an outside job. And by the time you all were in school, we didn't have the money for me to train to be a vet. Do you think I work just for kicks?"

Mary Kate was subdued. "You love your work."

"Yes, but I couldn't do it if it didn't pay. We need every extra cent."

"My baby won't cost much," the girl said meekly.

Kate took her daughter's shoulders again, holding on to a dream that was fading fast. "It isn't the money," she pleaded softly. "I want things to be easier for you when you have kids. I want your children to have rooms of their own. I don't want you to have to choose between music lessons or ballet because you can't pay for both."

The door opened and Kate looked up, fully expecting it to be Lissie. But it was Will. Will, who had worked his way from the PC shipping dock to foreman of the department, losing hair and gaining girth, but remaining Kate's rock.

She always felt a weight lift from her shoulders when Will came home, but her relief had never been greater than it was now. "Here's your dad. Will, we have something to discuss."

Five blocks away, Sunny Barros was nowhere near as relieved when her husband came home from work. "She's what?" Dan asked her. Their daughter stood nearby, but he was looking at Sunny, who was absolutely beside herself.

"Pregnant," Sunny mouthed. She couldn't say the word again.

"Jessica?" he asked and turned to the girl. "Is this true?"

She nodded.

"Who's the boy?"

"You don't know him, Dad."

Dan looked at his wife. "Who is he?"

Sunny shook her head and pressed her mouth shut. It was either that or scream.

"Mom's angry," Jessica said calmly. "I've been telling her that it's fine. People have been having babies since Adam and Eve. She's convinced it's the end of the world."

"Excuse me, Jessica," Sunny cried, but stopped when her ten-year-old daughter skipped into the room. "Darcy." She pointed upstairs. "Violin practice. Ten more minutes."

The child looked wounded. "I'm just saying hi to Daddy. Hi, Dad."

Sunny pointed again, waiting only until the child left before eyeing Jessica. "Tell him what else you told me." She looked at Dan. "Jessica planned this."

"Planned to get pregnant?"

"Decided she wanted a baby," Sunny specified. If the girl had gone looking for the one thing that would dismantle the tidy life Sunny had so carefully crafted, she had found it.

"Is this true, Jessica?" Dan asked.

Jessica eyed him levelly. A tall girl with long brown hair and Dan's verbal skill, she spoke with confidence. "Bringing a child into the world is the most important thing a person can do. I want to leave my mark."

"At seventeen?"

"Age doesn't matter. It's what's inside. I'll be the best mom ever."

"At seventeen," Dan repeated. Looking at Sunny, he scratched his head. "Where did this come from?"

Sunny didn't answer. Folding her arms against the coming storm, she waited. Dan was smart, well beyond the contracts he negotiated for Perry & Cass. He saw cause and effect, and was eminently predictable. Sunny had always loved that about him, but it was about to work against her.

To his credit, he considered other options first. Looking at Jessica again, he said, "Is it school pressure? Fear of college?"

Jessica smiled smugly. "My grades are great. That's one of the reasons I knew I could do this."

She had her father's brains-tenth in her class without much effort-but this had nothing to do with grades, or apparently with brains, Sunny decided. "Do you have any idea-" she began, but stopped when Darcy whipped back in.

"My lamp just blew out. It needs a new bulb."

"I'll replace it in a minute," Sunny said and turned her around. "Until then, use the overhead light."

"I don't like the overhead light."

"Use it," Sunny ordered and turned back to the others. "And there's another problem. What do we tell Darcy so that she doesn't do this herself in seven more years? This is the worst kind of example to set."

Dan held up a hand and returned to Jessica. "You talked about going to Georgetown."

"Percy State will do."

"Will do?" He lowered his voice. "Is it Adam?"

"Maybe. Maybe not."

"Jessica!" Sunny shouted.

Dan lifted his hand for quiet. "You are dating Adam, are you not?"

"I have been, but he isn't the love of my life."

"He has to marry you if he's the father of this baby," Sunny argued.

"I haven't said he's the father," the girl insisted. "Anyway, the donation of sperm doesn't make a man a father. Involvement does, and the father of this baby won't be involved. I'm raising it myself."

"Raising it yourself?" Dan asked. "That doesn't make sense."

"Maybe not to you and Mom. When everything in your world is as neat as this kitchen-"

"What's wrong with this kitchen?" Sunny asked in alarm. Their kitchen-their house-was larger than many in town, reflecting Dan's position as head of the PC legal department and Sunny's as manager of Home Goods. She had decorated every inch of the place herself and took pride in seasonal additions from the store, like the handblown glass bowl of pine cones on the table. Their kitchen reflected everything they had worked so hard to achieve. She hadn't expected an attack on this front.

"Nothing's wrong with the kitchen, Mom," Jessica replied serenely. "That's the problem. Nothing is out of place. Nothing clashes. Our lives are very, very organized." She looked at Dan, who looked at Sunny.

"Where is she getting this?" he asked, sounding mystified.

"Not from me," Sunny vowed, but she knew what was coming.

"From your mother?"

It was the only possible explanation. Sunny didn't have to study Jessica's cell tab to know that she talked with her grandmother often. The girl made no secret of it. She and Delilah had always gotten along, and no warning from Sunny could change that.

Delilah Maranthe was the embodiment of all Sunny had tried to escape. Her parents had been the eccentrics of the neighborhood, bent on doing their own thing. Born Stan and Donna, they went to court to become Samson and Delilah. They bought a house in suburbia and, under the guise of returning the property to its natural state, refused to mow the lawn. Ever. They spent weeks before Halloween baking cookies and rigging up elaborate electronics, though the local children were forbidden to visit. To Sunny's utter mortification, they appeared at her high school graduation dressed as graduates from the century before.

To this day they remained odd, and though some people found a benign charm in their behavior, Sunny did not. Had her parents ever been benign-had they had an ounce of caring or foresight-they wouldn't have saddled their children with silly names. What kind of mother named her child Sunshine? Sunny would have gone to court to change it herself if she hadn't been adamant against following in a single one of her parents' footsteps. And Buttercup? That was her older sister, who had simply shrugged it off and gone through life as Jane.

Sunny had been more vulnerable, suffering the taunts of schoolmates, and though no one in Zaganack knew her as Sunshine, the fear of discovery haunted her. She had raised Jessica and her sister to be Normal with a capital N.

Now Jessica was pregnant, saying that sperm didn't make a man a father and that their lives were too ordinary-and Dan was looking at Sunny like it was her fault. But how could she control Delilah Maranthe? "It's not enough that I had to escape my mother when I was a child, but now she's corrupted my daughter!"

"This has nothing to do with Delilah," Jessica insisted, which irritated Sunny all the more.

"See, Dan? Not Grandma. Delilah." She turned on her daughter. "A grandmother shouldn't be called by her first name. Why can't you call her Grandma?"

"Because she forbids me to. She just isn't a grandma."

"There's our problem," Sunny told Dan.

"Why are you always so down on her?" Jessica argued. "Delilah happens to be one of the most exciting people I know. Face it, Mom. We are totally predictable."

"I have a job other people would die for," Sunny reasoned.

"We follow every rule to the letter."

"I'm respected in this town."

Jessica raised her voice. "I want to stand out!"

"Well, you've done it now. What are people going to think?"

"They'll think it's fine, Mom, because it isn't just me. It's Lily and Mary Kate, too."

Sunny gasped. "What?"