“Lex? Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding as if she had a bad cold. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“That’s okay . . . no problem. What is it?”
“Nothing.”
It sounded as though she’d said “nudding.” He watched her, still unsure what was going on. The fact that he was staring didn’t stop her from crying, and she sniffled again. “I’m just sad,” she explained.
“Can I get you anything? Pastrami? Tomato soup?”
She blinked through her tears, as if trying to figure out if she’d heard him right. “Why on earth would you think I want pastrami?”
“No reason,” he said. Sliding closer, he slipped his arm around her. “So you’re not hungry, though? No strange cravings?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I just feel sad.”
“And you don’t know why?”
All at once she broke down again, big heaving cries that left her shoulders shaking. Jeremy felt his throat constrict. There was nothing worse than the sound of a woman crying, and he found himself wanting to comfort her. “There, there,” he murmured. “It’ll be okay, whatever it is.”
“No, it won’t,” she blubbered. “It’s not going to be okay. It’s never going to be okay.”
“What is it?”
It took a long time before she was able to regain some semblance of control. Finally, she faced him with red, puffy eyes.
“I killed my cat,” she announced.
There were a lot of things he’d expected her to say. Perhaps she was overwhelmed by the changes in her life, for instance. Or maybe, in the surge of hormones, she had found herself missing her parents. He had no doubt her emotional outburst had to do with the pregnancy, but this was not the sort of comment he could ever have anticipated. All he could do was stare.
“Your cat?” he asked at last.
She nodded and reached for another tissue, talking through her sobs. “I . . . killed . . . it.”
“Huh,” Jeremy said. Frankly, he didn’t know what else to say. He’d never seen a cat around her place, never heard her talk about a cat. Didn’t even know she liked cats.
Meanwhile, she went on, her voice still raspy. He could tell by her body language that she’d been hurt by his comment. “That’s . . . all you can . . . say?”
He was at a loss. Should he agree with her? You really shouldn’t have killed the cat. Should he empathize? That’s okay. The cat deserved it. Should he support her? I still think you’re a good person, even if you did kill that cat. At the same time, he was frantically searching his memory, trying to figure out if there actually had been a cat, and if so, what its name was. Or how on earth he’d gone this long without ever seeing it. But in a burst of inspiration, the perfect response leapt to mind.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened,” he said, trying his best to sound soothing.
It seemed to be exactly what she’d needed to hear, thank goodness, and her sobs began to subside. Again, she blew her nose.
“I was doing laundry and emptied the dryer to add the next load,” she said. “I knew he liked warm places, but I never bothered to check inside before I closed the door. I killed Boots.”
Boots, he thought. Got it. The cat was named Boots. Still, it didn’t make the rest of the story any clearer.
“When did this happen?” he tried again.
“Over the summer.” She sighed. “While I was packing for Chapel Hill.”
“Oh, we’re talking about when you went to college,” he said, feeling triumphant.
She looked over at him, obviously confused and irritated. “Of course I am. What did you think I was talking about?”
Jeremy knew it was probably best not to answer. “I’m sorry for interrupting. Go on,” he said, doing his best to sound sympathetic.
“Boots was my baby,” she said, her voice soft. “He was abandoned, and I found him when he was just a kitten. All through high school, he slept with me in bed. He was so cute—reddish brown fur and white paws—and I knew that God had given him to me to protect him. And I did . . . until I locked him in the dryer.”
She reached for another tissue. “I guess that he crawled into the dryer when I wasn’t paying attention. He’d done that before, so I usually checked, but for whatever reason, I didn’t do it that day. I just loaded the wet clothes from the washer into the dryer, closed the door, and hit the button.” The tears started again as Lexie went on, her words broken. “I was downstairs . . . half an hour later . . . when I heard the . . . the . . . thunking . . . and when I went to check . . . I found him—”
She broke down completely then, leaning against Jeremy. Instinctively, he pulled her closer, murmuring words of support.
“You didn’t kill your cat,” he reassured her. “It was an accident.”
She sobbed even harder. “But . . . don’t you . . . see?”
“See what?”
“That . . . I’ll be a . . . terrible mother. I . . . I . . . locked my poor cat . . . in the dryer. . . .”
“I just held her and she kept on crying,” Jeremy said at lunch the next day. “No matter how much I assured her that she’d be a wonderful mother, she wouldn’t believe me. She cried for hours. There was nothing I could say or do to console her, but she finally nodded off to sleep. And when she woke up, she seemed fine.”
“That’s pregnancy,” Doris said. “It’s like a great big amplifier. Everything gets bigger—your body, your tummy, your arms. Emotions and memories, too. You just go crazy every now and then, and sometimes you do the strangest things. Things you’d never do in other circumstances.”
Doris’s comment conjured up the image of Lexie and Rodney holding hands, and for an instant he wondered whether to mention it. As quickly as the thought came, he tried to dismiss it.
Doris seemed to read his expression. “Jeremy? Are you okay?”
He shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “Just a lot on my mind these days.”
“About the baby?”
“About everything,” he said. “The wedding, the house. All of it. There’s so much to do. We’re closing on the house at the end of the month, and the only permit Gherkin could get was for the first weekend in May. There’s just a lot of stress these days.” He looked across the table at her. “Thanks for helping Lexie with the wedding plans, by the way.”
“No need to thank me. After our last conversation, I thought it was the least I could do. And there’s not that much to do, really. I’ll be making the cake and bringing some finger food for the outdoor reception, but other than that, there wasn’t much left once you got the permit. I’ll cover the picnic tables that morning, the florist will put some flowers out, and the photographer is good to go.”
“She told me she finally picked a dress.”
“She did. For Rachel, too, since she’s the maid of honor.”
“Does it hide Lexie’s tummy?”
Doris laughed. “That was her only stipulation. But don’t you worry, she’ll look beautiful—you can barely tell she’s pregnant. But I think people are beginning to suspect anyway.” She nodded toward Rachel, who was clearing another table. “I think she knows.”
“How would she know? Did you say anything?”
“No, of course not. But women can tell when other women are pregnant. And I’ve heard people whispering about it over lunch. Of course, it doesn’t help that Lexie’s been browsing through baby clothes at Gherkin’s store downtown. People notice things like that.”
“Lexie’s not going to be happy about it.”
“She won’t mind. Not in the long run, anyway. And besides, she didn’t really believe she’d even be able to keep it a secret this long.”
“Does that mean I can tell my family now?”
“I think,” Doris said slowly, “you’d better ask Lexie about that. She’s still worried that they won’t like her, especially with the wedding being so small. She feels bad about not being able to invite the whole clan.” She smiled. “That was her word, by the way, not mine.”
“It works,” Jeremy said. “They are a clan. But now it’ll be a manageable clan.”
When Doris reached for her glass, Rachel returned to their table with a pitcher of sweet tea. “Need a refill?”
“Thanks, Rach,” Jeremy said.
She poured. “Are you getting excited about the wedding?”
“Getting there. How’d shopping go with Lexie?”
“It was fun,” she said. “It was nice to get out of town for a while. But I’ll bet you can understand that.”
Sure I can, Jeremy thought. “Oh, by the way, I talked to Alvin and he said to say hello.”
“He did?”
“He said he’s looking forward to seeing you again.”
“Tell him hey from me, too.” She fiddled with her apron. “Do you two want some pecan pie? I think there’re still a few pieces left.”
“No thanks,” Jeremy said. “I’m stuffed.”
“None for me,” Doris said.
As Rachel headed toward the kitchen, Doris put her napkin on the table, returning her attention to Jeremy. “I walked through the house yesterday. It looks like it’s coming along.”
“Does it? I hadn’t noticed.”
“It’ll be done,” she reassured him, hearing his tone. “People may work at a slower pace down here, but it all gets done eventually.”
“I just hope it’s finished before the baby heads off to college. We just found out that there’s some termite damage.”
“What did you expect? It’s an old house.”
“It’s like the house in the movie The Money Pit. There’s always something else that needs to be fixed.”
“I could have told you that beforehand. Why do you think it had been on the market so long? And come on, no matter how much it costs, it’s still cheaper than anything in Manhattan, isn’t it?”
“It’s certainly more frustrating.”
Doris stared at him. “I take it you’re still not writing.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” she said, her voice soft. “You aren’t writing. That’s who you are; it’s how you define yourself. And if you can’t do it . . . well, it’s kind of like Lexie’s pregnancy in that it amplifies everything else.”
Doris was right, Jeremy decided. It wasn’t the cost of the new house, plans for the wedding, the baby, or the fact that he was still adjusting to life as a couple. Any stress he felt was due largely to the fact that he couldn’t write.
The day before, he’d sent off his next column, leaving only four prewritten columns left, and his editor at Scientific American had begun to leave messages on Jeremy’s cell phone, asking why Jeremy wasn’t bothering to keep in touch. Even Nate was beginning to get concerned; where he used to leave messages about the possibility of coming up with a story that might appeal to television producers, he now wondered whether Jeremy was working on anything at all.
At first, it had been easy to make excuses; both his editor and Nate understood how much had recently changed in his life. But when he offered the standard litany of excuses, even Jeremy realized they sounded exactly like that: excuses. Even so, he couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Why did his thoughts become jumbled every time he turned on the computer? Why did his fingers turn to mud? And why did it happen only when it came to writing something that might pay the bills?
See, that was the thing. Alvin e-mailed regularly; Jeremy could pound out a long response in only a few minutes. The same thing happened if his mother or father or brothers e-mailed, or if he had to write a letter, or if he wanted to take notes about something he found on the Internet. He could write about the shows on television, he could write about business or politics; he knew, because he’d tried. It was easy, in fact, to write just about anything . . . as long as it had nothing to do with topics he had any expertise in. In those instances, he simply went blank. Or worse, he felt as if he would never be able to do it again.
He suspected his problem was a lack of confidence. It was an odd feeling, one he hadn’t ever experienced before moving to Boone Creek.
He wondered if that was it. The move itself. That’s when the problem started; it wasn’t the house or the wedding plans or anything else. He’d been blocked from the time he’d rolled back into town, as if the choice to move here had come with a hidden cost. That suggested that he would be able to write in New York, however . . . but could he? He considered it, then shook his head. It didn’t matter, did it? He was here. In less than three weeks, on April 28, he’d close on the house and then head off to his bachelor party; a week later, on May 6, he’d be married. For better or worse, this was home now.
He glanced at Doris’s journal. How would he start a story about it? Not that he intended to, but just as an experiment. . . .
Pulling up a blank document, he began to think, his fingers poised on the keyboard. But for the next five minutes, his fingers didn’t move. There was nothing, nothing at all. He couldn’t even think of a way to begin.
He ran his hand through his hair, frustrated, wanting yet another break, wondering what to do. There was no way he was going to the house, he decided, since it would only put him in a worse mood. He decided instead to kill some time on the Internet. He heard the modem dial in, watched the screen load, and scanned the main page. Noting that he had two dozen new messages, he clicked on the mailbox.
Most of it was spam, and he deleted those messages without opening them; Nate had sent a message as well, asking if Jeremy had noticed any of the articles concerning a massive meteor shower in Australia. Jeremy responded that he’d written four columns about meteors in the past, one as recently as last year, but he thanked him for the idea.