“Don’t you think I’m trying to quiet her down?” she barked. “Deal with Elliot!”
Chastised, the man bent down toward his son, who was kicking and pounding the floor, throwing the mother of all temper tantrums.
“Stop that screaming right now!” the husband said sternly, shaking his finger.
Oh yeah, Jeremy thought. Like that’s going to do it.
Elliot, meanwhile, was turning purple as he writhed on the floor.
By that point, even Lexie had stopped browsing and turned her attention to the couple. It was, Jeremy thought, sort of like staring at a woman who mowed her lawn in her bikini, the kind of spectacle impossible to ignore. The baby screamed, Elliot screamed, the wife screamed at the father to do something, the father screamed back that he was trying.
A crowd had gathered, ringing the happy family. The women seemed to be watching them with a mixture of thankfulness and pity: thankful that it wasn’t happening to them, but knowing—most likely from experience—exactly what the young couple was going through. The men, on the other hand, seemed to want nothing more than to get as far away from the noise as possible.
Elliot banged his head on the floor and began to scream even louder.
“Let’s just go!” the mother finally snapped.
“Don’t you think that’s what I’m trying to do?” the father barked.
“Pick him up.”
“I’m trying!” he shouted in exasperation.
Elliot wanted no part of his father. As his father finally grabbed him, Elliot wiggled like an angry snake. His head flailed from side to side, and his legs never stopped moving. Beads of sweat began to form on his father’s forehead, and he was grimacing with the effort. Elliot, on the other hand, seemed to be getting larger, a mini Hulk expanding with rage.
Somehow the parents were able to get moving, weighed down with shopping bags, pushing the stroller, and managing to keep hold of both children. The crowd parted as if Moses were approaching the Red Sea, and the family finally vanished from sight, the slowly fading wails the only evidence they’d ever been there.
The crowd began to disperse. Jeremy and Lexie, however, stood frozen in place.
“Those poor people,” said Jeremy, suddenly wondering if this was what his life would be like in a couple of years.
“You’re telling me,” Lexie agreed, as if fearful of the same thing.
Jeremy continued to stare, listening as the wailing finally ceased. The family must have left the store.
“Our child will never throw a tantrum like that,” Jeremy announced.
“Never.” Consciously or subconsciously, Lexie had placed her hand on her belly. “That definitely wasn’t normal.”
“And the parents didn’t seem to have any idea what they were doing,” Jeremy said. “Did you see him trying to talk to his son? Like he was in the boardroom?”
“Ridiculous.” Lexie nodded. “And the way they were snapping at each other? Kids can sense the tension. No wonder the parents couldn’t control them.”
“It’s like they had no idea what to do.”
“I don’t think they did.”
“How could they not?”
“Maybe they’re just too caught up in their own lives to take enough time with their children.”
Jeremy, still frozen in place, watched the last of the crowd vanish. “It definitely wasn’t normal,” he offered again.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
Okay, so they were deluding themselves. Deep down, Jeremy knew it, Lexie knew it, but it was easier to pretend that they would never be confronted with a situation like the one they’d just witnessed. Because they were going to be more prepared. More dedicated. Kinder and more patient. More loving.
And the child . . . well, she would thrive in the environment he and Lexie would create. There was no doubt about that. As an infant, she’d sleep through the night; as a toddler, she would delight with her early vocabulary and above average motor skills. She would maneuver the minefields of adolescence with aplomb, stay away from drugs, and frown on R-rated movies. By the time she left home, she would be polite and well mannered, she would have received high enough grades to be accepted to Harvard, become an all-American in swimming, and still would have found enough time during the summers to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity.
Jeremy clung to the fantasy until his shoulders slumped. Despite having zero experience in the parenting department, he knew it couldn’t be that easy. Besides, he was getting way ahead of himself.
An hour later, they were sitting in the back of a cab, stuck in traffic, on the way to Queens. Lexie was thumbing through a recently purchased copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting as Jeremy watched the world beyond the windows. It was their last night in New York—he’d brought Lexie up to meet his family—and his parents were planning a small get-together at their home in Queens. Small, of course, was a relative term; with five brothers and their wives and nineteen nieces and nephews, the house would be packed, as it often was. Even though Jeremy was looking forward to it, he couldn’t quite get his mind off the couple they’d just seen. They’d seemed so . . . normal. Aside from the exhaustion, that is. He wondered whether he and Lexie would end up that way or whether they’d somehow be spared.
Maybe Alvin had been right. Partially, anyway. Though he adored Lexie—and he was sure he did, or he wouldn’t have proposed—he couldn’t claim to really know her. They simply hadn’t had time for that, and the more he thought about it, the more he believed that it would have been nice for him and Lexie to have had a chance to be a regular couple for a while. He’d been married before, and he knew it took time to learn how to live with another person. To get used to the quirks, so to speak. Everyone had them, but until you really knew someone, they tended to be hidden. He wondered what Lexie’s were. For instance, what if she slept with one of those green masks that were supposed to keep wrinkles at bay? Would he really be happy waking up and seeing that every morning?
“What are you thinking about?” Lexie asked.
“Huh?”
“I asked what you’re thinking about. You have a funny expression on your face.”
“It’s nothing.”
She stared at him. “Big nothing, or nothing-nothing?”
He turned to face her, frowning. “What’s your middle name?”
Over the next few minutes, Jeremy went through the series of questions Alvin had proposed and learned the following: Her middle name was Marin; she had majored in English; her best friend in college was named Susan; purple was her favorite color; she preferred whole wheat; she liked watching Trading Spaces; she thought Jane Austen was fabulous; and she would, in fact, turn thirty-two on September 13.
So there.
He leaned back in his seat, satisfied, as Lexie continued to thumb through the book. She wasn’t actually reading it, he figured, just skimming passages here and there in hopes of getting some sort of head start. He wondered if she had done something similar whenever she had to study in college.
As Alvin had implied, there really was a lot about her that he didn’t know. But at the same time, there was a great deal he did know. An only child, she’d been raised in Boone Creek, North Carolina. Her parents had been killed in an automobile accident when she was young, and she had been raised by her maternal grandparents, Doris and . . . and . . . He decided he’d have to ask about that. Anyway, she’d gone to college at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, been in love with a guy named Avery, and had actually lived in New York City for a year, where she’d interned at the NYU library. Avery ended up cheating on her, and she went back home and became the head librarian in Boone Creek, as her mother had been before she’d passed away. Some time later, she’d fallen for someone she referred to vaguely as Mr. Renaissance, but he’d left town without looking back. Since then she’d led a quiet life, dating the local deputy sheriff now and then, until Jeremy came along. And oh yeah: Doris—who owned a restaurant in Boone Creek—also claimed to have psychic powers, including the ability to predict the sex of babies, which was how Lexie knew their baby would be a girl.
All of which, he admitted, everyone in Boone Creek also knew. But did they also know that she tucked her hair behind her ears whenever she got nervous? Or that she was a wonderful cook? Or that when she needed a break, she liked to retreat to a cottage near the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, where her parents had been married? Or that in addition to being both intelligent and beautiful, with violet eyes, a slightly exotic, oval face, and dark hair, she had seen right through his ham-fisted attempts to charm her into the bedroom? He liked the fact that Lexie didn’t let him get away with anything, spoke her mind, and stood up to him when she thought he was in error. Somehow, she was able to do those things while still projecting a charm and femininity that was underscored by a sultry southern accent. Add in the fact that she was downright stunning in tight jeans, and Jeremy had fallen head over heels.
And as for him? What could she say she knew about Jeremy? Most of the basics, he thought. That he’d grown up in Queens as the youngest of six in an Irish-Italian family and that he’d once intended to become a professor of mathematics but realized he had a knack for writing and ended up becoming a columnist for Scientific American, where he often debunked the allegedly supernatural. That he’d been married years earlier to a woman named Maria, who eventually left him after they’d made numerous trips to a fertility clinic and were finally told by a doctor that Jeremy was medically unable to father a child. That he’d spent too many years afterward trolling the bars and dating countless women, trying to avoid serious relationships, as if subconsciously knowing he couldn’t be a good husband. That at the age of thirty-seven, he’d gone to Boone Creek to investigate the regular appearance of ghostly lights in the town cemetery in the hope of landing a guest commentator gig on Good Morning America but found that he spent most of his time thinking about Lexie. They’d spent four enchanting days together followed by a heated argument, and though he’d headed back to New York, he’d realized that he couldn’t imagine a life without her and had returned to prove it to her. In exchange, she had placed his hand on her belly, and he finally became a true believer—at least when it came to the miracle of pregnancy and a chance at fatherhood, something he’d never considered possible.
He smiled, thinking it was a pretty good story. Maybe even good enough for a novel.
The point was, as much as she’d tried to resist his charms, she’d fallen for him, too. Glancing over at her, he wondered why. Not that he considered himself repulsive, but what was it that drew two people together? In the past, he’d written numerous columns about the principle of attraction and could discuss the role of pheromones, dopamine, and biological instincts, but none of this came close to explaining the way he felt about Lexie. Or presumably the way she felt about him. Nor could he explain it. All he knew was that they fit somehow and that he felt as if he’d spent most of his life traveling a path that led inexorably to her.
It was a romantic vision, even poetic, and Jeremy had never been prone to poetic thoughts. Maybe that was another reason he knew she was the one. Because she’d opened his heart and mind to new feelings and ideas. But whatever the reason, as he rode in the car with his lovely bride-to-be, he was content with whatever might happen to them in the future.
He reached for her hand.
Did it really matter, after all, that he was abandoning his home in New York City and putting his future career plans on hold to move to the middle of nowhere? Or that he was about to embark on a year in which he had to plan a wedding, set up their household, and prepare for a baby?
How hard could it be?
Two
He’d proposed at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day.
He knew it was a cliché, but weren’t all proposals something of a cliché? There were, after all, only so many ways he could do it. He could do it sitting, standing, kneeling, or lying down. He could be either eating or not eating, at home or someplace else, with or without candles, wine, sunrises, sunsets, or anything that might strike someone as vaguely romantic. Somewhere, sometime, Jeremy knew that some guy had already done it all, so there wasn’t much sense in worrying whether she would be disappointed. He knew, of course, that some men went all out—skywriting, billboards, the ring found during a romantic scavenger hunt. But he was pretty sure that Lexie wasn’t the type to require total originality. Besides, the view of Manhattan was breathtaking, and as long as he remembered to hit the highlights—why he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, the presentation of the ring, popping the question—Jeremy figured he had it pretty much covered.
It wasn’t as if it were a total surprise, after all. They hadn’t specifically talked about it beforehand, but the fact that he was moving to Boone Creek, coupled with various bits of we-type conversation in the last few weeks, had left no doubt that it was coming. As in, We should go shopping for a bassinet to put by our bed, or We should visit your parents. Since Jeremy hadn’t contradicted those statements, a case could be made that Lexie had already sort of proposed to him.
Still, even if it hadn’t come as a complete surprise, Lexie was obviously thrilled. Her first instinct, after wrapping her arms around him and kissing him, was to call Doris to let her know the news, a conversation that lasted twenty minutes. He supposed he should have expected that, not that he minded. Despite his outer calm, the fact that she’d actually agreed to spend the rest of her life with him was overwhelming.
Now, nearly a week later, they were in a cab on the way to his parents’ house, and he noted the ring on her finger. Being engaged, as opposed to dating, was the Next Big Step, one that most men, Jeremy included, rather enjoyed. He could, for instance, do certain things with Lexie that were pretty much off-limits to anyone else in the world. Like kissing. For example, he could lean across the backseat right now and kiss her. More than likely she wouldn’t be offended. She’d probably even be pleased. Try that with a stranger and see how far it got you, Jeremy thought. The whole concept left him feeling rather good about what he’d done.