“Merry Christmas!” Mac had on his gregarious expression. He must have borrowed it from Wendy, who tended to be the one making an elaborate holiday fuss at the door. Or on the patio. Or in the kitchen. Chloe looked past Mac for Wendy; she hadn’t seen her boss since her return from a conference earlier in the week. Mac stopped her, hands on her shoulders, barrel chest blocking her view. “Do I need to drag you under the mistletoe?”
“What’s gotten into you tonight?” she laughed, leaning in to kiss his cheek. “You’re like a right jolly old elf.”
“Ho ho ho,” he said. “And yes, I am. What did you expect?”
His aftershave lingered once he returned her kiss. Wendy was a lucky woman. “I don’t know. That you would be chasing down Penny to hang the mistletoe from her collar? That you’d interrupt your dancing to wave at me? You’re not normally so effusive.”
He looked perplexed, or maybe crestfallen.
“I don’t mean that in a bad way, you know I adore you just the way you are. But I feel like I’m in one of those alternate universe scenarios.”
He pulled her a little ways down the hallway towards the private areas of the house. “Are you telling me you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
He maybe thought his expectant look was an answer, or the way he half-gestured back towards his room.
“Did you...get juried on something? Book a show? Wendy usually tells me that stuff. I’m sorry if I missed it; I haven’t seen her in ages.”
His hand went to his scalp like he still had an afro to dig fingers into. “She hasn’t told you.”
“Now you’re intriguing me. Nope, nothing. What’s happened?”
Mac’s grin overwhelmed his face. “I get to tell you. She can’t stop me. Hang on, let’s go in the spare room so she won’t catch us.”
The man was in a madcap mood. “In your own house? Damn, Mac, you court trouble with every step.”
“Funny.”
“What if I’m spying for her? What if I’m taping this whole conversation?”
He snapped. “Great idea. Hold up.” Sitting her on a chair by the window, he fished out his phone and fiddled, presumably to set up a video of her.
“This is very odd.”
“I know. I never thought I’d get to tell anyone myself, and now you can’t pretend you didn’t know and let her have the honors. I’ll have proof. Smile, Chloe. You’re being recorded.”
“Merry Christmas to all,” she said, staring at his phone.
“Naw, it’s not about that. I mean, unless you want to start going on about Christmas miracles, but let’s be serious, it was a Thanksgiving miracle.”
Chloe’s office was full of certificates attesting to her intelligence. There was a cork board of babies she’d helped through the initial days and weeks of life so they could go on to thriving, active lives. And Mac’s unprecedented giddiness was anything but subtle. “I hope you’re due on August twentieth. You have to make me godmother if the baby and I share a birthday.”
The phone drooped. “Hey.”
She moved in for a hug, then turned the screen so it was filming her and Mac both. “For the record, baby to be, your dad is very bad at subtlety. But let’s make him happy. Hey there, DeAndre McCann, what’s new with you and Wendy these days?”
His face eclipsed hers on the screen. “We’re pregnant!”
“Congratulations! I can’t wait to meet the next member of your family. And I hope they’re born too large to fit into any of Penny’s outfits, because hand-me-downs from the family dog are not a dignified way to go.” She blew a kiss at the camera, stopped the recording, and returned the phone to Mac.
“Wendy will kill you when she sees that.”
She grinned. “I know. Wait until we’re in public, will you? Maybe it’ll be justifiable, but I still want witnesses.”
He peeked ostentatiously up and down the hall before ushering her out into the main crowd at the party.
Wendy met them as soon as they entered the living room, and burst into her hopping-happy laugh as soon as she spotted them. “You brat,” she told her husband, then hugged Chloe.
“Congrats,” she told Wendy, quiet in case the news wasn’t all over the place yet. By rights it shouldn’t be; Wendy was younger than Chloe, but still old enough for the complications of advanced maternal age. They ought to wait a few more weeks, but after the years of trying and their outsized exuberance, no one on the gambling boats would place bets on the news staying under either Wendy's or Mac’s Santa hats.
She glanced over Wendy's shoulder and saw Penny sitting up on her favorite ottoman, sporting her own miniature Santa hat. Hers was attached with a chin strap that almost engulfed the pup’s tiny face.
Wendy stopped squeezing her tight. “Don’t lecture me. All my levels are great. I feel fantastic. And so far, not one person we’ve told has asked how I’ll get a Mac-sized infant through my Wendy-sized frame, or said what a beautiful biracial baby it is destined to be.”
“Now there’s your Christmas miracle.”
“Tell me about it.”
She listened to Wendy's info dump on the unevenly combined topics of the conference and her pregnancy. When Lassiter started up, they headed outside to listen, making a game of guessing which other guests Mac had told. She offered to get Wendy gumbo.
“Oh, no. I’m not eating that.”
“Spice bothering you?”
“Not a bit of it. This baby is half Korean, it can handle the heat. But we had to get it from—cue your dramatic gasp here—the store. And I’m sure it’s fine, but this baby’s mom is all Korean, and I have my standards. It’s Gabe’s gumbo or nothing for me.”
Chloe bit her tongue. It was a good thing she wasn’t eating gumbo, or the pepper would sting on her incisor-inflicted wound. “Why didn’t Gabe make the gumbo?”
“He’s not here.”
She craned to see around the live oak separating her from his place. No lights, door closed. Not even the usual wreaths on the windows.
“Did he move out?” He couldn’t have moved out without Wendy telling her, never mind her oddness of the last months about him.
“No. His dad had a stroke last week, he headed up to stay there over the holidays.”
“Oh, hell. Is he okay? The dad?”
“On the way to it. He called Mac Wednesday and they’ve got a plan to bring him home this weekend.”
“Poor Gabe.”
“I know. It was a huge surprise.”
“Was his brother offshore? Did he get home, too? What are they doing at the roadhouse?”
Wendy hauled her towards the fence. The whole party seemed to consist of the hosts dragging her into secluded spaces. “You seem to know an awful lot about Gabe’s family, Chloe Lee.”
The shadows were good at concealing flaming cheeks and that sort of thing. “You know we’ve chatted.”
“I know you’ve denied any interest in him.”
Crap on a Christmas cracker. “Look. This isn’t a thing, so don’t go making it a thing. Let’s gossip about you instead.”
“Oh, no. I’ve spent the past two hours talking about myself. I love this future baby, no doubt, but there’s a limit to how much we can say about something the size of a French knot.”
Chloe shook her head. “Nice try. We all know you want to tell me more about each moment of consciousness since you took the test.”
“You don’t want to hear my story about when I began to suspect? The famous pickled onion story?”
“You have a pickled onion story, and it’s already famous?”
Wendy nudged her shoulder. “Stop stalling and tell me about you and Gabe. I told Mac there was a story there, and he said no, and I was right and he was wrong, which means I get to be the one to pick the baby’s name.”
“You bartered naming rights over gossip about me?”
“We’ve bartered naming rights over a whole series of factors. The relationship between you and Gabe is just a tipping point at the moment.”
She sighed. “It’s a good thing you two are procreating. You need something besides dressing up Penny and judging your friends to distract you.”
She’d meant it in a melodramatic, joking way. She hadn’t meant for Wendy to shrink into herself any.
Wendy surely had to know she wasn’t just being a jerk.
To make up for it, she told her everything. The sex after the party the year before. The fleeing when the hospital called. Her comments to the mural committee, his back every time she passed by. Philipe’s confusing claims. The June evening she was exiting the macaroni and cheese restaurant and thought he was opening the door for her, only to see he was holding it for his date. He’d tipped his chin at her. Like she was just a friend of a friend.
Which she supposed she was, when all was done and dusted.
She abridged some, because much as she loved Wendy, she didn’t need her boss knowing details about happenings in the loft in her backyard. Or Mac, come to that, because no matter what they pretended, those two never held secrets for more than one second around each other. She’d always thought of them as having the most open of open relationships, until her neighbors explained to her what the polyamorous definition of open was. In that regard, Wendy and Mac were a closed unit. They orbited each other like twin stars, and this baby would nestle in the middle of their system.
By contrast, she and Gabe had completely separate gravitational orbits.
“So, that’s that. But it doesn’t mean I don’t care that Mr. Babineaux is hospitalized.”
“Oh, wow. Okay, sorry I teased.”
She rolled her eyes, not that Wendy could see it in their dark corner. “Please, don’t worry about it. We tease each other all the time, right?”
“Mmm.”
She could wish Wendy's voice sounded a little surer. As if she wasn’t still offended about that comment about procreation. But surely she’d made her point. “Anyway, I do think he’s a great guy at heart, and there’s no awkwardness between us. I wish he was here. I was looking forward to the gumbo.”
That got her a short laugh, and Wendy walked shoulder-to-shoulder with her back to the dance floor. Shoulder-to-ear, really. Wendy was a tiny thing, but they’d dealt with more difficult things in their years at the hospital than a small woman delivering a large man’s child.
Just before they entered the white halo cast by the crisscrossing strings of Christmas lights, she put a hand on Wendy's arm. “Hey, boss?”
“Stop calling me boss.”
The rote exchange cheered her. “I’m so happy for you, and Mac. You’re going to sail through this pregnancy and your baby is going to be beautiful. Not because of the whole exotic mixed race thing, but because you and Mac are beautiful people, and you will bring a wonderful human into this world.”
For longer than she thought possible, Wendy was quiet. But Chloe could see the tracings of a smile on her face. Finally, she said. “But let’s be honest. This child will be so gorgeous, right?”
“She sure as hell will.”
They danced until Mac came to claim Wendy, and she danced alone until the slow songs swept to the fringes of the happy crowd.