Surprise!
In the checkout lane at the grocery store, Nola tells her mother, “Whenever I can’t decide something, I just stand still and make myself pure blank on the inside, and then I say, ‘Now!’ and—presto!—I know what I want to do. It’s as plain as a hamburger on a plate.”
Maddy wrinkles her forehead. “Plain as a hamburger on a plate?”
“Yeah. John says that. Don’t you get it? Like, just a hamburger on a plate.” She offers a one-shouldered shrug. “You might not understand. It’s a semaphore.”
“ ‘Metaphor,’ I think you mean to say. And I guess I understand. Especially if the plate is white. And there’s nothing but a burger on it. I guess I get it.”
In the car on the way over, Maddy told Nola in as light a voice as she could muster that she was trying to decide if it might make more sense for them to live permanently here, in Mason, rather than in New York. “You do like Mason, don’t you?” Maddy asked, and Nola said, “Yes! I already told you about six hundred times! You want to stay here, right?”
Maddy nodded. “I do.”
“Well, me, too. So”—Nola dusted off her hands—“all done. We stay here.”
Now Nola says, “I can’t wait to see the baby.”
“What baby?”
“You know. Link’s mom is going to have a baby and it might be here by Halloween and Link says it can go trick-or-treating with him because everybody loves babies. People will get all goo-goo-gah-gah and they’ll give him more candy than usual. But I get all the Starbursts because Link hates Starbursts.”
“Wait. Abby is going to have a baby?”
“Yes! You didn’t know? And she just found out it’s a girl, like the ring said! Remember when we put Abby’s wedding ring on that twine you gave us and it moved around in a circle? That means it’s a girl. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No!” Maddy rewinds events in her mind, begins to see things differently. Correctly. Wait till she tells Iris. A baby!
Nola starts unloading the cart onto the conveyor belt. “Oh. Well, hee-hee, now you know. I thought you knew about the baby! I heard you and Iris talking about helping to take Abby to the doctor.”
“When?”
“Ho, I hear lots of things you say—don’t worry.”
This remark sends Maddy’s brain into a kind of frantic hide-and-seek with itself, trying to remember if there is other sensitive information Nola might have been privy to. Nothing she can recall.
A few days ago, Iris told Maddy that Monica Dawson had come to Abby’s house to pick her up for a doctor’s appointment. “Maybe we ought to offer to drive Abby to her appointments, too,” Iris said. “Jason is busy trying to hold down the bookstore, and Monica’s making a pretty big sacrifice, taking time away from the Henhouse.”
“Sure,” Maddy said. “But I don’t think Monica minds. The people in this town don’t look at it that way. You help your neighbor, here. Period.”
It was true. People left bouquets of flowers on doorsteps, paper bags of tomatoes. If you were the first one out after a snowfall, you shoveled your neighbor’s walk as well as your own.
Maddy and Iris did offer their driving services, but Abby never took them up on it. Now it occurs to Iris that she and Monica are probably both going to the same OB practice.
“I’m so happy about this news,” she tells Nola. “Let’s go over to Baby Love and get Abby a little gift.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a pretty maternity top?”
“Okay.”
Nola snatches a bag of potato chips before it is bagged, then attempts to bat her eyelashes. It looks like Morse code. “Can I have some?”
“At home.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want you to fill up on chips.”
“Why not? They’re good for you. They are made from vegetables.”
“No.”
“I will only have six chips.”
“No.”
“Four?”
Maddy gives Nola a That’s enough look.
Nola drops the chip bag. Then, while Maddy signs the credit card receipt for the groceries, Nola leans on the handle of the cart, moving it back and forth in irritating little jerks.
“When we get home, I want you to go outside and run around for a while,” Maddy tells her. “Good grief.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I need to keep a lookout for Matthew.”
Maddy freezes. “What do you mean? Is he coming?”
Nola sighs. “Sheesh. You don’t know that, either?”
That night, while Iris pores over cookbooks, Maddy comes to sit with her. “So I’ve got news.”
“What?”
“First of all, guess who’s pregnant?”
Iris looks up. “Oh, my God. You?”
“Nope. Abby.”
“Abby?”
“Yup.”
Iris closes the cookbook she’s been looking at. “When did she tell you?”
“She didn’t. Nola did.”
“Why didn’t Abby tell us?”
Maddy shrugs. “Maybe she assumed we knew, since the kids did. Or she might have wanted to wait a while to talk much more about it, just to make sure everything was okay. A lot of people don’t tell anyone until they’re past the first trimester.”
“Well, this puts a whole different spin on things!” Iris says. “What good news!”
“I know.” Maddy laughs.
“And here I was, thinking the worst!” Iris says.
“Me, too. But then that’s kind of a habit of mine.”
“But the kids knew.”
“The kids knew. And here’s even bigger news: Guess what else Nola told me?”
“What?”
“Matthew’s coming.”
“He is?”
“Yup.”
“When?” Iris asks.
“Don’t know. He’s on the way.”
“Wow.”
“Right?”
“Are you glad?” Iris asks.
“We’ll see,” Maddy says.