Hello, Sunshine

It was too late. My sticky throw-up landed right on the edge of her dress. A little extra goo dripped down her legs.

“That’s disgusting,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She started patting herself down with paper napkins. “You’re not forgiven.”

I pointed down to the water. “Meredith is here.”

She kept patting, following my eyes to Meredith. “Is that the wife? Or the scorned girlfriend?”

“The wife.”

She put down the napkins and moved farther away from the small puddle of vomit. “Serious overreaction.”

Then I looked closer. It wasn’t Meredith. The hair was more red than blond. The legs were thicker than Meredith’s had ever been. And whereas Ryan had two boys and a girl, this woman had only girls, towheaded beauties following the fake Meredith around.

“Never mind. It’s not her.”

“So definitely an overreaction!” Rain said. Then she looked at me, handed over a paper napkin. “What’s going on with you?”

“I just don’t feel very well. I ate fennel at the restaurant the other night, which didn’t agree with me. I haven’t felt great since.”

“That would be your fault, not the fennel’s.” She paused. “Maybe you’re allergic to Montauk.”

I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” she said.

I started to tell her I’d had that exact thought when my thermos of coffee hadn’t agreed with me.

Then I threw up again.

32

There is something that people don’t tell you about trying (and failing) to get pregnant. That every time you take a pregnancy test you get the same result. The NO shining at you, a condemnation that you dared to hope for a different result. So you stop trying. Stop counting days. Not interested in even knowing

when you should have taken the test. Not interested in more of that hateful condemnation.

So when my sister suggested that maybe the reason I had thrown up three times in an hour was that I was pregnant, I thought she was wrong.

I argued with her on the car ride home when she insisted I take a test, just to be on the safe side, spelling the implicating words for Sammy’s benefit.

Then gave in when Sammy spelled back, A cousin!

Of course, when I got back to the guesthouse and was sitting on my sister’s bathroom floor and I actually got a YES, it was surreal. It was like there was a mistake of nature or something.

I looked at the box, unsurprised to see that it was expired.

Rain went to the store and got another test, not expired, and it also said YES. It said it without equivocation. It said there was going to be a baby.

“Now what’s the excuse?” she asked.

“It’s just . . . we had been trying for a while. Like, really trying.”

“And nothing good?”

I shook my head. Pregnant.