Gerry was waiting for me when I got to work, and we geared up and headed out together.
“Hey, so what’s going on with Finn? Did he get everything worked out?” he suddenly asked me when we were headed toward the site chosen for the morning’s work.
The question took me by surprise and threw me off. My eyes snapped over to him.
“What do you mean what’s going on with him?” I asked. “What’s he trying to work out?”
Gerry looked at me strangely. “You don’t know? I figured since the two of you are…”
I shook my head to stop him. “No. Things are… complicated right now.”
“Oh. Well, it seems like whatever’s going on between the two of you isn’t the only thing that’s complicated for him. When I went into the diner the other day to get lunch, he looked like he was feeling really down. I asked him if everything was okay, but he just kind of brushed me off. He said he was fine, and everything was good, but as I was leaving, the police showed up, and he went off to the side to talk to them. I don’t know what they were talking about, but it didn’t seem like a good conversation,” he said.
Now I felt truly awful. We were doing whatever it was we were doing, but Finn was obviously going through something. Whatever it was, I didn’t want any chance of things getting worse for him, which they definitely would if someone else were to find out about my pregnancy and reveal it to him before I got around to it.
Deana was the only person outside of the doctor’s office who knew, but it probably wouldn’t take long before more people started figuring it out. I showed very early with Olly, and the doctor told me then if I ever had a second child to be prepared to show even earlier. Soon enough, my belly was going to start forming, and there would be no denying what was going on.
The last thing Finn deserved was to have the town gossip flare up and be about me being pregnant with a mystery man’s baby. I needed to man up, so to speak and talk to him about everything. No matter how he reacted, it would be better that he at least knew what was going on so we could start making decisions together, and both of us could start really exploring how we felt about the baby and each other on our own. I already knew what I was feeling. It was just a matter of finding out if we were still on the same page.
Just as I came to that conclusion, the sky opened up.
It seemed like an omen.
27
FINN
Friday night was trudging along surprisingly slowly. I was used to Fridays being a long, repetitive mad dash to make as much food as possible starting around six in the evening until roughly two in the morning. A stream of families would be followed by teenagers and then the early-twenty-somethings as they came in, half-drunk and looking for something greasy. Dina’s was usually the place where they would sober up with a plate of fries and a hamburger and coffee that I only brewed when I saw someone come in three sheets to the wind.
So, when seven thirty came, and my shift was set to be over in half an hour, I knew it would be a hard sell to stick around. Especially the way that Helen had been hinting that maybe I was spending too much time at work and not taking care of myself. It wasn’t that I was starting to look like Dad or anything, but she had mentioned that I looked like I had lost weight and that I wasn’t sleeping much.
She was right, of course, but that didn’t stop me from arguing that I was fine and that I just wanted to throw myself into work. Helen didn’t have a lot of room to talk, since she had told me plenty of stories about her days in Chicago and how she worked herself to death there.
But this probably was a line in the sand. With so few tickets coming in the window, both Helen and Tony in the kitchen with me and waitresses being cut, I was going to be lucky to make it to eight. Which meant I needed to figure out what the hell I was going to do on a Friday night by myself.
I hadn’t had one, other than last Friday, when I worked to close, in months. Either I had been with Wendy, or I had worked, and before that, I simply worked or slept. There wasn’t anything in between. However, with me not sleeping lately, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with myself. Maybe I’d just go to Sergio’s and drink beer and watch whatever sport he had up on the TV.