The Fourth Child, Jessica Winter [fantasy novels to read txt] 📗

indifference were the proof that she’d achieved ahard thing, because turning him sweet was hard. Convincing Pat to love her, and to like her, was hard, and it was work thatwas never done. She trusted hard.

 

The time came to make the necessary arrangements. A wedding over Labor Day weekend at Saint Mary’s, Pat’s aunt Diane, thedirector of the Saint Mary’s children’s chorus, putting in a word to fit them in. Neither Jane’s nor Pat’s family was inclinedto discuss why the happy event needed to be so hastily planned.

Plenty of other girls who found themselves in the same situation would make a different kind of necessary arrangement.

It’s not that she didn’t think about it.

It wasn’t difficult to get done.

She knew somebody who knew somebody who’d done it. You just had to know who to ask. How to ask. It would be like it never happened. Instead of getting married in September, she could start at the University of Buffalo, with Pat. Geeta and Christy were going to UB, too. Elise off to Vassar, Sonja to the University of Michigan. Jane would be showing by September, probably. But she didn’t have to be.

The idea followed her around even after the wedding date was set. The idea was a tall lithe nurse in white linens: paper dressinggown over one arm, one hand beckoning Jane toward a small room with a large chair, a tray of sharp and gleaming instrumentsbeside it. The nurse had a scent Jane couldn’t place, not antiseptic, but as wholesome and foreboding as peat and heavy rain.She smelled of wildflowers spattered with freshly dug earth.

Jane turned away from her again and again. She wouldn’t look her full in the face.

How do you consent to a thought?

 

Her mother slapped her when Jane told her she was pregnant. Her mother always lost her nerve just as open palm met cheek.Jane wondered if she’d resent her mother’s blows less if they could ever be delivered with conviction.

Her mother’s revulsion dissipated, however, once she could pause to consider the prestige of the match, even if it had been sealed under less-than-ideal circumstances. Patrick Brennan Sr. had cofounded Brennan & Menzari, which built dozens of the higher-end Town of Amherst homes, and he’d parlayed his wealth and standing into the chairmanship of the largest local auto dealership. The Brennans managed to be both affluent-for-Williamsville and salt-of-the-earth. They were soft-spoken and churchly, and the six of them lived well within their means in a four-bedroom split-level of Mr. Brennan’s own design. They were, Jane’s mother said, “the right sort of people,” people who “could buy you out if you looked at them funny” yet don’t “go begging you to count their money.” Her mother could count the Brennans’ money without being asked.

Mrs. Brennan, whom Jane could never quite bring herself to call Dee and so rarely called her anything at all, was slight andtanned and usually dressed for the tennis court. She could have probably shared clothes with Jane’s mother, but her mother’sconspicuous thinness seemed a by-product of perpetual exasperation, while Dee’s felt, like everything about her, quietly intentional.She would help get Jane set up in the holly-green clapboard house on Maple Way. Pat’s dad was building out the developmentand others in Williamsville, half-acre lots carved out of forest. The candy tins would be replaced by a checkbook, drawingon a bank account that Pat’s parents would control at first. Pat would go to work for the family firm, as had always beenexpected, while enrolled part-time at UB. Jane could enroll, too, someday. It was the only school she had applied to. Shewanted to major in early childhood education. But she would have to wait at least until all the children were in school, becauseof course there would be more children.

“And then you’ll wonder why you ever thought you needed a degree,” Mrs. Brennan said cheerily. It was not a dig, not one ofher mother’s just you waits. It was meant to reassure her that everything would work out fine, and just as it was intended to.

Mrs. Brennan took Jane shopping for furniture, paints, fixtures. Jane deferred so consistently to the older woman’s judgment—botanicalprints, reproductions of Colonial-era furniture, deep blues and reds and greens—that her participation felt like a formality.One of Jane’s few suggestions was to find a frame for Madonna and Child with Saint Anne. Another was to place the chunk of the Colosseum on the living room mantelpiece. Jane had not yet removed it from its cardboardpackaging.

“You know that’s not real, honey,” Mrs. Brennan said gently.

“No, it is,” Jane said, gripping the box, watching the mantelpiece. They hadn’t laid the carpet yet and their voices echoed slightly against the bare white walls. “I bought it right across from the Colosseum site.”

“Sweetheart,” Mrs. Brennan said, with soft remorse, “they wouldn’t just let you bring home a piece of the Colosseum.”

“No, it’s—see, look at the stamp on the side, it says, certificado come genuino.” Jane’s treasure looked all at once to her like a Happy Meal prize. A sheer plastic square cut into the packaging so youcould peek inside at the rock, like the Tonka trucks on the shelves at Kay-Bee Toys. Jane laughed and covered her eyes, andMrs. Brennan laughed, too.

“I’m a moron,” Jane said.

“You are not. Hey, it doesn’t even matter if it’s real,” Mrs. Brennan said. “It’s a memory for you, and that means something.For Pat, too. That trip brought you together.”

Mrs. Brennan placed the chunk on the mantelpiece, flush against the wall, behind a twin frame holding Jane’s and Pat’s babypictures.

When Jane told her friends what she would be doing instead of college, Elise wore a look of stricken compassion. Geeta mentionedthat she was learning how to knit, and that she could knit the baby something—booties, she thought, or a cap.

“I can’t wait to have kids,” Christy said.

“Well, you can,” Jane said, smiling.

“When I finish my residency,” Christy said.

Sonja’s brow furled in perplexity. She had gathered enough information from the Human Reproduction section of her old AP Biologytextbook to formulate a strict birth