Page 29 of Under the Stars

Meredith

Winthrop Island, New York

Her belly got in the way of everything, including sex. Not that she was in the mood for sex that often anymore. The only place she felt like herself was in the water.

Mike stood at the edge of the pool and pulled out the thermometer on its string. “How the fuck can you stand it? It’s, like, fifty-six degrees in there.” He looked closer. “Fifty- four .”

“You get used to it.”

“ You get used to it. The rest of us are freezing our nuts off.” He let the thermometer drop back into the water and put his hands on his hips. “Are you sure it’s okay for the baby?”

“Can you let me worry about the baby? Jesus.”

“Meredith.”

“I think I’d know if something was wrong, Mike. It’s my uterus, remember?”

She pushed off from the wall to start another lap.

The pool was fifty feet long, give or take, so fifty laps was about a mile.

She was on lap thirty-eight right now and she didn’t want to lose her momentum.

Momentum was everything when you were this pregnant, it turned out.

If you stopped to rest, you wouldn’t get up again.

And Meredith had no intention of carrying a single pound more baby weight than absolutely necessary.

She’d almost reached the opposite wall when she heard a volcanic splash. A couple of seconds later, the tsunami broke over her, followed by a high-decibel scream like that of a small girl child. She reached for the edge, sputtering. “What the fuck, Mike?”

“Oh my God. I think my nuts just shot up behind my belly button.”

“You’re such an idiot. Why’d you do that?”

He was stroking toward her, bare shoulders gleaming in the watery April sunshine. An expression of pained determination shrunk his face. “I think you know the answer to that, Mair,” he gasped.

“You swim like a rhinoceros, did you know that?”

“Rhinoceroses are pretty graceful in the water, actually.”

“Then you’re the opposite of a rhinoceros.”

He collapsed against the wall. Water rolling down his face. Kind of adorable, though she hated to admit it.

“Can’t have my manhood handed to me by a pregnant chick.” He stretched his arm and gathered her close. As close as he could, anyway, given the beach ball between them. “Plus, the sight of you skinny-dipping makes me horny.”

“Shamu the fucking whale turns you on?”

He started kissing her—mouth, neck, breasts that had burgeoned into a pair of expectant udders. “I’m thinking Free Willy .”

She pushed him away. “I don’t need a pity fuck right now, Mike. I need my feet rubbed.”

“I’ll rub your feet. After I have sex with the sexiest girl in the universe.”

“Sorry, don’t know where you’re going to find her .”

His hand traced the longitude of her belly until it slipped between her legs. “Meredith Fisher is growing my baby inside her. It doesn’t get any sexier than that.”

“Mike, stop it.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I have to…have to finish my laps…” She was losing her breath, and it had nothing to do with the thirty-eight laps in the cold saltwater pool, or the baby that was squashing her lungs up into her epiglottis.

“There are other ways to exercise, babe. Much more comfortable, trust me.”

“I mean it, Mike.”

“Okay, Mair. Whatever you say.”

He slid his hand away. She grabbed it and put it back. Closed her eyes and ground against his fingers. It turned out the baby was also pressing things down below, such that Mike’s gentle touch made her thrash like a lunatic.

“Whoa, babe. I thought you wanted to keep swimming.”

“Like you have a functioning pair of gonads right now.”

“We can fix that pretty fast, if you let me carry you out of this fucking polar ocean before we hit an iceberg.”

“Oh, I’d love to see you try to carry me.”

They reached the steps at the shallow end. Mike bent low to scoop her up. “Watch me, babe.”

Then— Oh, shit!

“Warned you,” Meredith said smugly.

—

At least Mike was happy. You’d think a nineteen-year-old bartender would freak out when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant, as Meredith had done the week after Labor Day, once she’d smuggled in a pregnancy test to the monthly grocery trip to the mainland.

She’d bicycled down after breakfast and found him mopping the kitchen after a freak egg accident.

She hadn’t beaten around the bush, either. Just— So I’m pregnant.

“You’re what ?”

“Pregnant,” she said. “Knocked up.”

He dropped the mop. “Holy shit. Oh my God. Are you screwing with me?”

“Would I screw with you about something like this?”

He had stared at her for so long, she was afraid his eyelids might permanently attach to his orbital sockets. Then he’d reached forward and grabbed her and swung her around the kitchen, narrowly missing a tray of condiments.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she said. “This is a disaster.”

“This is a fucking miracle . My girlfriend’s pregnant.” He dropped to one knee. “Marry me, Meredith.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“I am out of my fucking mind, Mair.” He grabbed her hand. “Be my wife.”

She jerked her hand away. “Hold on a second, jerk. I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep it yet.”

The way his face fell.

Long story short, she had kept the baby.

Who was she kidding? She was always going to keep the damn baby.

But sometimes it was only Mike’s joy that kept her from throwing herself over a cliff.

What it would do to him if she lost this pregnancy.

What it would do to him if he lost her . She owed him that much, anyway.

It hardly needed saying that Mike’s mom was the opposite of thrilled. “She said she’d kick me out if I marry you,” he reported back. “So we’ll have to get our own place.”

“Mike, I’m not marrying you,” said Meredith. “I already told you. So that’s not a problem.”

“Do you think your mom would mind if we stay at Greyfriars for a while? Just at first. Until I can get something going for us.”

“Do you not hear me, Mike? We’re not getting married.”

“I hear you,” he said.

“So you can stop asking.”

“I’m not asking, am I?”

And it was true. He didn’t ever ask . He just talked about it like it was a fact, their getting married, and now that she was only a week from her due date, he had practically taken up residence at Greyfriars—his mom, he said, gave him such a hard time he’d taken to leaving right after closing so he didn’t have to listen to her shit.

“You should listen to her shit,” Meredith said. “Mama knows best.”

—

Meanwhile, Isobel had taken up a position of guarded neutrality. Earth Mother she was not, but neither was she the Mother Superior. Besides, as Meredith reminded her, she had no ground to stand on.

“History repeats,” Isobel would say with a sigh, staring at Meredith’s stomach from across the kitchen table, “just in a different key.”

So she tolerated the presence of Mike, shambling through her house at all hours to fetch water and ramen noodles and herbal tea, as needed, or lounging in bed with her daughter, having noisy bouts of sex followed by equally orgasmic foot rubs.

“I tell you, this is the life,” said Mike. “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and I’m naked in bed with my fiancée—”

“Not your fiancée,” Meredith said, but her heart wasn’t in it. Not when he was sending parabolas of pleasure up her legs from the soles of her feet.

“So I’m thinking, since my mom’s being such a pain in the ass, maybe we start our own inn. We could call it the Pequot.”

“Mike, I’m not an innkeeper’s wife.”

“Meredith. You said wife .”

“Any more of your sass and I’m kicking you out of bed.”

“You could maybe bartend, that’s all. I’ll hire someone to do the cleaning and cooking and shit. Or do it myself. People keep saying how the Mo is going downhill—”

“They’ve always said it’s going downhill. Like, I hate to tell you this, but there was never a heyday at the Mo, Mike. It was always a dive and it will always be a dive.”

He sat up. “That’s what I’m talking about, Mair! The island deserves better. We could bring in a decent chef, get some decent acts to play—”

“Mike,” she said, “I am not going to live out my days tending bar on Winthrop Island. That’s just not how it’s going to work, okay? You need to wrap your head around that fact, like yesterday .”

Mike sat there at the end of the bed with her feet in his lap, rubbing the soles like Aladdin’s lamp. Hoping some genie would appear to grant him his wish. His hair had dried in untidy ginger pieces against his forehead. “Once the baby’s born—”

Meredith struggled her way up against the headboard.

“Once this baby’s born, I’m out of here.

Do you hear me? I’m not raising another poor kid on this prison island, this Alcatraz of the soul, is that clear?

You can stay if you want. Start your five-star dive bar, go ahead. But you’re doing it without me.”

“Meredith, we’re a team —”

“We are not a team. This is your dream, not mine. You’re the one who wants to stay on Winthrop all your life, the same friends, the same damn life your parents lived.

Hey, fine. Whatever makes you happy. But that’s not my dream.

My dream is something else, Mike, but you wouldn’t know that, would you? You never asked.”

“Meredith—”

“We’re not getting married, Mike. I’m not keeping a damn inn with you. That’s all.”

“Jesus, Mair. We’re having a kid together! You can’t just—just leave . You can’t just take my kid away with you on some half-assed Thelma and Louise fucking road trip —”

“Well, in that case, why don’t you raise it?”

Mike’s hands, which had gone on rubbing her soles throughout this exchange, maybe a little harder even, now went still around the balls of her feet. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean if you think it’s so important to raise this kid on a rock in the middle of Long Island Sound, then you do it!”

“By myself ?”