“Well, Adam, it’s that time for you. This will be our last meeting.”
“Yup.”
“So, I beg you, please tell me you’ve decided what you plan to study next year.”
Adam leaned back and eyed Mr. Fisher. His guidance counselor stared back at him with a stern expression that Adam was certain had to have been a course requirement for the man to earn his education degree. The thought of a roomful of men and women staring each other down, practicing and perfecting their faces for the final exam, made Adam grin.
“I’m glad you’re so unconcerned and amused,” Mr. Fisher said, sitting back in his chair and lacing his fingers together on the blotter in front of him. “I wouldn’t want you to be losing sleep over your unclear future.”
“I’m not, Mr. F.,” Adam said, pretending he didn’t understand the sarcasm so as not to prolong the argument.
Adam didn’t take it personally. It was Mr. Fisher’s job to make sure his students didn’t return to Grover Cleveland High School year after year and tell him about their miserable rat-race lives of drudgery and nine-to-five-plus-overtime.
He, Adam Shibbs, would not be among them. When he returned—if he had time between checking out jazz clubs, discovering Middle Eastern restaurants and getting the local guys together to shoot hoops—he would have an easy smile on his face, a man happy with life and free to sample all the world had to offer.
“I know you’ve had a very difficult year,” Mr. Fisher said after a pause. His voice and face softened. “Losing a parent is a terrible experience.”
Adam, his levity fading away, looked down at the dusty floor, and wondered what the point of this discussion would be.
“But I don’t want to see you permanently stunt your growth as a person, Adam,” Mr. Fisher said. “Your grades are pretty good for an average student, but for a boy as bright as you, they’re a definite underachievement. Still, they were enough to get you into a good college, and my advice to you is to consider buckling down for a few years. Get motivated. See what your brain can do.”
“I use my brain,” Adam said. “I just don’t use it in the way you think I should. I don’t use it thinking of ways to get ahead and be great at everything, and earn a million dollars a year and make mergers and whatever else. I use it to try to learn about things that amaze me or make me laugh, so I can have a good time.” He paused. “You only live once.”
“I agree,” his guidance counselor said. “And sometimes, as I know you learned the hard way, your one life can throw you a lot of curveballs. You’ve got to know how to hit them, even if you don’t want or expect them to come at you. You coped this time around by easing up and relaxing, and that was fine, but maybe now it’s time to work hard for a while. Find your potential. Prepare yourself to face anything in the real world, and to meet anyone.”
Adam didn’t want to admit it, but he had been giving the part about meeting people a lot of thought.
Out there were many women just like himself—fun, carefree, exciting, adventurous. He planned to meet as many women as was possible and enjoy the wide, beautiful variety the world had to offer. And if he ever got to the point where it was time to settle down—although he couldn’t imagine that, really—he’d be acquainted with many to choose from. Women who didn’t work themselves to death, so that he wouldn’t have to love and lose someone again.
Women exactly like him. It was a huge planet. They wouldn’t be hard to find.
College started in three months. They could be everywhere.
Adam bent to retie the tattered lace on his sneaker, then stood and put out his hand. “Thanks for everything, Mr. Fisher. I did have fun most of the time here at G.C. High. I promise I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t promise me anything,” Mr. Fisher said, clasping his hand. “You’re the one with the promise. Just don’t ignore it.”
Chapter One
Molly Jackson’s pros/cons for keeping her birthday to herself—
Pros:
1. Don’t have to laugh weakly at lame jokes that go, “Let me guess. twenty-nine again, right?” Thirty-two is not only chronologically correct but absolutely acceptable.
2. Don’t have to worry about getting dragged out to a bar or restaurant by well-meaning Danbury Way women only to quietly obsess for three hours that I could be at home preparing that report for my newest client and worry that I’m wasting valuable time.
3. Don’t have to deflect curious, endless questions about my getting-bigger stomach. Don’t have to smile distantly and nod vaguely when the words “sperm bank” inevitably come up. Don’t have to feel guilty, and then extra guilty that I feel guilty.
4. Staying indoors all day means my hair won’t frizz up in the rain.
Cons:
1. Have to make my own cake.
The rain splattered down harder, startling Molly from her thoughts for a moment, but as she watched water stream down the windowpane, she was pulled back into the haven of her organized mind.
Molly was never off task for long, whatever the task happened to be.
Ten minutes later, she was con-less and convinced she’d made the right gut decision about her birthday. Plus, she was itching to get in to her office to start plowing through her in-box. She glanced up at the kitchen clock, which she could see from where she sprawled in the center of her soft, bouncy sofa—8:00 a.m. on the dot. She rose—or tried to rise. Her new weight unbalanced her and she fell back down, her behind sinking into the crevice between the sofa cushions. She was surprised it fit in there, because lately, she’d noticed her back end widening inch by inch, minute by minute. At this rate, by next week she’d be turning sideways to go through doorways. Someone would have to slap a Wide Load sign on the butt of her heather-gray sweatpants, the only item of clothing in her closet that she could still breathe in.
In what was becoming a common occurrence, her noncuddly, nonmaternal thoughts dissolved into guilt. “Sorry, baby,” she said, patting her stomach gently. “I’m just not used to you being so—so there.” She sighed. “Every day, you take me as much by surprise as the day I found out about you.”
Thinking about that, and thinking about how every day for the rest of her life would contain a persistent element of unexpectedness, Molly felt love. And hiding just underneath that thick cozy cover of love, a thinner, shakier stranger of a feeling that could possibly be—
No. Not fear. Molly refused fear. Never let it in.
She planted both palms on the couch and hurled herself up so efficiently she almost flew across the room into the wall. She walked to the staircase and ascended it, each deliberate step taking her away from the moment where she might have given in to her feelings, admitted what the fear did to her, welcomed this emotion she so rarely experienced.
And she refused to experience it, to surrender to it now. She was a single, pregnant career woman, and she couldn’t afford to give in to—that emotion.
She pushed through the door to her office and sat down. She glanced around at the clutterless desk, the efficient file cabinet, the dust-free computer monitor. This was control. She was in control. She could do anything she put her determined mind to.
The phone rang, and she donned her headset. She switched her computer on with one hand as she clicked onto the phone line with her other hand. “M.J. Consulting,” she said, her tone crisp.
She smiled, the same way she did after answering every first phone call of the day. She so loved the name of her own one-woman company. She particularly loved the name of her own company spoken by her in her own office, in her very own still-felt-like-new home.
“Yes, Mr. Trent, how are you?” she asked, leaving the smile