I tried to choke out the words, but they did not make any more sense on the second retelling than they had when I gave Amy an abridged version in the car. Soon the tears were dripping off my chin. Two days ago, everything was normal. Everything was fine. I was boring Rachel, married to a nice but slightly infuriating man with one exuberant son and a daughter on the way. Not exactly living the dream but doing well enough to pass the Christmas card newsletter test. Now I was separating from a cheating husband who had taken up with a B-grade celebrity interior designer.
‘What? Are you sure? I can’t believe …’ My mother placed a perfectly manicured hand over her mouth.
I cut her off. ‘Yes, I know. It was a surprise to me as well.’
‘But … you’re pregnant! He can’t get away with this, surely.’ She pushed her small square glasses up on her nose and stared at me as if being able to see me more clearly might present a different reality.
I rolled my eyes and gestured to my midsection, where my stomach was doing its best impression of a parade float. ‘I’m aware of that, too. Turns out, there’s no law against it. Thomas!’ I shouted over her head. ‘In the car, please.’
She grabbed my hand again. ‘What will you do? A newborn and Thomas on your own … Can you imagine …’ Her eyes were sparking with anger. ‘How dare he? After everything you’ve done for him.’
I rested my hand on her arm in a way I hoped was reassuring. The last thing I needed was her flying off to fight my cause for me. I still hadn’t recovered fully from the email she had sent to one of my university lecturers when I had failed a paper in my final year.
‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’ I took another deep breath, summoning up an image of my first yoga teacher, who’d spent a full session showing me how to move my diaphragm. ‘Sillier people than me manage it. Thomas! What are you doing in there?’
‘Darling, come and stay with us.’
My father gave up his pretence of ignoring us. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said Rachel must come and stay here if she and Stephen are having problems.’ My mother’s voice was unusually firm. ‘We have the spare rooms upstairs. We can help you with the baby. I can clean out the cupboards down here, so you have room for your things. The rooms aren’t big, but they should be fine for the three of you. It’s quite warm in the evening on that side of the house, but I can get you a fan …’
I bit my lip. Would the things that drove me nuts as a teenager – my mother’s anxiety about every decision I had to make, my father’s need for routine – be even more grating twenty years on? Did they think I couldn’t cope on my own?
I cut her off. ‘I’ll think about it, okay?’ Thomas had appeared at my side, stretching his little fingers around two new train carriages.
In the car on the way back to our house, I replayed my mother’s words in my mind. Amy had dozed off in the passenger seat next to me, her phone clasped in her hand.
Could I manage a newborn and Thomas, alone? There were millions of women around the world functioning perfectly well as single mothers. Should I be offended that my mother deemed me unable do the same? I assumed I would need a little longer off work than the roughly four and a half hours I’d taken with Thomas. But it could be done. Perhaps I could get a flatmate. I drafted the ad in my head: Sunny room for single person to share with professional woman and two others, one prone to stomping about in the middle of the night or waking early with a rousing rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’.
Perhaps a flatmate was not going to work.
‘Stephen will have to pay some sort of child support, won’t he?’ I realised I was asking the woman with the friendly smile on the billboard opposite us as we waited for the traffic light to change.
‘What, Mumma?’ Thomas’s little forehead crumpled into a frown. His floppy brown fringe needed a trim. I met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘Nothing, darling. Sorry. Don’t worry, Mumma’s just having a bit of a rough day today. It’s going to be okay.’
He kept watching me, cracker in one hand, as the traffic light went green and I put my foot on the accelerator. The irony was, I had a tower of parenting books on the table beside my bed. Could any of them tell me how to protect a two-and-a-bit-year-old from a sudden-onset paternal midlife crisis?
What would I do if the baby woke just as Thomas was falling asleep, his little arms wrapped around my neck? And would I ever get another shower again, if I had to coax two of them through breakfast first? Thomas stretched his hand out, making a smeary print on the window. I watched him drag his finger through the crumbs left on the glass.
Back at the house, Thomas splashed in his paddling pool in the late afternoon sunshine. The leaves on the tree in the middle of our lawn had curled prematurely, dropping one by one and forming a mushy brown mulch. The lawn looked exactly as I felt. I propped myself on an outdoor dining chair and tracked back through my missed calls. One number had tried me three times already. I pressed the button to call it back.
A woman’s voice answered on the first ring. ‘Rachel.’ She exhaled my name into the phone. ‘Thanks so much for getting in touch. I just wanted to run a story idea past you. I think it’s pretty neat – one of my clients is launching a new business …’
I yelped as Thomas threw a plastic bucket of water at my legs. I held up a finger.
‘Rachel? Are you okay?’ The PR woman was still talking.
‘Sorry, yes. Just working from home with my son today.’ Thomas frowned and backed up for another attempt.
Her laugh tinkled down the phone. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I know how that is.’
I would have bet anything that she didn’t. I’d heard from a friend that she had employed two nannies, working in tandem, so that she could carry on with her life fairly untroubled, despite the arrival of twins. It had made me question my life choices.
Thomas took aim with his next bucket-load. I grabbed the pail from his clutches, and with a surge of anger shooting through me, threw it to the far corner of the garden. His face fell as he turned away. A twang of remorse tugged at my chest. I reached to pat his shoulder, but he ducked and darted away to the bucket.
‘So it’s ground-breaking, exciting stuff. Was hoping you might like to do an interview? I could set it up for any time that suits you.’
Thomas pumped his fists in the air as I watched him attempt to kick water at me from the far end of his paddling pool. I turned away from him and huddled over the phone. ‘Do you think you could pop the details in an email to me?’
When the water in the pool was evenly spread across the rest of the garden, Thomas moved to his bike and propelled himself along as fast as his lean legs would permit, heading for the gate. When at last I was able to put the phone down, I stumbled after him. ‘Get back here.’
He shook his head. ‘Leaving.’
I dropped to his height and blocked his path. ‘Sorry for throwing your bucket, darling. I was trying to concentrate on my call.’
He kicked at the ground. ‘Hungry.’
I hauled myself to my feet. ‘Okay, let’s go inside and see what we can find, shall we?’
Of all the parenting things at which I was failing, feeding Thomas seemed the most egregious.
When he was first starting to eat solid food, I would spend every other Sunday evening cooking and freezing nutritious meals with a laundry list of clean foods like kale and quinoa. He invariably turned his nose up, and more went on the floor than in his mouth. Defeated, I’d let the most recent freezer stash run out, and now the chances of me producing more than a plate of fish fingers for his dinner were slim. The most I could hope for was that there was a handful of oven chips somewhere in