Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

her deep contemplation of it.
    “Who?” Bee shot out.
    “You probably already…”
    “Who?”
    “I’m pretty sure you…”
    Bridget huffed in exasperation. She grabbed the arm that wore Diana’s wristwatch and held it up so she could read it. “We have a staff meeting in eight minutes. I’m going to go find out who you’re talking about.”

 
    I don’t have to be careful, I’ve got a gun!

—Homer Simpson

 
    C armen was sitting at the table in the small kitchen of the apartment later that day, clutching the bottle of prenatal vitamins.
    In this time of thinking, certain facts aligned themselves in Carmen’s mind. Her mother had gained weight in the past couple months. Carmen had put it down to happiness, but now she felt silly for not being more observant. Christina’s wardrobe had subtly but certainly shifted toward the roomier stuff in her closet. Had she stopped drinking wine? Carmen tried to think. Had she gone for a lot of doctor’s appointments?
    Carmen had once overheard her mom joking with her aunt about how it was easy to hide stuff from teenagers because they were so self-absorbed. She felt the sting of it now, though she’d laughed it off then.
    She heard a key in the lock of the front door—her mother, arriving home from work at the usual time. Carmen stayed sitting, knowing her mother would appear in the kitchen moments after she’d put her bags down. Carmen hadn’t planned an ambush, exactly, but it came off a lot like one.
    “Hi, nena , love.” Christina’s whole body looked tired as she entered the kitchen. She’d always eschewed the practice of wearing sneakers with her suit to and from work, but recently she’d caved on her dignity. Now Carmen understood why.
    Wordlessly Carmen held up the bottle.
    Wordlessly Christina stared at it, and slowly its significance registered. Her eyes widened, and her expression changed from confusion to surprise to dread to exhaustion and back again.
    Carmen decided to skip to the crux of the matter. “How far are you?” she asked in a moderated, matter-of-fact tone, though her heart was pounding. She knew it was true, but still she wanted her mother to deny it.
    Christina seemed to stiffen her spine to mount a vivid defense. She seemed to consider several possible angles. And then, before Carmen’s eyes, she deflated again. Her dark red blouse appeared to crumple. “Five months.”
    “You’re kidding.” Well, there it was. “When were you planning to tell me?” Carmen’s voice was flatly accusatory.
    “Carmen. Darling.” Christina sat down across from her. She wanted to reach for Carmen’s hand, but Carmen was sitting on one, and the other was strangling the neck of the vitamin bottle. Christina withdrew her attempt. She was quiet for a few moments, collecting her breath. “Just let me explain, okay? It’s complicated.”
    Carmen offered something between a shrug and a nod.
    “David and I have talked and thought a lot about having a baby. He hasn’t had that joy in his life, as I have. We didn’t know if it would be possible. But we agreed, life is too short not to try for something you want.”
    Carmen hated the “life is too short” rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because “life is too short not to,” you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.
    “At the very least we thought it would take me a year or two to conceive, if I did at all,” Christina went on. “We never dreamed it would happen so fast. I’m almost forty-one years old.”
    Carmen cocked her head skeptically. With half her mind she was calculating whether they’d conceived this baby before or after their wedding. It was a close call.
    “I didn’t even guess I was pregnant until I was almost three months along. I just couldn’t believe it. And then I needed to think about how to talk to you. The timing was not what I had wished. It’s