Sister's Choice (21 page)

“Are you all right?” Kendra asked.

“Here.” Jamie grabbed her sister’s hand and rested it against her belly. She was wearing stretchy pants, and she was glad she wasn’t wearing jeans, since Kendra wouldn’t have had enough access through the heavy fabric. “Do you feel anything?”

Kendra frowned. “Isn’t it a little early?”

“There are two in there, you know. I’m getting as big as a house.”

Kendra concentrated. The two men looked faintly ill at ease, as if they were witnessing something that wasn’t meant for their eyes.

“Nothing,” Kendra said at last.

“Whatever it was, it stopped.” Jamie patted her sister’s hand. “Maybe the Indian food will jump-start it. I’d better eat some for lunch.”

Cash and Isaac started toward the cabin, discussing some green building techniques that Isaac wanted to incorporate. Kendra walked behind them with Jamie.

“It must be amazing to feel a baby moving inside you,” Kendra said. “Like nothing else.”

“Actually, it feels a little like too much chili on a hot summer night.” Jamie slipped her arm through her sister’s. “But it
is
amazing. I’m sorry it’s not you feeling it.”

“Me, too. But this is close.”

“Once the babies are moving around, you can sit all day with your hand on my belly. They’ll give it a workout.”

“It’s beginning to seem real to me.”

“It seems real to me every time I look down.”

“You’re feeling better though, now that you’re further along?”

“Like a million bucks. There’s the occasional rush to find the nearest toilet. My breasts still feel lumpy. I sleep like the dead at night. But it’s all small stuff.” She stopped. “Okay, try again.”

Kendra looked doubtful. “Maybe you’re just hungry and your stomach’s growling.”

Jamie grabbed her hand and placed it on her belly again. “Right there. Now.”

Kendra frowned as she concentrated. Then she looked startled. “Oh, I felt that.”

“Probably as much as I did.”

“It’s gone now.”

“Just wait another second or two.”

They stood there, the September sun beating down on them. Jamie thought of the day she’d driven up to the clearing for the first time, that day more than two years before when she hadn’t been sure her sister would even want to see her again.

Now, here they were, Kendra’s children growing inside her. The world could be a funny place.

“Oh, I felt that, too,” Kendra said in wonder. “Hello, little ones.”

Jamie blinked back sudden tears.

Cash liked watching Jamie with her family. She and Kendra couldn’t be more different. Jamie had told him once that she looked like their mother, while Kendra took after their father. They were both easy to look at, Jamie more Vivien Leigh in
Gone with the Wind
, Kendra more Katharine Hepburn in
The African Queen
. He supposed his enthusiasm for classic movies was bound to invite those kinds of comparisons.

Jamie loved to cook and entertain. Kendra went through the motions, concentrating on setting tableware precisely the same distance from each edge of the place mat while Jamie experimented with tossing fresh herbs into the salad. Kendra’s dinner parties would probably include interesting conversationalists high at the top of praiseworthy professions, with quality food either catered or purchased from gourmet groceries. Jamie’s parties would include colorful locals mixed with close friends, and everything on the table would be created by her own hands from recipes she’d probably developed on the spot.

“Alison is cutting the sandwiches into stars,” Grace announced. “She has decided to make a quilt sandwich for you to enjoy.”

Cash wasn’t surprised his grandmother got along so well with Jamie Dunkirk.

“Jamie tells me you provided the program at the bee this morning,” Kendra told Grace. “I’m sorry I missed it.”

As they laid out the food, the women chatted about Grace’s quilts. Cash went to wash his hands, and when he came back, he saw his father in the doorway.

Isaac had seen Manning first. By the time Cash reentered the room, the two men had already stepped out to the porch.

“I just need to see Cash a moment,” Manning was saying loud enough for Cash to hear. “Something’s come up on another site I want to check with him about.”

“I’ll let you two talk,” Isaac said. “But sometime when you’re not in a hurry, Manning, I’d like to have a little time alone with you. You’re one of the few people who seems to remember my mother.”

“We were friends, yes, but it was a long time ago.”

“I know so little about her. I’d kind of enjoy hearing whatever you can tell me.”

Cash knew his father well. And from Manning’s tone, Cash could tell he was uncomfortable. He paused, not sure whether to rescue him or let this continue. Then his father began to speak, slowly at first, then gaining momentum.

“One thing I can tell you is that she’d be proud of what you’re doing. You know, that work on the health of rivers? She loved that river out there. She was the only person I knew who even loved it when it was rising high. She always said flooding was the way the river got rid of all the bad things people put into it. Once we were walking together and somebody dumped some trash in the water from a truck. She threw herself in front of that pickup so he couldn’t get out without running her down, and she screamed at him until I was afraid he was going to take his shotgun off the gun rack behind him and silence her for good. She wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody.”

“Well, that’s a story,” Isaac said. “My temper’s a little more even.”

“She
was
a little wild. Never quite fit in here. I always thought it was partly that Rachel needed more than our schools offered back then, especially for a girl. If she wanted to know something, she figured it out without half trying. These days, we call those kids gifted, but back then, teachers just called them troublemakers.”

“Until Kendra started digging around a couple of years ago, the only thing I knew about Rachel Spurlock was that she didn’t want to raise a baby.”

“Couldn’t, more likely. She never really found her way. And she wouldn’t raise a baby alone and poor, not after her own childhood. She had a mother, sure, but she yearned, like nobody I’ve ever known, for a father, too. She wanted two parents, a normal life, something other than scraping along in that cabin that burned down over there, hoping her mother would get another job taking care of some sick person so they could buy what they needed. They were poor. Not dirt poor, you understand, but poor enough she felt it right here.”

Cash could envision his father touching his chest with his fist, a longstanding habit. He had eavesdropped long enough, and he couldn’t retreat without someone noticing, so he crossed the distance to the door and pushed it all the way open.

“Hey, you wanted to see me?” he asked Manning.

Manning looked as if he’d been pulled from another time and place, then relieved—so relieved, in fact, that Cash thought it was odd.

“Ran into some issues on the Sanford place we need to go over,” Manning said. “Nothing big, but timely.”

Isaac put his hand out to shake Manning’s. “I appreciate your time. If you think of anything else you’d like me to know, I’d like to hear it. It’s nice having somebody to talk to who knew Rachel. It’s a little like piecing together half a puzzle. I’m afraid my father will always be a mystery.”

Manning gave a curt nod. “I’ll do that.”

Isaac went back inside, and left Cash and his father alone.

“He seems like a good man,” Manning said, almost to himself.

“I like what I know about him,” Cash said.

“His mama would be proud.”

“I’m glad you told him so.”

Manning shook his head. “Little enough.” He took a deep breath; then he looked at his son. “You’re getting awful comfortable over here, Cash. What’s going on between you and Miss Dunkirk?”

Cash raised a brow. “Let’s talk about what’s going on at the Sanford place.”

Manning seemed to debate his answer. Then he shrugged. “It’s that sunroom they keep insisting they want us to build.”

Kendra and Isaac went off to do more shopping for the house, and Alison, tired from preschool, went into her room for a nap. While Grace told Alison a story in the bedroom, Cash helped Jamie put the remains of lunch away.

“There’s a refrigerator filled with Indian food,” she told him. “You could come back tonight and help me eat it.”

“I’ve got to be down in Richmond for a meeting with some folks who want to build a house on the other side of the county. But I appreciate the invitation.”

“Kendra was able to feel the babies moving. Just a ripple, but something. It was a holy moment, like we were in church together.”

“How do you feel about it? Them moving and you knowing they’re not yours?”

“It’s nice of you to ask.” She stretched plastic wrap over the leftover salad and put it next to the take-out cartons of chicken korma and basmati rice. “It feels odd, if you want the truth. It was such a special moment when it was one of my girls. A bonding moment.”

“And not so much now.”

“That part’s in my head. I guess it’s always in our heads.”

“Hormones help.”

“Well, I’ve got those coming and going. But there’s this voice inside me that says not to get too impressed with what’s going on here, that this is for Kendra and Isaac to enjoy and for me to keep a distance from.”

“Probably smart.” He looked up. “Probably hard.”

“One day at a time.” She smiled at him, then she put her hand on her midriff. “Oh. Wow.”

“Moving again?”

She didn’t think about what to do next. She just reached for his hand and guided it to her belly. “There. Can you feel it? Just a little ping, a little shake.”

She released his hand, but he didn’t move it away. He frowned, as if in concentration. Then he looked up at her and grinned. “This is as personal as I’ve been allowed to get so far. I’m making headway.”

She slapped his hand playfully, but he didn’t move it.

“There,” he said at last. “Was that it?”

“That was probably the Indian food. I feel a burp coming on.”

He moved closer, put his arm around her to turn her and pulled her so she was standing with her back against him, leaning into him. He circled her waist with his arm and splayed his hand across her belly, covering more of it.

“This way, if I don’t feel a baby, I still get to feel something good,” he said.

“Spoken like a man.”

He kissed the top of her head. She could feel it, the slight warmth, the pressure. She smiled.

And then a baby moved again, and this time Cash laughed. “Well, I’ll be. That was the real thing, right?”

“The real thing.”

“This is good work you’re doing. You bringing these babies into the world. Pro soccer players, I’m guessing by all this activity.”

But she heard the catch in his voice, and she smiled and put her hand over his.

“Thank you, Cash.”

“For what?”

“For making this special for me, too.”

J
amie enjoyed working on the baby quilts with Grace. She had shopped for hours online and at two different quilt shops until she found what she wanted. For one quilt she had chosen three fabrics. Black with the white silhouettes of puppies and kittens, white with tiny red umbrellas and yellow ducklings in rain slickers, and finally bright red with cheerful one-word inscriptions such as “love” and “kindness” and “laughter” printed in white and black. The fabric made her smile, and the Sister’s Choice design was graphic enough to show it to perfection.

She’d started on that quilt first, since she was only using three fabrics instead of four, so it was a little simpler. But she had bought the fabrics for the second quilt, as well, choosing bright tone-on-tone prints of lime, orange and yellow, and for the background, a snowy-white cotton sprinkled with small citrus polka dots in the other three colors. Both the fabric and its placement guaranteed that the quilts would be so different that only a sharp eye or another quilt maker would recognize that the pattern was the same.

“Building a quilt is a lot like building a house,” she told Grace one morning when the two were stitching together in Grace’s sewing room.

Grace was working on stockings for the bee’s Advent quilt. Three weeks had passed since the meeting when the design had been decided on, and Grace had agreed to make four of the stockings herself. So far, she had covered one with appliquéd stars adorned with seed pearls and silver beads. A second was a crazy patch made with satins and velvets, and adorned with bits of old lace and a little jeweled mouse. Today she was cutting a stocking shape out of a quilt block she had patched together from sixteen homespun fabrics in muted country colors. She planned to stitch “Naughty or Nice” from top to toe in primitive black lettering.

“Quilting is much cooler on a hot day than building a house,” Grace said.

“You have to have a plan. That’s the pattern—or the blueprint, in the case of a house. Then you have to have a foundation, choose your materials carefully, measure very, very accurately—” Jamie knew this part from sad experience having ruined her first two blocks by forgetting to add the proper seam allowance “—and you have to put your best workmanship into it, or the end result is something nobody will want to live with or in.”

“Spoken like an architect.”

Jamie had ten out of twelve acceptable blocks now, and she loved putting them side by side and envisioning the finished quilt. She couldn’t imagine putting the same kind of devotion and passion into quilting that Grace did, but she had found that piecing a quilt met some basic need inside her to work with her hands and create something useful, but something smaller than a church or an apartment building.

With Grace’s help, her daughters had stitched together quilts in their chosen fabrics and were now learning how to tie them, making knots to hold the quilt “sandwich” together. It was easier for Hannah, of course, but with everybody’s help, Alison was making headway, too. Jamie thought it looked like quilting might turn out to be an interest she could share with her girls.

She checked Grace’s Betty Boop clock, then stood, put her hands against the small of her back and leaned into them. She was halfway through the pregnancy. She felt the babies move regularly now, and nobody looking at her could fail to notice what her body was up to. Her belly button had gone from an innie to an outie, and she had an itchy rash where her skin was stretching to accommodate her little guests.

The babies themselves should be almost a pound each and longer than her hand. She was scheduled for another ultrasound soon. Kendra and Isaac were still trying to figure out if they wanted to know the sexes of the twins. She hoped they could decide before she was up on the table.

“Are you okay, dear?” Grace asked. “Did you sit there too long?”

“My back’s a little achy. And my stomach’s a little rumbly. Maybe I didn’t eat enough breakfast.”

“I’ll go right down and get you a snack. Why don’t you come along, and you can recline in comfort on my sofa?”

“Oh, you don’t have to fuss. I’m fine. I ought to just go. I have to pick up Alison in a little while, and I’ll take her out to lunch on the way home. If I’m lucky, I can eat her leftov—” She stopped, because suddenly she realized she wasn’t fine at all. Something was definitely not right.

“I need to use your bathroom,” she said.

“You don’t look well.”

Jamie was sure she didn’t. Fear was draining the color from her cheeks. “I’ll be back.”

“I’m coming with you. I’ll stand in the hallway.”

Jamie didn’t object. She was already halfway there. Inside, she took a deep breath, then began to undress.

A few minutes later she came out.

“I’m spotting,” she said, after she had swallowed hard. “And not just a little.”

“Okay, it could be worse. You were afraid your water had broken, weren’t you?”

Jamie gave a short nod.

“Can you make it downstairs?”

“I think so. I feel shaky, but mostly from—” She burst into tears.

Grace put her arms around her. “There, there. We’ll get you looked at right away. You’re an experienced mother. You know this could be many things, some of them not so serious.”

“I can’t lose these babies.” Jamie tried to stop crying, and that made her cry harder. She dissolved in Grace’s arms, wailing.

“You don’t know you’re losing them,” Grace said, patting her back. “Let’s get you downstairs and get your feet up, okay? I’ll call Cash to get you into your doctor’s office. Or Sandra, if I can’t reach him. You haven’t met Cash’s mother yet. You’ll like her. She’s good in a crisis.”

“My sister—”

“I’ll call her, too. You can tell me how to reach her. She can meet us there.”

“Alison—”

“Cissy Claiborne can pick up Alison when she picks up Reese. She’s told you she’ll do that anytime you need her, right? I’ll call
her,
too.”

Jamie felt as if the world was ending. She could not imagine what she would do if she miscarried. How had she thought she could pull this off, that she, of all people, with all the mistakes she had made in her life, could make a miracle happen? How could she tell Kendra and Isaac she hadn’t been able to give them this gift?

“Stop it,” Grace said. “Whatever you’re thinking, stop it right now!”

“Let’s do this quickly, okay?”

“Exactly what we’ll do,” Grace said. “Exactly.”

Dr. Raille wasn’t a hand-holder. A woman in her fifties, she was olive-skinned and sharp-featured, with hair that was more silver than brown. She was well educated and too busy to mince words with her patients. She had probably always been blunt, but now she had the excuse she needed.

She finished her examination of Jamie and told her to stay flat on the table. Kendra was there, holding her sister’s hand. Unlike Jamie, she hadn’t shed a tear. Instead, she looked like somebody who had just been through a hurricane or an earthquake. She was in shock and going through the motions, but clearly she was waiting for reality to hit.

“We’ll do an ultrasound to be sure,” Dr. Raille told them. “But I’m inclined to think this is not as serious as it seems. I think this may well be a partial previa. The last ultrasound bears that out. We sometimes see bleeding about now when that happens, and it’s certainly more common with twins. It’s nothing to be too alarmed about.”

“Exactly what does that mean?” Kendra asked.

Dr. Raille seemed glad to lecture. “A low-lying placenta, one too close to the cervix, nothing more. If we’re lucky, and I’m assuming we will be, it’s marginal and will correct itself as the uterus continues to stretch. We’ll know more when we take a look. Miss Dunkirk, you just rest until we’re ready for you.” She patted Jamie’s hand awkwardly, then disappeared out the door.

“Is she just saying that to make me feel better?” Jamie asked.

“Does she seem like a woman who would say anything if it weren’t true?”

“You’re right.” For the first time since she’d seen the blood, Jamie felt hope stirring.

“I’m so sorry—” They had spoken the words simultaneously.

Jamie couldn’t even force a laugh. “Why would
you
apologize?”

“Because I let you take this on. Because you have so much pressure to succeed, you must feel like you’re being torn in two.”

“I feel awful, but not for me.” Jamie hesitated. “Well, that’s not quite true.” Then she started to cry again. “Darn hormones,” she sputtered.

“Under the circumstances, makes sense to me.” Kendra’s eyes finally filled with tears. “Of course you feel bad, too. You’re trying so hard. You want to make me happy, and it’s been working really well.”

“If something happens…”

“We aren’t going to talk about that. Nothing’s going to happen. This pregnancy is going to continue, and you’re going to be fine.”

“Grace and Cash’s mother—did you meet her?—they got me here so fast, I haven’t even had time to think.”

“Isaac drove like the wind.”

“How is he?”

“Quiet. That’s how he gets when he’s worried.”

“I want to do this for you!” The words were a wail.

“You don’t know how much that means to me.” Kendra squeezed her hand.

“Not as much as having these babies!”

The nurse, much more maternal in nature than her employer, bustled in. “We’ll get you set up in the next room, Miss Dunkirk. I’m so sorry about this, but you’re in the best of hands.”

Jamie looked at Kendra. “Do you want Isaac to see this?”

Kendra nodded. “He’ll want to.”

“If they’re okay…the technician might be able to tell the sex.”

“Doesn’t that seem like the most ordinary question in the world now?” Kendra’s eyes glistened. “And to think at one point it seemed so important.”

Sandra Rosslyn probably wasn’t quite sixty. Her hair was blond, although it had probably once been darker. She was slender and tall, and she moved with Grace’s sense of purpose, but without her considerable energy. She seemed genuinely warmhearted, fond of her mother, although a little wary of Grace’s eccentricities, and willing to take charge when it was clear she was needed.

She had appeared at Grace’s door twenty minutes after Grace phoned her, driving the same comfortable sedan Jamie remembered from her date with Cash. She’d settled Jamie flat on the backseat and her mother in the passenger seat up front, and then taken off like a NASCAR driver with something to prove. Now she patted Jamie on the hand as she helped her out of the backseat after the trip home.

“I’m so glad the news is good. I hadn’t even met you yet, but I’ve been praying for you and those babies since I heard about them from Mother and Cash.”

“It was so kind of you to just drop everything and come for us. I can’t thank you enough.”

“I’m available anytime you need me. Cash told me enough about you to know I’d like you. And I do. Anything you need now, you call. Anyway, you’ll be right here, and I’ll be coming to check on all of you, whether Mother approves of that or not.”

Sandra flashed her mother a smile and lowered her voice, although obviously Grace could still hear her. “She hates for me to fuss, but now I have an excuse.”

Jamie couldn’t believe she was going to be anybody’s excuse for anything. But there it was. The pregnancy was not in immediate jeopardy, probably not in jeopardy at all, but just in case, Jamie was assigned to bed rest. No arguments, no time to make plans. Bed rest starting immediately or sooner. To be discontinued later if the spotting stopped.

After the ultrasound and in full view of the waiting room, she and Kendra had gone round and round about the alternatives. Kendra and Isaac had wanted Jamie to come to Arlington and stay with them until she delivered. But Jamie had rebelled. The girls were happily settled in school and enjoying their new lives in Toms Brook. Jamie didn’t want to leave, either. She had Grace and the bee. She wanted to watch the new house being built using her plans. She wasn’t ready to give up her independence. And she didn’t want to say goodbye to Cash. Not yet.

Then Grace had set everybody straight.

“Jamie will come to my house and stay with me, of course,” she told them. “I’m an old woman who could use the company, and she and the girls will get the best of care. The girls can finish school right where they are. Sandra will help me get ready—” she didn’t even bother to ask her daughter, but luckily Sandra was nodding “—and so will Cash. When the doctor says Jamie can get back on her feet, she can move back into the cabin if she chooses. But as far as I’m concerned, she can stay until those babies come popping out. Now, how shall we get her moved in?”

So here she was. Sandra and Grace had brought her back to Grace’s house, and now they settled her on the living room sofa. She knew they were about to make sure that the two downstairs bedrooms were ready for guests. Kendra and Isaac had left the doctor’s office to go straight to the cabin. Kendra was going to pack up what Jamie and the girls would need for a few weeks, and while she did, Isaac was going to the school to pick up Hannah, then over to Cissy’s to get Alison. In a matter of hours, Jamie’s whole life had changed.

“It must have been reassuring to see those little ones bouncing around on that screen,” Grace said. “But I can’t believe your sister and brother-in-law decided they didn’t want to know the sexes.”

“After they left the room, the technician asked me if I wanted to know, since I was carrying them.”

“Now that would be something, wouldn’t it?” Sandra said. “Trying to keep that from slipping out in conversation.”

Jamie liked Sandra’s practical bent. She thought that what Grace saw as a lack of imagination was really just old-fashioned horse sense. Sandra’s personality was different from her mother’s, but they complemented each other perfectly. Maybe the way Ben and Grace had complemented each other.

“That’s what I told her,” Jamie said. “When they drove away, Kendra and Isaac were still arguing about whether they wanted to know.”

Sandra turned her attention to Grace. “Mother, I think we should put Jamie in the room that overlooks Daddy’s old pumpkin patch. It’s covered with wildflowers now, and the view of the mountains and the orchard in the distance is really lovely.”