Starlight (Peaches Monroe #2)(58)
Author: Mimi Strong

At home, my parents barely let me in the house before they sat me down to talk about adoption papers. My father had gone into problem-solving mode the minute they’d returned early from their trip, and once he starts, he’s like an unstoppable cargo train.

The funniest thing about that night was that the two of them couldn’t stop smiling. I honestly thought they were going to be furious with me as soon as we all left the safety of the hospital, but they weren’t.

It’s hard to be anything but calm when a newborn is sleeping in a laundry basket next to you, his tiny hands curled up like rosebuds.

All babies should be so lucky, to be as wanted as Kyle. I hadn’t known this at the time, but my mother had tried for years after my birth—tried to have a younger brother or sister for me. She says she would have had four kids, if it had been possible. She had an abnormality in her uterus that they didn’t discover until she was in the hospital having me, by emergency caesarian. The abnormality didn’t show up on the ultrasound, but the doctors said she would have difficulty bringing another baby to term.

She chose not to believe them. But medical problems don’t care what you believe.

They tried and tried in secret, and it wasn’t until after Kyle came along, and we sat together at the table with him slumbering in the laundry basket, that she told me all the details about the miscarriage heartbreaks she’d suffered.

At last, I finally understood why she’d cried for two weeks, all during Christmas break, when I was twelve. I’d gone onto the internet that holiday and thanks to Dr. Google, diagnosed her with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I printed out some information about special lights you can get to combat the dark, rainy Washington winters.

She’d lost a baby on Christmas Eve. A boy. They named him Kyler and held a small memorial in January. I thought they were going to the funeral of a distant uncle.

And then, three years later, there was a healthy little blue-eyed surprise who needed a lot of care, and a name. Their hearts were so full. Their prayers had been answered, and, unlike the doctors, they believed me that I hadn’t known. My parents were concerned, but they weren’t angry. They were overjoyed.

“I love the name Kyler,” I told them, glancing over at his little red face. He just looked like a baby, not a person, so what did I know? “I would name the baby that, but isn’t that a girl’s name?”

My mother started crying, the tears falling into her smile. “Sweetie, it’s a boy’s name.”

We talked some more that night, and over the next few days, about responsibilities and care of the baby, now named Kyler—Kyle for short.

I’m not going to lie and say my parents were saints about the whole thing. We had moments. When my father was bleary-eyed from baby duty all night, he said a few cross things to me about certain clothes I was wearing and accused me of being “prone to whimsy.”

I took his comments in the worst possible way; I heard him say I was a fat slut. Those weren’t the words, but guilt has a way of twisting and balling things up to torture you.

My parents are smart people, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out my friend Toby, who lived down the block, was the other half of the surprise baby equation. Toby was uninvited from “homework sessions” behind closed doors, and after a few tense meetings with Toby’s family, he agreed to the terms of the adoption.

Toby’s family claimed that there had been a job offer across the country in the works before all of this “baby daddy drama” had started, but none of us believed it. They moved away before Kyle’s first birthday. Toby came over once (supervised) and held Kyle. The whole time, he looked like he was about to vomit.*

*Coincidentally, that’s not dissimilar to how he looked the first time we had sex.

And now I will answer the questions I’m sure you have:

1. Yes, I knew how babies were made. I was fourteen and went to public school, people. But I looked up a monthly ovulation chart, and it made perfect sense to me, so naturally I felt I could outsmart the main force that has altered women’s destinies since the beginning of time.

2. I continued to get what I thought was an irregular period. I don’t have the same abnormality my mother did, but there’s a little uterine weirdness going on, for sure.

3. There’s no such thing as a food craving that I would find unusual in any way.

4. Any body changes, I attributed to puberty, given I was going through puberty at the time.

5. My parents absolutely didn’t know or suspect, not consciously. They wouldn’t have gone on a three-day trip to Arizona and left me to go into labor at home alone if they had.

6. Except for the part where I nearly died, the delivery wasn’t too bad.

“Thank you for an amazing birthday,” Keith said as we ate our cake and ice cream at a neighborhood cafe near his apartment.

It was nearly midnight, and I felt twitchy with nerves, as if I had bug bites all over me instead of just one on my shoulder. Being outdoors in the sun all day makes my skin sensitive, even if I don’t get sunburned.

My commercial shoot started the next day, Monday, and finished on Tuesday. I’d gotten myself through the print photos the week before, barely, but now I had movement and my voice to mess things up.

I’d been assured that the horrible, rude model, Sven, wasn’t a part of the commercial, but I couldn’t shake the idea he’d be there anyway, and they’d say “too f**king bad” if I didn’t like it. They had a lot of money riding on the new product line, and they had to pay me my modeling fee no matter what. Deep down, I worried the whole thing would be a colossal failure, and everyone would think I jinxed it with my jiggly ass.

“Stop it,” Keith said.

I looked up from my cake and ice cream, confused by his words. Stop eating cake? But there was still cake on my plate. What kind of cruelty was this?

“Stop worrying about the shoot,” he said. “Everyone on set tomorrow is there to make you look good. Think of them as your people, your team. If you’re not sure about something, ask. And take your time. They’ve scheduled two days to shoot a thirty-second commercial.”

“It’s actually splitting into a couple different commercials.”

He used his fork to separate his chocolate cake from the ganache. “A couple? In that case, you should definitely freak out. You’re toast.”

“You’re not helping.”

“Wait ’til we get home. I’ll undress you and take your mind off your worries.”