her and woofed softly, as if to say, Well?
“He’s right,” Travis said, “You’re not being fair. Don’t keep us in suspense.”
“I am,” she said.
“You are?”
She grinned. “Knocked up.”
“Oh my,” he said.
“Preggers. With child. In a family way. A mother-to-be.”
He got up and put his arms around her, held her close and kissed her, and said,
“Dr. Weingold couldn’t be mistaken,” and she said, “No, he’s a good doctor,” and
Travis said, “He must’ve told you when,” and she said. “We, can expect the baby
the third week of June, and Travis said stupidly, “Next June?” and she laughed
and said, “I don’t intend to carry this baby for a whole extra year,” and
finally Einstein insisted on having a chance to nuzzle her and express his
delight.
“I brought home a chilled bottle of bubbly to celebrate,” she said, thrusting a
paper bag into his hands.
In the kitchen, when he took the bottle out of the bag, he saw that it was
sparkling apple cider, nonalcoholic. He said, “Isn’t this a celebration worth
the best champagne?”
Getting glasses from a cupboard, she said, “I’m probably being silly, a
world-champion worrier. . . but I’m taking no chances, Travis. I never thought
I’d have a baby, never dared dream it, and now I’ve got this hinkey feeling that
I was never meant to have it and that it’s going to be taken away from me if I
don’t take every precaution, if I don’t do everything just right. So I’m not
taking another drink until it’s born. I’m not going to eat too much red meat,
and I’m going to eat more vegetables. I never have smoked, so that’s not a
worry. I’m going to gain exactly as much weight as Dr. Weingold tells me I
should, and I’m going to do my exercises, and I’m going to have the most perfect
baby the world has ever seen.”
“Of course you are,” he said, filling their wine glasses with sparkling apple
cider and Pouring some in a dish for Einstein.
“Nothing will go wrong,” she said.
“Nothing,” he said.
They toasted the baby—and Einstein, who was going to make a terrific godfather,
uncle, grandfather, and furry guardian angel.
Nobody mentioned The Outsider.
Later that night, in bed in the dark, after they had made love and were just
holding each other, listening to their hearts beating in unison, he dared to
say, “Maybe, with what might be coming our way, we shouldn’t be having a baby
just now.”
“Hush,” she said.
“But—’’
“We didn’t plan for this baby,” she said. “In fact, we took precautions against
it. But it happened anyway. There’s something special about the fact that it
happened in spite of all our careful precautions. Don’t you think? In spite of
all I said before, about maybe not being meant to have it . . . well, that’s
just the old Nora talking. The new Nora thinks we were meant to have it, that
it’s a great gift to us—as Einstein was.”
“But considering what may be coming—”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll deal with that. We’ll come out of that
all right. We’re ready. And then we’ll have the baby and really begin our life
together. I love you, Travis.”
“I love you,” he said. “God, I love you.”
He realized how much she had changed from the mousy woman he’d met in Santa
Barbara last spring. Right now, she was the strong one, the determined one, and
she was trying to allay his fears.
She was doing a good job, too. He felt better. He thought about the baby, and he
smiled in the dark, with his face buried in her throat. Though he now had three
hostages to fortune—Nora, the unborn baby, and Einstein—he was in finer spirits
than he had been in longer than he could remember. Nora had allayed his fears.
2
Vince Nasco sat in an elaborately carved Italian chair with a deep glossy finish
that had acquired its remarkable transparency only after a couple of Centuries
of regular polishing.
To his right was a sofa and two more chairs and a low table of equal elegance,