All the Difference (5 page)

“It looks like someone murdered Veruca Salt on your doorstep,” she called.

“The grape girl from
Willy Wonka
? That was Violet Beauregard,” Molly said. “Never did like Veruca Salt—the character
or
the band.”

“Trust me, I know,” Jenny said, and climbed back up the staircase. “I brought wine, anyway. We need to talk.”

Molly sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

She fished her key out of her pocket and opened the heavy, mahogany-stained door. Molly's brownstone was a stylish, miniature version of the other row houses nestled in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. Her real estate agent had tried to regale her with all the benefits of getting a smaller home. She'd said there'd be less cleaning to do and a small dining room was a great excuse to bow out of hosting big family dinners, but Molly had just shrugged her shoulders. What had actually sold her on her home was the simple act of walking through the front door. The house was sweet, quiet, and bright, with a large white-framed picture window in the living room that illuminated the whole first floor all the way back to the kitchen. It fit her. There were rumors that the current owner would soon put the house on the market, and Molly wished more than anything in the world to be able to purchase it herself.

Had wished,
she corrected herself. Back when she thought there would be another person to help with the mortgage.

“So, what's going on with you, Mol?” Jenny tossed her vintage handbag onto the couch and took a bag from Molly. Her hair, pulled back by a red-and-gold scarf she'd folded into a headband, tumbled around her shoulders like ribbons curling on top of a gift. “I don't hear from you for a couple of weeks, and I can't find you at work anymore. It's like you've gone underground. You have me worried.”

“I'm sorry.” Molly followed her into the kitchen. “I just . . . I'm not dealing with this very well.”

She set her bags on the counter and reached into one for the chocolate chips she'd opened on the way home.

“Any of it,” she added.

“Three years is a long time, Mol,” Jenny said. Her voice was soft. “Long enough to justify you falling off the planet for a while and then resurface wearing pants with holes in them.”

Molly winced and smoothed down the soft cotton of her yoga pants. “Be nice. They're comfortable.”

She knew she was going to have to tell Jenny the real reason she'd started wearing clothes with elastic waistbands in public. She needed to say it: that they were the only pants that fit around her thickening middle. Molly had put it off for too long, and now she braced herself. She needed to face this pregnancy, face her fears about what was coming next, and she needed her friend to help her do it. She was having a baby. A thrill rippled along Molly's nerves, surprising her. It had happened, just like that. She was going to be a mother.

Molly had heard acquaintances in recent years talk about
how hard it was for them to want a baby and not have one. She'd listened to the women talk about how obsessive the desire was, about how the absence of a baby in their lives and the act of going through each day without getting pregnant was all they could think about. But no one had ever told Molly that getting pregnant without trying could render her just as preoccupied, just as fixated and unwilling to live her life like usual. It had made sense to keep news of the pregnancy to herself until she'd waded through enough of the muck to know how deep it was. This was a secret that was going to divulge itself whether Molly shared it or not. But a secret you never planned to know in the first place can be the easiest kind to keep.

Jenny wandered into the living room with an open bottle of wine and two glasses. She scrolled through Molly's iPod until she found Billie Holiday, and Molly sank down onto a small ottoman beside her. “Foolin' Myself” started playing from the surround-sound speakers, Holiday's slow vibrato weaving in and out of their conversation. Molly looked around at her serene, beautiful house. The living room walls were painted an earthy gray-green, and she'd tossed some bright red pillows from IKEA on the sofa for color. With last year's holiday bonus from Shulzster & Grace, she'd been able to pick up a funky floral-patterned armchair that had been on sale at a furniture boutique in Old City, as well as a couple of small cherry-wood tables. A brick gas fireplace held court over the sitting area, grounding the space.

“Do you know what I remember most when I think about New Year's?” Molly pressed her lips together. “I remember how shiny Scott's hair looked.”

“What?”

“It must've been the gel, or whatever product he uses now,
but that's what I keep thinking about. How wet his hair looked, and how it had these deep ridges from where he'd combed it.”

“Okay,” Jenny said. “That's what you're picturing? What about that big, shiny diamond he was waving in front of you?”

“That thing was huge,” Molly said.

“That thing makes my diamond look like Dan took a jimmie off an ice cream cone and stuck it on my finger.” Jenny laughed. “I can't believe you refused it. I think that was the first time I've ever seen you do something so . . . unexpected.”

Molly shook her head. “I can't, either.”

“So, that's it? You go along, dating him for longer than some people are married, then bail when he actually
does
want to get married?” Jenny took a sip of wine. “You're a piece of work, Sullivan.”

“I know, right? It was so weird, like my gut finally decided to speak up,” Molly said. “I saw Scott kneeling there and my brain just went, ‘Nope. No. Can't do it.'”

She bit the inside of her lip. “And the timing was terrible, considering—”

Molly heard the words come out of her mouth and gulped. No time like the present, she figured, and eyed Jenny for a reaction.

“Considering what?” Jenny asked. “Considering that you'd been with the guy forever and we all thought you'd end up marrying him?”

She hadn't caught the hint. Molly lost her nerve.

“You didn't really think I'd marry him, did you?” Molly asked. She watched Jenny swirl the wine around in her glass, thinking.

“You fought a lot, yeah,” Jenny said. “But you'd been with him for so long that, I don't know.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It seemed inevitable.”

“That's just because he's gorgeous,” Molly admitted.

“Can't argue with you there, sister,” Jenny laughed. “It's almost a shame. You two would've made really good-looking babies.”

Molly suddenly felt faint.

Later, over a dinner of Thai takeout around the butcher-block island in Molly's kitchen, Jenny shifted topics to the changing atmosphere at Shulzster & Grace. There were rumors of staff cutbacks, and while Molly had worried that specialists like her would be let go first to save the firm a huge chunk of their revenue, Jenny had heard that her marketing department would be cut in half, moving the graphic design work out to inexpensive freelancers. Molly took small bites of her pad Thai as they talked, willing herself to keep down the waves of nausea in her stomach. Jenny and Dan had just started making the loan payments for Dan's master's degree from Temple, and even with Dan pulling in coaching jobs on the side, the Philadelphia School District wasn't quite able to shower its teachers in money. Neither Jenny nor Molly could afford to start over in their careers almost ten years after they'd begun.

Molly looked at the bar stool beside her, the place where Scott always sat when they ate, now empty save for an extra napkin folded with care on the seat. Through the window she could see the bare tree that rose from the frozen soil of her tiny, fenced-in backyard. One brown leaf still stuck to the branches, as if refusing to let go.

Not even a month had passed since New Year's Eve, but life as she'd known it had screeched to a stop. The confusion that haunted her days was chipping away at the shell she thought
she'd been so careful to create. She didn't like this lost feeling, but she didn't know how to shake it.

Molly's calendar on the weekends was blank now, the hours long and empty. There were no more parties, no exquisite eight-course dinners at Le Bec Fin or soused late nights tasting the pricier offerings at Tria Taproom. She'd spent the last two Sundays sweeping minuscule crumbs off the kitchen floor, thinking about the mornings just weeks earlier when she and Scott would sleep in, then take a lazy walk arm-in-arm down to the Square for a brunch of oysters and ten-dollar Bloody Marys. Last night, Molly had caught a 76ers game on TV, and it was a strange feeling to see the arena but not be there, to see the box above center court where she and Scott used to watch the games. She worked very hard to not think about the plane tickets he'd given her for Christmas. They'd been set to spend Valentine's Day on a resort in Los Cabos, Mexico. Last year at this time, they'd been zip-lining in Costa Rica.

And this year?
Molly thought. Through the window she could see the lone leaf on its branch, trembling in the wind. This year, she'd chosen to trade the charming boyfriend and tropical boat drinks for cable TV and ginger ale. Molly's stomach flipped, and she put down her chopsticks.

“We saw a gorgeous house for sale last week, Mol,” Jenny was saying. “Three bedrooms, a cute yard, and far enough away from my parents' house that we would never have to visit.”

Jenny had never forgiven her father for carrying on an affair years earlier, leaving her and her mother staring at each other in shock in a silent house. Molly knew the feeling of betrayal had only worsened when her mother welcomed him back home months later, once he finally ended the relationship. Molly sometimes thought Jenny blamed her mother the most, for moving
forward and pretending that their family had never been ripped apart. Jenny hadn't forgotten. She also refused to pretend.

Molly got up to get a glass of water. Her wineglass remained untouched on the island.

“I wanted to see what you thought of it,” Jenny said. “Though with the layoffs possible, I guess we need to hold off on buying anything.”

Molly groaned in sympathy.

“I guess that would make sense. For now, anyway,” she said. “But that sucks, Jenny.”

Jenny was looking at her plate. “Being a grown-up is kind of hard sometimes, isn't it?”

“I'll say,” Molly replied, looking at Jenny's empty glass. She heard the last notes of another Billie song trail off, accompanied by the forlorn wail of a saxophone, and in the quiet of the moment that followed, knew what she had to say next.

“Um, Molly?” Jenny hesitantly broke into Molly's thoughts. She was pushing the remnants of her curry around on her plate. Molly noticed that her fork was shaking. “There's something else I wanted to talk to you about, too, but I wasn't sure how to bring it up.”

A weight like a rock dropped into Molly's belly. She held her breath and waited.

“Dan and I have been trying to have a baby.”

Jenny said the words to her plate. Her shoulders were slumped forward, making her back curve like the rounded part of a question mark.

“But we can't,” she said. “Have a baby, I mean.”

Jenny looked up at Molly, meeting her eyes.

“We can't get pregnant.”

Molly stared at her best friend's face. A kind of paralysis took hold of her body, making her legs feel wobbly. She couldn't move, couldn't breathe, could say nothing in response to the honesty of one of the dearest people in her life. Molly watched Jenny talk, heard her speak of fertility windows and thermometers. She let her reach out, listened to Jenny confide in her, and stayed quiet and removed. Molly felt like she was standing in the shadows of her secret, stuck there, because now she knew that if she stepped out into the light Jenny wouldn't be able to look at her.

“Sorry, Mol,” Jenny was saying. Her voice was cloudy. “I hate to unload on you after everything you've been going through, but I had to. I couldn't imagine keeping something like this from you for any longer.”

Molly forced herself up to take a box of tissues from the pantry.

“Why didn't you tell me before this?” she asked. “Before everything with Scott? I could've been there for you.”

Jenny pushed her curls back off her shoulders in a self-conscious gesture. “Because I didn't want to make too much of a big deal about it. I didn't want to put more pressure on myself than there already was.” She shrugged. “It's like, if I didn't talk about it, didn't acknowledge it, even with you, then it wasn't a problem.” Jenny laughed. “You probably think I'm nuts.”

Molly placed her hands in her lap to hide their trembling.

“So what now?”

“I don't know. I think we have to see a doctor,” Jenny replied. “I keep picturing myself sitting on our bed, holding our baby in my arms, but it feels like it's just a dream. It's like we've been wasting weeks—months—waiting for our lives to start, if that makes sense.”