Come to her house.Come to her house.Either she was going to shoot her and bury her in the backyard, or she wasn’t as angry as Lorna had imagined. Either way, Lorna would not sleep a wink tonight.
She typed,Is 6 okay?
Yep. CU then.
Chapter 17Lorna Now
Bean arrived home from school the next afternoon in a red-and-white-striped T-shirt and brown cargo shorts, like some cartoon character. The only thing missing was a beanie with the propeller on top. It was a sad fact the boy had no mother to gently guide him into dressing less like a caricature.
Not that Lorna had any idea how to guide him, given her own problem with selecting clothes. She’d spent the better part of the day fretting about this evening and trying on different outfits. No matter what she put on, she looked ridiculous, like a nineteenth-century nanny come to drag a child away to boarding school.
She finally settled on black slacks and a white shirt. She put her hair in a low messy bun and tied a scarf around her neck. She thought maybe it looked jaunty and not stuffy. No sartorial magic was going to transform her wardrobe or hair on such short notice.
Bean was full of news about Aiden, a kid in his class who liked to wear silly hats to school and then make the teachers chase him. “He had to go to the principal’s office,” Bean reported with wide eyes.
Lorna, with one of her own eyes on the clock as it slowlyticked its way to five, said, “He sounds like a delinquent in the making.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone who is always going to be trouble.”
Bean laughed. “Aiden isalwaysin trouble.”
“Guess what, Bean?” Lorna finally blurted, unable to contain her news another moment. “My friend said I could come over today.”
Bean gasped and clapped his hands over his mouth. “Yourbestfriend?”
“Yes, Callie.”
“She wants to be friends again?”
“I don’t know yet. She may want to tell me to my face that she hates me. But at least I’ll know, right?”
“Right,” Bean emphatically agreed.
Lorna pressed a hand to her belly and laughed self-consciously. “I’m so nervous. Is that crazy?”
“Dad says if I’m nervous, then probably my friends are nervous, too, so she’s probably nervous too.”
Seth was a gold mine of advice, apparently. She wondered if Callie was nervous. Lorna imagined her looking the same, maybe her hair in braids, with cannons in her windows to blast Lorna out of her life once and for all. Which was an absurd thing to imagine. Callie was a grown woman. “She may be nervous, but I bet she doesn’t feel queasy like I do.”
“Okay, if you feel like you’re going to throw up in the car, open your door and lean over,” Bean instructed her. “I had to do that once after Grandpa took me to SeaWorld. He said I ate too much junk. Did you eat too much junk today?”
Lorna shook her head. She swallowed down another swell of nausea. She should not have mentioned it, because now she felt like she might throw up. What were these nerves? Why was shesuch a wreck? This wasn’t a broken marriage or a broken law. She made sales pitches to bigwigs and head honchos all the time and never felt anything but annoyed that they’d kept her waiting. This was a childhood friend she wanted to apologize to. There should not be so much anxiety about it. And yet she was filled with it. She pressed both hands against her belly.
“You can always tell if you’re sad or scared because something hurts,” Bean informed her. “But if you’re happy, you feel kind of floaty, and nothing hurts. So be happy.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in, but she took her eyes off the clock, which had just hit five, and looked at Bean. “What are you, like, a miniature Eckhart Tolle or something?”
Bean’s brow wrinkled. “Is that a candy bar? I’m not a candy bar. But if Iwerea candy bar, I’d want to be a KitKat.”
“Smart,” she agreed.
Her phone rang, startling them both. She picked it up. “Hello?”
“Lorna, hi. It’s Seth.”
Seth, she noticed, sounded breathless and her anxiety ratcheted. Breathless on the phone was never good. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m going to be late—”
