Holy fuck. She was pregnant. My twenty-three-year-old sister with no boyfriend—that I knew of—was pregnant. Far-along pregnant. Pregnant enough to be showing a belly. Pregnant enough to have told us when she obviously hadn’t.
No wonder she’d been freaking out. I was freaking out seeing her like this. I had no idea how off the edge Mom and Dad were going to dive. Dad had joined Mom on the step, and they were both staring at Cassidy as if they were seeing a mirage.
I left the SUV and the bags to join them.
“Cassidy Marie. What on earth?” Mom’s voice was full of unshed tears. I didn’t know who they were for, but it wasn’t what Cassidy wanted, because her chin raised in defiance.
“Surprise. You’re going to be grandparents.” Cassidy tried to make light of it, but her voice was tight and missing the lightness it normally had.
“Who? What? Jesus…” Dad was blustering.
“Who doesn’t matter,” Cassidy said. “I chose to have the baby, and that’s all there is to it.”
“How could you?” Mom asked, hand to her heart. And again, I wasn’t sure what she meant. How could Cassidy get pregnant? How could she do it without having a partner in her life? Or how could she keep it from my mother?
“Can I suggest we go inside?” I asked.
Mom whipped around. “You knew? You knew and didn’t tell me?”
“No?”
“No one knew,” Cassidy said over me.
“The whole town obviously knows,” Mom thundered out.
“Since when have you cared about that kind of propriety, Mom?” I asked. Mom was not exactly a flower child, but she definitely wasn’t one to buy in to some nineteenth-century rhetoric about babies out of wedlock.
I pushed past both my parents and wrapped my sister in a hug. “Congratulations, Sis! I’m so happy for you. What a great Christmas present.”
That seemed to unlock my parents. They came forward, and we were suddenly tangled in a group hug that wasn’t our norm. All arms and legs and limbs, with a sniffling Cassidy in the middle of it all.
Tristan
THE ONES THAT DIDN’T MAKE IT BACK HOME
“The not forgotten but gone
They're in a better place up there
But they sure left a hole down here.”
Performed by Justin Moore
Written by Stover / Moore / Digiovanni / Mcgill
Laughter wafted from the kitchen asI came down the stairs. Hannah’s tiny voice and my grandmother’s sweet one. Both lyrical and smooth, blending together. I wasn’t sure what they were chatting about, but?by the way things were banging?I was pretty sure they were already in the middle of baking.
Grams wanted to bring several dozen cookies to the Holiday Open House at the music store later. I’d promised I’d help, but for the first time in what felt like centuries, I’d actually slept in—if you could call six o’clock sleeping in. Grams hadn’t knocked on the door because she knew what it was like to barely sleep at night.
It was just one of the many ways she and I were alike. It comforted me to know she understood rather than admonished it as my mother did. Grams had lost her husband, too.She may have lost him to a strokeinstead of an IED, but it was the same kind of loss. Unexpected. Unplanned.
Except, I couldn’t really say Darren’s death had been unexpected. Every time he’d been sent out on a mission as a Navy SEAL, my heart had seized up until I knew he was back safe. Now, my soul was permanently locked into a collapsed state that would never let go because he’d never walk through the door again.
Molly heard me before they did, and her nails scrabbled on the wooden floors as she came bounding out of the kitchen and jumped her furry brown-and-white body into my arms. My wiry-haired fox terrier was a bundle of energy, and no matter how well my friend Nash had trained her, we hadn’t been able to break Molly of jumping into the arms of the people she loved.
I’d barely put Molly down when a whiff of baby shampoo and a spin of a beaded shawl warned me Hannah was taking her turn. I pretended to fall to the floor with a groan as if the weight of her had caused me to collapse.
She was already giggling as my fingers found her stomach, increasing the laughter until it filled the sugar-scented air. My four-and-a-half-year-old barely weighed more than a couple of sacks of potatoes, but she still loved to pretend she was the size of the Hulk.