Happy Birthday: A Novel

Her due date was in June. She had a baby now and a due date. She walked out of the doctor’s office in a daze, feeling stunned. The decision had been made. And April knew she wouldn’t change her mind.

She hailed a cab and went back downtown to the restaurant, and as soon as she got there, she went upstairs and called her mother.

“I’m keeping it,” she said softly. Valerie was still at work.

“Keeping what, darling?” She had just come out of a meeting and had a thousand things on her mind. “Oh my God,” she said, before April could answer the question. “You are? Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” She wasn’t happy to hear it, and April could tell.

“I saw it on the sonogram, Mom. It looks like a baby. I can’t do it. I want to have it.” She was crying as she said it, and listening to her, Valerie started to cry too.

“Are you going to tell the father?” She was desperately worried about her daughter.

“I don’t know yet. All I know is that I’m going to have it. I’ll have to figure out the rest as I go along.”

“All right,” Valerie said firmly, “let me know what I can do. Thank God you’re not feeling sick. I was sick as a dog with you.” This wasn’t the choice she had hoped April would make, but she was willing to go along with it and support her. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” April said firmly.

“And when is this going to happen?” Valerie asked with dread.

“In June,” April said, smiling for the first time in a week.

“I have to admit,” Valerie said, sounding shaken by the news, “it’s a bit much turning sixty and facing becoming a grandmother all in one week.” She was trying to be a good sport about it. It had been one hell of a week, but surely for April too. Her thirtieth birthday had brought with it an unexpected gift. Valerie hoped that it would prove to be that and not just an intolerable burden for her daughter. It was not going to be easy. She had a demanding business to run, and her mother knew how much her restaurant meant to her. She had been willing to give up her personal life for four years in order to do it, and now suddenly she was going to have a baby on her hands too, with no man to help her. It was certainly not what Valerie would have wanted for her. “I was the same age when I had you,” she said, sounding pensive. “But I had your father to help me, and he was very good with you.”

“I’ll figure it out, Mom. Other women do it. It’s not the end of the world.” And maybe, just maybe, it was the beginning of a whole new life for her, and she was willing to do all she could to have her restaurant and a baby. In the beginning at least, she could have the baby in the restaurant with her. And after that there was day care. Other single mothers did it, she told herself. So could she.

Next, April called Ellen to tell her that she had decided to keep the baby, and Ellen was thrilled for her. She promised to lend her baby clothes and a stroller. By the time she hung up, April felt reassured and a little less scared. She kept reminding herself to take it one step at a time. She still had to decide if she wanted to tell Mike Steinman, but she wasn’t ready to do that yet, or anyone else. She had to get used to the idea herself first. And it was a lot to get used to. She sat staring at the photograph from the sonogram after she talked to Ellen. It still didn’t seem real to her. She put the photograph in her desk drawer, then put her apron on and wrapped it around her, stepped into her clogs, and went downstairs to work. But this time, she was smiling, and everyone in the kitchen was relieved to see that she was her old self again. She was scared but excited, and she told herself all night that she had seven months to figure out how to make it work.

Valerie was thinking about her daughter that night, as she lay in bed watching TV. She was flipping through the channels, and worried about April’s decision to have the baby, when she saw Jack Adams, the sportscaster, interviewing a well-known wide receiver and she recognized him from the elevator on her birthday when he could hardly walk. She watched him for a few minutes. He mentioned having injured his back recently, and he seemed to have recovered as he moved easily on-screen, but talked about how excruciating it had been.

She smiled, thinking of the condition he’d been in. He looked a lot different now on the screen, and very smooth. He appeared to be humorous and light-hearted, and he was very different from the disheveled creature who could barely walk that day, in gym clothes and rubber flip-flops. On-screen, he was a nice-looking man and more articulate than most sportscasters, and she had to admit, as she watched him, that he was very good-looking. She knew that when the network had signed him, it had been a big deal. A very big deal. She had heard too that he had a reputation for dating very young women. It was funny to see him on the screen, after being in the elevator with him that day. Doubled over in pain, he had looked like Rumpelstiltskin, and without thinking about it any further, she changed channels to a sitcom she watched occasionally, but a few minutes later, she turned the comedy off too. As she turned off the light to go to sleep, she reminded herself to call Alan and tell him about his accurate prediction about April’s baby. She had thought he was crazy when he said that April would have one. But he was right. He certainly was good at what he did. She fell asleep thinking about him, and about April. She dreamed of her all night with a baby in her arms, crying and saying it had been a terrible mistake, and begging her mother to help her, and there was nothing Valerie could do.

Valerie woke up in the morning, convinced that April was making a huge mistake, but equally certain that she couldn’t sway her. Once April made up her mind about something, she rarely changed course. She had been that way with the restaurant, dogged and persevering every inch of the way, overcoming every challenge and obstacle to reach her goal. Valerie was that way too, and always had been with her career. She was a woman who always knew what she wanted, and so did her daughter. It was a quality, not a flaw, but in this case, Valerie was convinced she was wrong. She called April to talk to her about it again that morning. She was still upset by the disturbing dream she’d had the night before.

“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Valerie pressed her. It was still early, and April was at her desk, poring over the bills intently. She had been up since four and back at the fish market again at five that morning.

“Yes, I’m sure, Mom,” April said quietly. “It’s not a choice I would have made intentionally, but now that it’s happened, I don’t feel like there’s any other option. I’m thirty years old, I don’t know if I’ll ever have another shot at having a baby. I haven’t had a relationship in five years, not a serious one, just the kind of thing like what just happened, although it’s usually not a total stranger. I work all the time. When do I have time to go out and meet anyone? I’m always working. And it’s never going to be the right time for me to have a baby. I want to open another restaurant one day, then I’ll have two of them and I’ll be working even harder.

“If I do meet someone, I’m not even sure I’d want to get pregnant. I’ve never been a hundred percent sure that having children would fit in my life, or that I’d be good at it. But now that it’s happened, I don’t have the guts to just give it up and walk away. What if I never get pregnant again, or never meet anyone? I will have had this opportunity I threw away, and maybe I’ll never get a second chance. Maybe if I were twenty-two, it would be different. But not at thirty. I’m too old to refuse a gift like this.

“And I’m not even sure I’d have felt differently at twenty. That little person with the heartbeat you see on the sonogram screen is pretty compelling. That’s a baby in there, a real live human being, not just a kink in my lifestyle, or a glitch in scheduling. It’s a person, and for some incredibly stupid reason, this happened to me. Now I need to rise up and meet the challenge, even if it scares the hell out of me, which it does. I’ll just have to figure it out as I go along.

“And fortunately, it’s no longer a big deal to have a baby if you’re unmarried. People do it all the time. Women go to sperm banks and get inseminated by strangers. At least I know who this baby’s father is. He’s a smart, educated, employed, decent-looking guy. I may think he’s an asshole, and he hates my restaurant, but he doesn’t seem like a terrible person for this child to be related to. And it’s what I have to work with for now. Under the circumstances, this is the best I can do, to face what happened. The responsibility here is mine.”

“But you don’t even know this man, April,” her mother said mournfully. She was voicing all of April’s own fears.

“No, I don’t, Mom. I didn’t pick this, and I wouldn’t have. But I want to make the best of it, instead of doing something I may regret for the rest of my life, if I abort it.”

“And what if you regret having it, for the rest of your life?” her mother asked her honestly, and April closed her eyes as she thought about it, and then opened them and smiled. No matter how strong her mother’s doubts were on the subject, the decision had been made.

“I’ll send it to live with you then. You can tell everyone it’s your baby, and even look properly embarrassed about it. Then no one will believe you’re sixty. I think that’s the perfect solution.”

“Very funny,” Valerie said. She had already decided that under no circumstances would she admit it publicly in