I noticed him staring at me now. “What? Did I get dip on myself?” I looked down at my shirt.
“No, I was trying to see if you’re showing yet.” His forehead crinkled. “I asked my mom and she said she definitely had a bump at this point.”
“Well, you’re gigantic. What did you weigh, twenty pounds at birth?” Wait, that wasn’t funny. “Holy shit, did you?”
“No, of course not! My mom didn’t have any trouble with either my sister or me,” he assured me. “We go to the doctor next week, right? We can ask her about how big you should be. You’re eating a lot more now,” he said approvingly.
I put my hand over my stomach. I wasn’t showing but it did feel different there. “What else did your mom say about having you?”
“She said I was perfect. The best baby ever.” He grinned. “That’s what she says about everything I did.”
“Does she know about your cleats?” I asked. “Does she know that they’re so disgusting I make you leave them in the garage?”
“Perfect,” César repeated, and pounded his chest. “The perfect specimen.”
I threw a carrot at him but he caught it and ate it. He was pretty good with his hands. “Lindy said her baby was a surprise, too,” I told him. “But she seems excited, she and her husband.”
César nodded at me. “Babies are a gift.”
The nausea was pretty much gone, but one thing I hadn’t gotten over yet were the tears. I jumped up to go to the refrigerator and wiped my eyes because what he had just said had set me off. Was this a gift? I thought of Lindy waddling. “Your mom got her life back, right? She went back to work and everything after you and your sister.”
“Sure,” he said. “She took a semester off, or two, maybe, and then she went back to teaching at the university. It was easier for her because my dad could work from home, and of course she had the rest of my family to help her.”
“Right. Your family.” When César had told me before that they were all very close, I hadn’t realized what that meant. He spoke at least once a week to his parents, his sister, and grandma, too, in English and in Spanish. He texted and called aunts and uncles, cousins. It reminded me that I needed to talk to my sister, my one relative, about what was happening. I still hadn’t said anything to her, not about the baby or about me moving to Florida. I had told César that I would only be here through the end of February, and that date was coming up fast.
“Hey.” César closed the door of the fridge and looked down at me. “What’s making you upset all of a sudden?”
“Nothing. Just hormones.” I wiped off my face.
“I talked to my mom today, in fact,” he said. “She asked again about us visiting.”
“Yeah, you should go see them.”
“I said us. They want to meet you, too.”
I shrugged. “I’m not big into meeting families.”
“But you’re going to have to see them. The baby—”
“I have a great idea,” I interrupted him. “Let’s try to go for the rest of the night without talking about the baby again. Tell me what you guys are doing in practice instead.”
César’s eyebrows went up, but he did switch topics. He talked about running drills, the continued search for a new head coach, his friends. “I’m having people over this weekend,” he mentioned.
“Really? Like a party?” I asked. “Can I invite my friends, too?”
“It’s your house,” he told me. “You’re paying rent, remember?”
I nodded, already texting. “Saturday, right? Ok, I still have my old list of stuff that I used to get for the parties I had at Lincoln’s apartment, but I think if a bunch of football players are coming over, I’ll have to up my quantities. Oh, Nathalie and Brett already said they can come. They’ll bring a huge crowd.” I kept planning out loud as César turned back to the stove.
“This is your thing, isn’t it?” he commented. “This party stuff is what you like.”
“Well, yeah,” I answered. “It’s fun. You like to go out, too.” But he hadn’t been very much, when I thought about it. He’d been mostly at home since that night back at the Silver Dollar a few weeks ago. “It’s my job, too, at the winery. You should have seen what they were doing before I got there. Euna knows stuff like how many glasses you get from a bottle of pinot and how many mushroom caps per person, but she was literally decorating with doilies. I had to help pull them into the twentieth century, and yes, I mean that they were more than a hundred years behind.” I got more excited and happier as more of my friends responded, saying that they would come over on Saturday.
“I’m glad that you’re so into this,” César said. I looked up, and he was smiling at me. “You’ve seemed a little down.”
“Well, who wouldn’t be?” I asked reasonably. I thought about Lindy’s ginormous stomach. And butt. “Remember what you said about making a mistake?” He had said that I was a giant mistake, the biggest ever. “I’m going to have to deal with the consequences of what we did for the rest of my life, and it’s...” Overwhelming, terrifying, and oops, I was already talking about the baby. I had lasted about five minutes. And I didn’t feel very excited and happy anymore, either.
“We will deal with the consequences,” he corrected. “Remember me?”
“Right, sure. We.” We would see about that. “I’ve been down for a while, with my sister leaving and finding out about my father. I’m not turning cartwheels right now but I’m trying my best.” I checked my phone and tried to reclaim my earlier excitement. “Awesome, Kailey’s coming. She’s so fun.” I took more vegetables and tried to moderate with the dip. “What else did you do today?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
“What’s
