Gina tries not to stare as Calan leads Malaika up the stairs. Gina counts their steps to calculate the exact moment when they’ll walk into her son’s room. She is thankful that Calan keeps his room clean and orderly. At least Malaika won’t be walking into a teenager’s cave with posters of busty girls and piles of dirty laundry.
Gina decides to make them snacks. Not to have an excuse to check on them or anything. Not at all. This is about sandwiches, not snooping. Everyone likes sandwiches.
It only takes a few moments for Gina to prepare her famous chicken Tuscany paninis—focaccia bread, aioli spread, pulled roasted chicken, red onions, tomatoes, and basil—and a pitcher of homemade agave lemonade.
Gina picks up the tray and heads to Calan’s room, pleased to see the door wide open. Calan is sitting cross-legged on his bed and Malaika is sitting in his chair, holding a comic book. There’s a girl in her son’s room! No big deal!
“Snack time!” Gina sets down the tray on Calan’s nightstand.
“Oh, Mrs. Dew—I mean, Gina. Thank you!” Malaika grins.
“So how has America been treating you, Malaika?” Gina asks. “You’re from Switzerland, right?”
“Yes,” Malaika says. “I like it here very much. You are from Alma?”
“No.” Gina shakes her head. Does Salt Lake City mean anything to a girl from Switzerland?
“Are you from a big city?” Malaika asks.
“Not as big as New York City,” Calan pipes in.
“You like the city?” Gina asks.
“Yes,” Malaika says. “I was only there for a short time, but I would like to go back very much.”
“I lived there, briefly,” Gina replies.
Gina thinks back to her time in the city with mixed emotions. She had married Bobby and moved to Alma at the tail end of her sophomore year in college. The plan had been to take a semester off after Calan was born and then she’d resume her studies at NYU. Alma was only a fifty-minute train ride from the city, after all. During her pregnancy though, Gina became involved with the ASC. She was voted in as secretary—unanimously, too—and became consumed by the club’s activities.
Then Calan was born and it seemed like Gina didn’t have a single free minute, let alone hours to attend school. There were days she couldn’t find the time to shower until Bobby got home. She even quit running—it was too impractical a hobby with a stroller. It was Bobby who suggested she wait another year, and Gina had happily agreed. The unglamorous truth is that she loved being a mom, loved the ASC. School could wait. But then one year became two, and two became three, and now here she is. And it’s not that Gina regrets it, not really. Gina loves her life. But she does wish she had a degree. It’s only a piece of paper, but it’s one that matters.
Eva Stone has a degree. Gina wishes she didn’t know that.
“And then you moved here?” Malaika says here like it was a very unfortunate downgrade.
“I came because of Bobby, of course. When he proposed, he told me that he’d get to pick where we lived and the gender of our firstborn child.” Gina laughs.
Malaika giggles. “Did he get it right?” She glances at Calan.
“He guessed both.” Gina looks down, remembering Bobby’s prediction. In the very beginning of her pregnancy, he had put his hand on her belly and announced that they would be having twins: a boy and a girl. “It will be a new Dewar tradition,” Bobby had said. (In her heart, Gina feels this is because Bobby was afraid that, if they had two boys or two girls, they’d love one of them more. Bobby is convinced that Nick is his parents’ favorite.)
“I was a twin,” Calan says. “I ate my brother or sister.”
Malaika’s eyes widen.
“In the womb,” Gina clarifies, making a circular motion around her abdomen. “It’s something that happens to twins sometimes. One fetus absorbs the other.”
“The vanishing twin,” Calan says.
“Ah, yes,” Malaika lets out a small laugh.
“But I got to pick his name.” Gina reaches for the lemonade pitcher and begins to pour two glasses. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.” Enough chitchat. She doesn’t want to be one of those moms. Malaika seems like a lovely young woman. Why shouldn’t she hang out with Calan and talk about comic books? It really is no big deal.
“I like his name,” Malaika says. “Like Alan with a C.”
An electric shock. That’s what it feels like. Like someone zapped her with one of those Taser weapons. Gina’s brain forgets that her arm is holding a heavy glass pitcher. She sees the pitcher slipping from her fingers and tumbling to the ground. A thud, followed by the sounds of Malaika gasping and Calan leaping from his bed.
“Mom!” Calan exclaims.
Malaika picks up the pitcher. It’s unbroken, thanks to the carpet in Calan’s room. “I—I’m sorry.” Gina says. She doesn’t recognize her own voice. “I should get a sponge. And some ammonia.”
But instead of heading downstairs towards the kitchen, Gina races to her own bedroom. She shuts the door behind her and slides down with her back against it until she lands on the floor.
When Gina first moved to Alma, eight days after marrying Bobby, she had been prepared for two things. The first was dealing with her mother-in-law, who Gina suspected was bipolar since, at first, she seemed to hate the idea of Gina being pregnant and then, out of the blue, began to love it. The second was adapting to life in a town that was ten times smaller than Salt Lake City and over four hundred times smaller than New York. She had been to Alma only twice before. It seemed nice enough, though Gina worried that she’d feel just as suffocated as she had felt in SLC.
As it turned out, Gina had nothing to worry about.
Tish revealed herself to be a lovely person. Demanding and, to some, intimidating, but a kind and loving mother-in-law. And Alma, Gina discovered, wasn’t like SLC
