of me, Whitney. Not only do Americans consume nine pounds of pickles per year per person, but Elvis loved fried pickles!” She turned and stalked off.
Well, if it was okay with Elvis, then it’s okay with me.
Monday evening, later, March 22
Chase was in the kitchen when I got home, making himself a tuna fish sandwich. Mr. Tibble and Scram were weaving in and out between his legs like skaters making figure eights on the ice. Scram was meowing at the top of his lungs. He thinks it never hurts to ask for what he wants—especially if it’s from one of his favorite food groups. Mr. Tibble normally doesn’t stoop to Scram’s level and act like a cat. He allows Scram to speak for him and express his displeasure. He also lets Scram steal food off the table and promptly takes it away from him. He does not let Scram go into the litter box first, sleep in his bed or have the one catnip mouse in the house that hasn’t been beheaded. For some reason, whenever I think about Mr. Tibble, I’m reminded of Mitzi.
“Hi, honey.” I slipped my arms around Chase’s warm, taut middle and laid my head against his back. I could feel him breathing, and his innate, irresistible masculinity held me there as firmly as if he were a magnet and I a metal shaving. “How are you feeling today? Stomach better?”
“I feel great. Must have been something I ate.”
“There could be something going around. Or maybe you have morning sickness.”
He put down the mayonnaise, wiped his hands on a towel and turned around in my arms to kiss me on the forehead.
“You understand, of course, that I can’t dignify that with a response.”
“Wise choice.” I plucked a carrot from the plate he’d prepared for himself.
“There’s too much pregnancy conversation in my life. I have more information about what happens when a couple goes to a fertility specialist than I ever wanted to know. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try to get Mitzi to quit talking, it doesn’t work. I’m the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. Mitzi is the water and it’s hopeless to think I can hold her back.”
“Sometimes medicine can be an insane business—the E.R., people coming in on drugs, hallucinating, hyperventilating, bleeding—but it’s nothing like your office. Insanity there is considered the norm.”
“No one does drugs, but there is definitely a lot of hallucinating going on.” And I began to entertain Chase with Mitzi’s newest prepregnancy scheme, learning to love the common pickle.
Chapter Seven
Friday, March 26
It wasn’t until today that Chase and I had time to sit down together and rehash our week. After dinner we curled up together on the couch, I with a cup of jasmine tea and Chase with espresso.
I only drink espresso when I can dip sugar cube after sugar cube into it, something my one-hundred-pound mother taught me. Since all this baby-nutrition-good-health conversation has started buzzing around the office, I feel guilty even considering a dietary no-no. Mitzi can read in my eyes when I’ve enjoyed food she’s barred herself from having, and she can smell toffee on my breath from forty paces. It can’t last forever, of course, because Mitzi loves junk food.
“Since when did Mitzi become such a force of nature?” Chase asked when I told him. “She’s always been a climactic upheaval, but recently she’s gained momentum.”
“She’s more serious about this than about anything I’ve ever seen, including sending me to Hasty-Date to find a man and shopping for the perfect pair of Prada shoes.”
That might have sounded shallow to an outsider, but Chase got my drift. I told him about the basal thermometer and the list of tests Mitzi and Arch were facing.
Chase whistled. “That should give them a pretty clear picture of what’s going on.”
“Not entirely,” I muttered. “No one has even considered what it’s going to be like to work with Mitzi while she goes through this. Aphids eat their mates, right? I’m afraid Mitzi will devour us like so many cheese crackers before she’d done. She’s had so many mood swings I feel like we’re already dizzy.”
“It’s an emotional time,” Chase murmured.
And an emotional Mitzi is quite a sight to behold. Today she was alternately crying tears into her penne pasta salad with artichoke hearts, gorgonzola and pine nuts—nothing as plebian as a cheese sandwich at lunch for Mitzi—and laughing hysterically at the cartoons in the newspaper. Mitzi is becoming a split personality, and we at Innova have been watching her crack. When she got weepy over Blondie and Dagwood, we retreated to the safety of our desks.
“This has to hurt her more than she cares to let on,” I told Chase.
Chase suddenly took my face in his hands and kissed me soundly. It was the kind of kiss that, had I been standing, would have made my knees weak. Since Mr. Tibble and Scram were currently sitting on my kneecaps and had made them completely numb, the kiss only blew every sensible thought from my head as I kissed him back.
He stroked my cheeks with the pads of his thumbs and murmured, “You are amazing, Whitney.”
“What did I do to deserve that? I want to know so I can do it again.”
“You have compassion for Mitzi, even though she drives you crazy. You never dwell on the negative in anyone’s personality and always look for their humanity.” He grinned at me and, numb though they were, my knees did weaken. “Maybe that’s why I feel so fortunate to have you love me.”
“I love you because you are impossible not to love,” I told him. “Sometimes my heart hurts, I love you so much.”
“Hurts? I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It’s a good hurt. It feels as though it might explode with joy.” I snuggled into his chest and sighed.
“And?”
“And what?”
“And what was that sigh about? It wasn’t the sigh of a totally happy woman, now was it?”
“No fair. You know me too well.”
“So spill it. What’s not right in your world?”
“It’s Kim. She’s…” I searched around in my mind for a word, and could only come up with one. “Obsessed.”
Chase tucked me closer to himself, a sign that he was ready and willing to listen.
“They are finding adoption complicated and intimidating.” I thought back to this morning when, during her coffee break, Kim had filled out a self-assessment quiz meant to help her and Kurt identify their feelings and goals about adoption.
“Whitney,” she’d said, her eyes wide, “I assumed we’d adopt a healthy infant and raise him or her as we did Wesley. I didn’t even consider the children with disabilities who are in desperate need of parents.” She’d held out a paper for me to read. “Look.”
“Which disabilities in an adoptive child,” the sheet had read, “would you be willing to consider?” The inventory had been nearly a page long, listing everything from premature and drug-exposed babies to those with Down syndrome, blindness and a host of family history issues, such as diabetes, mental disorders and alcohol addiction. Then it had asked which racial heritages she and Kurt would consider and whether they had gender preferences or would think about taking twins.
“How can I decide? If a child needs love—needs us—then we would take it, wouldn’t we?” she’d lamented. “And what about all those we can’t take? What happens to them?”
“She either wants to bring all the children home with her or give up on the process entirely, depending on her mood,” I told Chase.
“They’re forgetting something important,” he commented. “They already have someone