When You Least Expect It (19 page)

“Hi,” India said, looking up. “Where’ve you been? You missed dinner.”

“I was working at the library. I guess I lost track of time,” Jeremy said. He still had his green canvas messenger bag slung over one shoulder.

“Are you hungry?” India asked.

“No, I grabbed a sandwich while I was out.”

“Sit down and join us. I’ll pour you a glass of wine,” India said.

“No, thanks. I’m going to go upstairs and take a shower,” Jeremy said. He gave Lainey a half-smile and then disappeared back into the hall.

Lainey stood. The warm, intimate mood had disappeared. Suddenly, she felt awkward and out of place, as though she didn’t belong there.

“I should probably go,” she said abruptly.

“You don’t have to,” India said. She patted the couch. “Stay and watch TV. I think there’s another makeover show coming on.
Maybe this time the hosts will make the lady cry when they tell her all of her clothes are ugly.”

“I’m too tired,” Lainey said, feigning a wide yawn. “I’m about to fall asleep. I’ll do your nails tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure. Okay,” India said, nodding, watching Lainey get to her feet. “See you tomorrow.”

I reread HippyChick’s post on the FutureRaceFantatics online message board, before hitting the Reply button. The shorthand of the board had taken a bit of getting used to at first—“B2” meant Book Two of the Future Race series, entitled
The Dark Dust
, “JH” was me—but now I was an old hand. I drafted my response.

I typed, my fingers flying over the keyboard, and hit the Post Reply button. The page reloaded with my new post at the end, written under my online alias, Magnus. I waited a few minutes, and another reply popped up from HippyChick.

It actually wasn’t a bad title, I thought. Better than anything I’d come up with so far; the working title was currently INSERT KICK-ASS TITLE HERE. I’d been hoping inspiration would strike while I was in the process of writing, but I hadn’t been doing much of that lately. I was only forty-eight pages into the manuscript, stuck at the point where Griff’s teen son, Lorcan, is kidnapped by a band of traveling metal collectors (metal being a rare commodity in the Future Race world). It wasn’t that I worried about Lorcan’s fate—Griff would, of course, save him, but not before Lorcan ended up in the hands of Griff’s nemesis, Tertia, the wily female head of the Bixan clan, thus setting up a sexually-charged-albeit-not-consummated Mrs. Robinson scenario. It was more that I’d run out of steam. And rather than banging my head against my keyboard while I tried to think of a new laser-powered weapon system that could be deployed against Griff and his ragtag
group of freedom-loving followers, I found it was far more pleasant to pass my time reading the nice things that HippyChick and the other FutureRaceFanatics had to say about my books.

At first, I’d avoided the temptation of posting on the board. But eventually I found myself drawn in when HippyChick and another regular, BobaFett36, were debating whether Future Race was supposed to be an allegory for World War II, and I had to jump in with my opinion that no, it was definitely not. I hated allegorical storytelling. Of course, I couldn’t admit to being me. For one thing, I’d look like an asshole if I admitted to lurking on a website for fans of my books. And for another, they might not believe that I was me, but just some loser claiming to be me, and run me off. So I created an online alias for myself—Magnus—and posted on the allegory thread.

The problem was that once I had started, I found it hard to stop. Internet message boards were oddly addictive. They allowed you to carry on in-depth conversations without having to go to the trouble of actually talking to anyone. Also, you could contain your conversations to just those areas that you found interesting—you weren’t forced into having to listen to someone bore on about his diet, or the dream he’d had the night before, or how much he hated his boss.

I hit the Reply button and was about to tell HippyChick how much I dug her proposed title, when I heard the metallic clink of our mail slot being opened, and then the thump as the mail fell into a basket India had nailed to the door.

Otis, who’d been sleeping on his bed in the corner of the dining room, jumped to his feet with a startled bark.

“Easy, killer,” I said.

When we’d first moved in, there hadn’t been a basket in place, so the mail would just fall to the floor in a pile. This was how we discovered Otis’s fetish for envelope glue, although not before he’d eaten both the utilities bill and a birthday card to India from my mother, which we later learned—when my mother took me
aside after Thanksgiving dinner to complain that India had never thanked her—had also contained a gift certificate to Hickory Farms.

Glad to have a legitimate excuse to take a break from writing, I stood, stretched—was it normal for my back to make that popping sound?—and went to collect the mail. It was the usual assortment of bills, junk mail, glossy catalogues, and requests from our respective alma maters for donations. I pulled out the Visa bill and our mortgage statement, and then headed to the kitchen, where India was readying dinner. I dropped the rest of the mail straight into the recycling bin.

“Anything for me?” India asked, not looking up from the carrot she was dicing with a deadly looking chef’s knife.

“Nothing good,” I said. “Not unless you’re planning on donating a new student union building to the University of Florida.”

“Mmm, not this year,” she said.

Backtracking to the dining room, I first opened the mortgage statement—confirming that yes, we still owed a monstrously large sum that we couldn’t ever hope to repay to the bank—and then the Visa bill, which I expected to contain the usual higher-than-strictly-necessary balance.

And then I read the impossibly high number on the bill.

“What?” I muttered aloud.

I stared down at it, trying to make sense of the numbers I was seeing there. There was no way we’d spent nearly fifteen hundred dollars in a single month. Was there? No, of course not, I thought, relief trickling through me. It must be a mistake. Either that, or we were victims of credit card theft. And if that was it, Visa would refund the money that had been illegally charged.

I looked at the list of charges, expecting to see charges for computer or electronic stores or pornography websites, and suddenly felt like I’d been sucker punched. $424 at Pea in the Pod. $285 at Mimi Maternity. $190 at The Gap. $390 at Coach.

Wait, Coach? I had a vague memory of something to do with
Coach. An overheard snippet of conversation between India and Lainey about a handbag. A handbag Lainey was carrying. That’s right, now I remembered! India was complimenting Lainey on the handbag. A
Coach
handbag.

Realization dawned. Lainey must have stolen our credit card and gone shopping with it!

Oh, God, I thought. India was not going to take this well. She probably wouldn’t even want to report it to the police and risk upsetting Lainey, but without a police report, the credit card company surely wouldn’t cover the loss, would they? Or was it even legal to report it? Did it count as fraud when the perpetrator was your future baby’s birth mother? Knowing India, she’d want us to just swallow the additional debt, to pretend it hadn’t happened, rather than risk upsetting Lainey. But if we didn’t confront it—confront Lainey—what would stop her from doing it again? Did I really have to sit by and say nothing while this woman torpedoed our credit and drove us even deeper into debt we couldn’t afford?

I fisted my hands on top of the dining table to stop them from shaking. “India, can you come in here for a second?” I called.

I could hear the rhythmic beat of India’s knife slicing through vegetables, readying them for pasta primavera, followed by the muffled clank of a knife being set down on the counter. A moment later, India appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a dish towel she’d fashioned into an apron by tucking it into the waist of her jeans.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Is Lainey here?”

“No. She went to the movies with my mom,” India said.

This momentarily distracted me. “With your mom?” I repeated. “Why?”

India laughed. “I know, right? They’re like the new Odd Couple. I don’t really get it, but they seem to love hanging out together.”

I refocused. “Look at this,” I said, pushing the Visa bill across the table to her. Her face went pale and her eyes widened before she’d even picked it up.

“I can explain,” India said quickly.

“You can explain,” I said, confused by her reaction. “You mean you
knew
about this?”

“Of course I knew. What did you think?”

“I thought Lainey stole our Visa card.”

India frowned. “That’s terrible. I can’t believe you think she’d do something like that.”

“What else was I supposed to think?” I retorted, my voice ringing with frustration. “That you’d be stupid enough to run our Visa bill up to its limit?”

“Excuse me?”

“The fact that you’re not denying it leads me to believe that yes, you really were that stupid.” I was light-headed with anger, but even so, I had a distant feeling that this might be going a bit too far. The fact that India’s blue eyes were flashing—always a danger sign—supported this.

“Please calm down,” India said.

But I couldn’t calm down. “Do you not get that we’re in a financial crisis? Seriously, do you not get that? We owe a
lot
of money. More than we can pay off anytime soon. We have no savings left. None. And every month, the bills coming in are more than we make. Which means every month, I have to figure out what I can get away with not paying and still avoid having our water or power turned off or our mortgage foreclosed.” I could hear my voice rising into a near-shout, but I couldn’t stop myself. “And while I’m conducting this horrible balancing act, you’re off buying, what?” I looked down at the Visa bill, now crumpled in my hand. “A four-hundred-dollar handbag? God knows what at The Gap? Seven hundred dollars of maternity clothes? Do you not see how insane that is?”

India crossed her arms and glared at me. “And do you have any idea what couples in this very city are willing to pay for a healthy baby? A Coach handbag is the least of it. There are birth mothers out there getting cars and apartments and bank accounts. It doesn’t matter if it’s legal or not, or if it’s moral, it’s happening. What if Lainey finds out? Do you want her to dump us and run?”

“We have a contract,” I said.

“Which means nothing, as you well know! She has the right to change her mind at any time up until the point that the adoption papers are signed. Do you get that?
At any time
. And she can’t even sign the papers until forty-eight hours after the birth.”

“And so, what? You’re going to let her hold us hostage until then?”

“Stop being so dramatic. She’s not holding us hostage. She didn’t ask for anything. I offered to get her that stuff,” India said.

“Why would you do that?”

“I told you. I want to keep her happy,” India said.

“Even if it means driving us into bankruptcy? Because that’s where we’re headed. We could lose our home, India. Is that what you want?”

“Of course not. But I don’t think things are as bad as you’re making them out to be. We both have good jobs. With all of the extra work I’m doing, my earnings this year are up,” India said.

“Which would be great, except for the small fact that you’re giving all of that extra money to Lainey to replace her income!”

“So now I’m the bad guy because I don’t want our birth mother inhaling nail polish?”

“I’m not saying you’re the bad guy,” I said. “But it’s simple math: We can’t spend money we don’t have. The end.”

“Aren’t you up for a new contract with your publisher? Why don’t you ask for a larger advance?” India suggested.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

The last shreds of my self-control dissolved. “Because right now, I’ll be lucky to have any advance at all.”

India stilled, her hand resting on the back of a black dining chair. “What does that mean?”

I suddenly remembered—a moment too late—that I hadn’t told India about the latest crappy royalty statement; that I had, in fact, been purposely keeping this information from her. Partly, I didn’t want to upset her, not when she was already under so much stress, first from the failed infertility treatments and now the pending adoption. But that wasn’t the whole truth. I also hadn’t wanted to admit my failure. I stared at the table, unable to look her in the eye.

“My books sales are down. The last time I spoke to my editor, he wasn’t what I’d call optimistic about the future of the series,” I said.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrugged. “You’ve had enough to worry about lately. I didn’t want to add to it.”

“You didn’t want to add to my worries,” India repeated.

She stared at me, blinking in a dazed way. My anger softened. I knew what she was going to say before she even said it: We were a team. She always wanted to know what was happening with me, good or bad. We loved each other and that was all that mattered.