Page 78 of Sublimate
“Oh, here she goes!” Cadence took my hand and put it on her stomach and I felt a fluttering beneath my palm, like a bird’s wing.
“That’s the baby?” I asked in wonder and she nodded.
“Isn’t it amazing?”
It really was amazing and I was so happy for her. “Do you care if Nolan feels?” I asked.
She didn’t, so he and I switched places so that he could have a turn. I directed my gaze to the action on the field, where the batter had returned to the stands with his mom and they were trying to find another kid willing to step into the lineup. I was still thinking about karma and things coming back around, and Cadence’s mom was an example of that. She had gotten kicked out of her sister’s house a few years ago and had mostly fallen off the radar, but last we’d heard, she was miserable and alone. As she deserved. We also heard fairly regularly that Nolan’s parents were miserable, but still together. They still didn’t like me, especially his mom, but he didn’t let her step one inch out of line in how she treated me.
“Je t’ai à l’oeil, maman,” he would say, often with the smile I didn’t like. But then he would smile at me for real.
And as for Kolter—
“I felt her move!” Nolan said. He sounded so excited. “That was the baby!”
“It was,” Cadence agreed calmly. It was different from a few years before, when she hadn’t been able to say his name without blushing. Now, she only had eyes for Beau and for Finley, too. She called some encouragement to him now. “You’ll get to run again soon, Fin! Oh, shoot.”
He had taken that as a signal to go. Beau started after him but then shrugged and returned to the batter, who needed to adjust her braids before taking her swing. I patted mine, too.
“Did you hear anything about the extradition?” Cadence whispered as we waited.
“Nothing new, but I’m not really keeping track of Kolter’s mom.” The last news had been that her days on the run were over and a lengthy prison sentence awaited her here in the United States.
“That whole thing is just so crazy.”
It had been. First, Kolter had gotten mad at his new boss at a salvage yard in Florida, and he’d tried to exact revenge by driving that guy’s car into the big auto crusher. The police believed that he’d left his phone in the vehicle by mistake, so he had gone back in to get it but the machine hadn’t stopped…it was a bad way to go. Then his mom had tried to kill the boss for revenge. It hadn’t worked but she had caused a lot of damage before she’d taken off. Now, she was on her way back to the United States but in handcuffs. Things had not gone well for them since they’d left Michigan.
But things had been going very well for me and Nolan. He was in his fourth year of teaching and he loved it. Not that it wasn’t hard and stressful, but he could handle it beautifully. I had continued at the dealership and was now the manager, which I also loved. I had taken a few college classes after getting my high school equivalent, and maybe I would finish. Why not? It wasn’t like there were any boundaries on learning.
“Finley’s back,” Cadence noted. He was on third base instead of first, but rules didn’t apply so much here. So when the next batter thwacked the ball off the T and it went somewhere into foul territory, Fin ran right home, and we all stood up and cheered. Beau was laughing as he hugged his son and the other kids seemed to think it was great, even the members of the other team in the outfield, who had been digging in the grass with their gloves. They also clapped.
“This seems like a good idea,” I said. “It seems like we would want someone else to share all the happiness we have.”
Nolan looked down at me. “Do you mean a baby?”
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“I think that I’m glad you pulled over when you saw me in the road, and you didn’t believe that I was a shade and pass me by.” He put his arms around me. “I think I love you a lot, Viv.”
Who knew that life could be so good? I never had. I put my cheek against his chest and smiled as bubbles of it rose through me. Sometimes, you got exactly what you needed, not just the minimum.
Maybe it was supernatural. It could have been science. It was definitely love.
