Page 7 of Expecting an Argument
I bit my lip at the thought of that egotistical rich boy buckling as I made him finish. Damn, what a sight to behold.
“So, Beau Fontaine is your baby daddy,” Ashley said a little too loudly.
“WHAT?”Tyson exclaimed in the background.
I retched, holding my fist to my mouth to stop the vomit.
“Hey, I’m still in denial,” I croaked. “Let me enjoy it a little while longer. Also—hey, Tyson.”
“Heyyy, Liv,” Tyson responded sheepishly. “So...I guess congratulations are in order?”
“That depends,” Ashley said. “Are you keeping the pregnancy?”
I pursed my lips and stepped out of the bathroom. Being “Aunt Livvy” to Ashley’s kids made me want my own baby eventually. My plan had been to go to a sperm bank once my career was settled and established…but I wasn’t there just yet.
My shoulder rested against the wall as I stared out my big windows that framed a perfect view of the cityscape. I had made it into an apartment on the twentieth floor, clawed and scraped for an office at Parker & Hill, and had just scored the highest-value verdict the firm had seen all year. My career was finally kicking off and a child would kneecap me before I could start a full sprint toward true stability.
I bit my lip as I looked across my apartment. My spindly-legged chairs weren’t exactly child friendly. My granite counters had sharp corners that I could just imagine a toddler running head-first into. I didn’t even have a bathtub...was my kitchen sink big enough to clean a baby in?
Though I’d need to do some major child-proofing, I did have a spare bedroom and enough floorspace for a playpen and a high chair and all the other baby stuff Ashley and Tyson had for their kids. My mom didn’t have any of that when I was born.
My eyes drifted up to the shelf with my mom’s photo—shewas bright-eyed and smiling at my college graduation, right after her cancer diagnosis. Then my eyes fell to the small pewter canister containing her ashes. The “Dead Mom” club was the shittiest club in all of human existence. I had never needed to talk to her more than I did now.
I pictured a teenage Mom crying in my grandma’s pink bathroom as she held a positive test in her own hands. She raised me on a small-business owner’s meager earnings, then on government assistance as she hunted for jobs, and we still made it through. It was a childhood full of hand-me-downs, shared beds, and afternoons spent window-shopping downtown with our hands stuffed into our empty pockets—but it made me into the woman who held the world’s largest oil company accountable at only twenty-seven years old.
Staring at her ashes triggered the memory of me sobbing in her living room because I was ready to quit law school. She was bald as an egg and had deep purple bags beneath her eyes, but she gripped me by the shoulders and told me to look at her as we recited,“I can do hard things.”
I rested my hand on my lower belly as my mother’s brave words repeated in my head.
“Yeah,” I said into the phone. “I’m keeping my baby.”
I pushed off the wall and walked over to Mom’s shelf. I picked up a framed photo of her beaming with pride next to me at my third grade history fair. I wore a creative interpretation of a flapper dress fashioned out of old rags and gave a partially-toothless smile as I held my “First Place” certificate in my little hands.
“And this changes nothing about our plans,” I said as I stared down at the photo. “I’m still all-in.”
“No, Liv,” Ashley argued, “I am not asking you to fund the renovation of Miss Kaye’s house while you’repregnant!”
I frowned. “I get my bonus from the Herringbone case at theend of the year. According to my contract with the firm, my cut out of the attorney’s fees is going to be $2.9million.I’m going to be fine. My baby is going to be fine. And you know Miss Kaye’s house is personal for me.”
I set the photo back on the shelf. Miss Kaye had been Elren’s original business woman. She owned the downtown department store, invented a patent for sewing machine parts that’s still in use more than a century later, and never married. After she died, all her money went into an endowment for the betterment of Elren’s up-and-coming young women. The endowment paid for my entire education at Plains State University for my bachelor’s degreeandlaw school.
Miss Kaye reminded me of what Mom could have been…had she never let my dad into her life.
After she got pregnant with me, Mom and my dad opened a successful restaurant downtown. She did the cooking and the serving while he handled the business. “Handling the business,” I later learned, really meant committing tax fraud, swindling other vendors in town, and then cleaning out the registers and disappearing without a word.
I had just started preschool. Mom went bankrupt and her reputation in town never recovered.
Even though the faded memories of my dad haunted me, I stared lovingly at my mom in the portrait—still in her twenties and holding us together. The eight-year-old dressed as Miss Katherine Kaye smiled back at me through the glass frame. I had once promised myself that if I ever made it big, I would give back to the people, just like Miss Kaye did.
I’d do it for Mom.
“Call the city and sign the contract for the house,” I told Ashley. “It’s time we showed Elren the power of an independent woman again.”
“OK,” Ashley replied lightly, but with commitment. “Butdon’t change the subject. When are you going to tell Beau about the baby? I’ll come with you for support!”
I turned from my mom’s shelf and scoffed. “Why would I tell him? I’m about to be a multi-millionaire, I don’t need him.”
“You have to tell him,” Tyson said. Their infant son quietly babbled in the brief silence. “He needs to know.”
