The Midwife’s Playlist: A Now Entering Hillford Novel Read online

My hand falls from the keys onto the seat. Hers slips from the door handle to her side.

  We really were everything, her and me. Once upon a time, for just a little while, I believed Easton Lawrence was going to be the girl who saved me.

  “I, uh...I should—”

  “Easton!”

  She blinks hard before she turns, forcing a smile at my sister. I hear them chatting, Caroline going a mile a minute, while I heft my sorry ass out of the driver’s seat and walk around the van.

  “...done okay so far, but he’s not really latching?” Caroline peeks at Bentley, sound asleep in the carrier on her lap. I lift it into the van like the entire thing, him included, is made of glass. “Careful!”

  “I know. I am.” I set the seat into the base and wiggle it, so she can see for herself. She relaxes, then looks at Easton again.

  “Anyway, we have formula at the house, but I really wish I could get the hang of feeding him. It’s so much cheaper.”

  “It is,” Easton nods, as she helps Caroline from the wheelchair, “but the only thing that matters is that he’s fed and hydrated. So if that means formula, or breastfeeding, or a combination—you should do whatever feels right for you two. Did the nurse give you a number for La Leche?”

  While they go back and forth about latching, lactation, nipple soreness, and a bunch of other words I’d rather not hear my little sister say, I look at Bentley. He’s on the small side for newborns, apparently, a common downside to having a teen mom. The pacifier blocks half his face.

  Teen mom. That’s what Caroline is, now. It was Mom’s biggest fear for her, besides universal worries like getting kidnapped out of the front yard, or finding ecstasy in our Halloween candy. She didn’t want either of us ending up like her and Dad, parents before they were adults.

  Maybe if I hadn’t left, things would have turned out differently for her, somehow.

  Even worse: if I hadn’t come back, things would be way easier for her now. For all of us.

  “Caroline,” I prompt, refusing to look Easton in the eye as I climb back into the driver’s seat, “we should get going. I promised April and Jason I’d get the van back by noon.”

  She gives Easton a look I choose to ignore. Something like, You know how he is.

  “See you soon,” Easton tells her, then slides the door shut. Caroline waves to her again before buckling up. If it weren’t for the fact we’re on hospital grounds with a new baby in back, I’d gun this blue bastard out of here. My heart’s racing. I need movement, and a lot of it.

  “What was that about? The ‘see you soon’ thing.”

  Caroline rearranges a knit blanket around Bentley. Good thing I put the AC on high, or the kid would be a baked potato by now. “She’s bringing me some special tea she gives her clients. It boosts milk production.”

  “When?”

  “Why’s it matter? She’s coming to see me, not you.”

  “That’s just common courtesy. I think I deserve to know if she’s coming around my house, so I can...prepare.”

  “Tonight, after dinner. Does that work with your schedule?”

  Her sarcasm rolls off me. How I want to “prepare” is beyond me, because I can’t even decide if I want to be there, or make sure I’m twenty miles away when she arrives.

  Bentley cries at every stoplight and stop sign, and when we pull into our driveway. “He likes the motion,” Caroline notices, rocking his car seat in the base until he quiets. “I knew I should have gotten one of those gliders for the nursery.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  She studies me as I unhook the carrier and take him to our porch, while she fumbles with the pack of diapers. “You already got him the crib set. And the formula. And a ridiculous amount of toys.”

  “An uncle can’t spoil his nephew?”

  Caroline smiles, tight-lipped, when I open the door and usher her inside. “He can,” she says slowly, “but I just want to make sure it’s not out of guilt.”

  “It’s not.” I set the carrier at her feet. The second he’s still, Bentley starts screaming again. “I want to.”

  “Well. Thanks.” Caroline taps my shin with her foot. I tap back.

  “Where’s he at?” Dad appears in the doorway to the den. Caroline hugs him and lugs the carrier into the room, already quizzing him on what he’s eaten today, did he take his medication, etcetera.

  “Taking the van back,” I call, but neither hears me.

  The van spits gravel when I U-turn into the Lawrences’ driveway. Jason’s car is parked near the catalpa tree, engine still ticking.

  “Hello?” I call, when I’m outside the screen door. The sound of running water stops; April appears, drying her hands on a dishtowel. Like Easton, she looks utterly exhausted.

  “Brought the van back,” I tell her, and brandish the keys. “Thank you again.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome! Come in, come in.” Somehow, her smile itself does not look exhausted. She pours me some sweet tea without asking, extra ice. “Caroline settling in okay? I was thinking of bringing some casserole over later. Cheddar-broccoli, her favorite. Can’t imagine she’ll have time to cook.”

  April flutters around the kitchen, doing a hundred things at once. It makes me dizzy just to follow, so I sit. “You don’t have to. I mean, thank you, it’s just...I know your mom’s still at Memorial. I’m sorry about that, by the way. How’s she doing?”

  “Stubborn,” she sighs, smiling as she attacks the kitchen island with some nuclear-yellow lemon cleaner. “As soon as her doctor mentioned physical therapy for her hip, she called him a quack.”

  I laugh. “Sounds like my dad.”

  April’s smile dims. She keeps wiping, long after the counter’s clean. “How is your dad?”

  I have no idea how much April knows. She’s a rare combination of prying yet helpful, and discovers a lot on her own—but some of the skeletons in our closet would genuinely shock her. I’m not ready for that sympathy.

  “He’s okay.”

  “Good, good.” She smiles again, hand blurring its way to the other countertops. I drink fast, itching to escape the fake lemon fumes.

  Sure, “fumes.” Tell yourself whatever you have to.

  “Oh!” she says. “I wanted to ask you a favor. You remember a few years ago, when we turned that room over the garage into Jason’s home office?”

  I nod. By “a few years ago,” she means a decade and some change, but I remember.

  “It’s filled with junk right now, and I need it cleared out as soon as possible. And I’m not sure if the little half-bath we put in is still working, but—”

  “I’ll get it going again,” I assure her. “So you just want it fixed up, basically?”

  “If you don’t mind. And I’ll pay you, of course. I’d do it myself, but with Mama in the hospital….”

  “April,” I laugh, half-scolding her, “you know I don’t want your money. Usual rate will be just fine.”

  “You’ll need a lot more than some hummingbird cake to make that job worthwhile, hon. It hasn’t been touched in years. I’m pretty sure there’s a possum family up there.”

  I’m about to insist that a cake is plenty. To be honest, I’m grateful just for something to do, while still being close by for Caroline and Dad. Beats watching golf all day.

  I stop, though. I’ve got to be imagining it, but I swear I can hear Bentley crying from all the way over here.

  “Actually,” I ask, “do you have an extra rocking chair?”

  Eleven

  “Moving day, huh?”

  I look at my roommate, who’s crunching sweet potato chips all over the threshold of my freshly vacuumed bedroom. Guess I can’t be mad: it’s their house now, not mine.

  “Yep. Last box.” I scan the space. It already looks like I was never here. It doesn’t even smell like my room, anymore: nothing but Febreeze and cardboard.

  “We’ll miss you,” she offers, wiping her hands on her jeans before she hugs me. I doubt this: my roommates were nice e
nough, just like the last girls I lived with. But—also like the last girls I lived with—they kept to themselves, or each other. Maybe I’m the issue. Social lives are tough when you’re effectively on-call 24/7. Babies don’t wait.

  Both girls wave me off from the curb. The lemon-yellow door of the house, glowing in the early sun, feels like I should take it with me. Rented or not, this was my house. Now I’m going back in time.

  No, I remind myself. You’re going back home. Things don’t have to be “just like old times” if I don’t let them.

  Mom is gardening when I arrive. “There she is!” she sings, soil trickling across my shoulders when she hugs me. “I’m so happy you’re here, sweetie.”

  “Mom, don’t cry. You’re acting like I’ve been gone for years.”

  “Well...you have.”

  “I moved out. I didn’t stop visiting altogether.” I pop the trunk and grab my suitcase. “Did Dad ever find my old bedframe, by the way? It was in the attic, I swear—”

  “Oh...actually,” she says, and already I feel myself glaring: this tone is never good. Some decision was made without me. Something big.

  “We cleared out Dad’s office for you. I think it’ll be much better. Your father’s been using your old bedroom to work for years now, because it’s less for him to walk, closer to me...and you’ll get some privacy! That’ll be nice, right?”

  She takes the suitcase from me, so I grab another from the car and follow her, semi-numb. “Yeah...I guess so.” In fact, the room over the garage never occurred to me, despite being kind of perfect: my own bathroom, no shared walls. Distance.

  “Wait.” I stop at the stairs inside the garage. “When you say ‘cleared out,’ you mean empty, right? Completely? Because you guys had a lot of stuff up here. I don’t want to have to tiptoe around Christmas decorations and baby photos.”

  “Completely cleared out,” Mom smiles. “The floor’s been reinforced, too, and the bathroom has all-new tile. You’ll love it.”

  As we start up the steps, I check my expectations. “How’d you have time to do all that? You’ve been at the hospital every day this week.”

  Mom pauses. I don’t fall for her smile one bit. “We hired someone.”

  “Who?”

  I already know. Long before we reach the middle of the stairs and I smell that combination of cologne and motor oil, Newports and dust. I’m suddenly staring Ford right in the face.

  “Easy,” he smirks, flinging a shop rag over his shoulder with one hand, holding up a caulk gun with the other. “Welcome home.”

  “Mom,” I bark, but the woman is oblivious. To be fair, she doesn’t know what went on between us. Not all of it, anyway. But she knows enough for this situation to be completely unacceptable.

  “He’s almost finished,” she calls, depositing my suitcase by the stair railing and vanishing downstairs. Ford and I watch through the window as she scampers to my car.

  “I’m here on business. Relax.” He ducks into the half-bath, a structure I’m not entirely sure is legal to have, but is easy to get away with around here. Half this town probably isn’t up to code. “Your mom and I made a trade: I fix up the garage for her, she gives Caroline the extra rocker from the back porch. Win-win. And you,” he adds, when I squeeze into the room with him to admire the new tile, “get your own space. Triple win.”

  Ford steps back while I look the place over. “You, um.... The tiles, you picked my favorite color.” Blocks of royal purple, exactly like the sign in front of Owens Drugstore, reside between the plain white ones.

  “I remembered,” he corrects, and I have to nod. He remembered.

  “Listen, I—I wanted to apologize, for the other day at the hospital. If it seemed like I was making fun of you, you know, for not sleeping with other people...I didn’t mean to.” I fold my arms against myself. Something about this situation has me feeling vulnerable. Maybe it’s being in a small space with him, too reminiscent of cars and truck cabs and vans. Maybe it’s the way he’s filling the doorway to hem me in the way he does, hands braced on the wooden frame over his head. Up close, I don’t smell the motor oil and cigarettes. I smell toothpaste, and the scent of warm skin.

  “Apology accepted. You did bruise my ego pretty bad, though.”

  I mirror his smile. “I think you’ll recover. If it helps, I know it was a choice.”

  “Celibacy for six years,” he says solemnly, “is not something I’d choose, nor recommend.”

  “You know what I mean: if you wanted it, you could have gotten it. From just about anyone, at that.”

  His smile ticks a little higher, growing cocky, but the blush creeping up his neck gives him away. “That so?”

  “Come on, Ford. You’re handsome, charming...” I motion around the bathroom. “...good with your hands. You wouldn’t have to look far.”

  His expression grows a little more serious. His voice gets a lot quieter. “Nah,” he says. “Guess I wouldn’t.”

  We’re silent. I catch myself thinking, against every instinct, about that afternoon in the Chevy.

  “Are these the only clothes you have?” Mom’s voice snaps us out of whatever we’re in, and Ford backs out of the doorway to let me pass.

  I take the last suitcase from her and set it with the others. “Yes. Why? This is plenty.”

  Mom eyes them skeptically. Of course three suitcases seem like nothing to her: she’s the type to bring actual portmanteaus on vacation, along with several hatboxes in case the need for some church arises.

  “We’ll get the rest, Mom. Go back inside and rest.”

  “I don’t need any rest.” She swats me away as we all go down to the garage. “But I guess that’ll give you two a chance to get reacquainted.”

  Ford must feel the heat in my face, even an entire five feet behind me. Reacquainted. That’s the last thing we need.

  Once the kitchen door clatters shut, I rush to my car and start piling stuff on the gravel for him to take. If he’s here on business, then I’m determined to keep everything professional.

  “Any cool medical stuff in here?” he asks, when I pass him the heaviest box besides the crate of books. It’s labeled, simply, “Birth Stuff.”

  “Sanitary pads, nipple balm, perineal ice packs...you know, the usual.” He pulls a face. I laugh, before remembering I probably shouldn’t.

  Within half an hour, the entirety of my life is in the little room over the garage. I run my hand over the wall of boxes and remind myself this is a good thing. Mom needs me here. It isn’t forever.

  “You can see my bedroom window from here, you know.”

  I look up from the box I’ve just opened. “What?”

  Ford draws back the curtain to the side window and nods. I join him. Just a few feet away, even closer than our parents’ houses are to each other, is his garage.

  “That’s my window. Caroline’s using my room for the baby, so I moved out to the storage room. Remember?” He leans on the wall beside me, watching as I stare into his bedroom.

  He’s got a bed, plain plank shelves with a radio and laptop, and a clothing rack made out of soldered pipes. It’s not much different from his room in their house, when we were kids: less colorful, cleaner, but the same simplicity and bare-bones look.

  “I used to wonder how you lived with so...little,” I tell him. “I had all these posters and photos and books around my room. Yours always looked empty to me.”

  Ford pushes off from the wall with a shrug. “We didn’t bring much when we left Filigree. Didn’t have much to bring, by that point.”

  “You never did tell me why you moved here.” I follow him to the futon, my bed for the foreseeable future. We sit and crack open the Pepsis Mom brought up in a bowl of ice, like this is some middle school dance.

  “What? Of course I did.”

  “No, you just said your dad got a new job. But I only remember him doing odd jobs around town. Temp stuff.”

  Ford tenses. “Oh.” He takes a long swig. I watch his throat move an
d despise the fantasy that suddenly forms in my head: running my tongue from his collarbone, all the way up his neck.

  “Yeah, it wasn’t really a new job,” he sighs. “He lost his old one. He was a landlord. Lost our house and both the houses we rented out, in basically one fell swoop.”

  “How?”

  “How else?” he laughs, brow furrowing. “He wouldn’t quit drinking. None of the mortgages were getting paid, but he kept pretending it was all fine. Mom had no idea until it was too late. Then, to top it off, one of the tenants sued us for unlivable conditions, because Dad never got around to fixing the leaking pipes in their house. The whole place had mold, their kid was sick....” He shakes his head, then takes another drink. “We lost everything but the truck. And that was only because it was in my grandpa’s name.”

  I’m quiet. This is pretty much what I suspected—something related to his father’s drinking, from the dodgy way Ford always dealt with my questions—but it’s still a shock, in its own way. I feel a fresh wave of pain for him.

  “I can’t believe your mom stayed through all that.”

  He picks the tab off his soda and flicks it into the ice bowl. “That was one of her few flaws, staying with him. I’ll never understand it.”

  “She loved him.”

  “She was stuck with him. There’s a difference.”

  My next question almost dries up right then and there, but I force it out, anyway. For all my honey-colored memories of Ford’s mother, I’ve realized I know too little about her. “How did they meet?”

  “School. Like everybody else in Filigree. Apparently Dad teased her a lot because he liked her, but she thought he was a jerk.”

  “Like father, like son, huh?”

  “Oh, I never liked you as kids.” Both of us laugh. “You got on my last damn nerve, growing up. No offense.”

  “None taken. You got on mine.”

  Ford smiles and shifts his weight. The six inches between us dwindle to four. Against my better judgment, I move my leg and make it two.

  “Then suddenly,” he continues, “you didn’t, anymore. Things changed. Just took me a while to notice.”

  “When did you start liking me? Or...when did you realize it, I guess.”