Happy Birthday: A Novel Read online

  A nurse led her into a dimly lit room, had her drink three glasses of water, and wait twenty minutes, and told her not to empty her bladder and to put a gown on. After April lay down on the table, the technician applied gel to her belly, turned on the machine, and moved a metal wand around in the gel, as April watched the screen. And then she saw it, the tiny little being nestled deep inside her. It had the shape and look of a baby but was tiny, and its heart was beating regularly. The technician told her everything was fine, as she showed her where the head was, and the “rump,” as she called it, and the little stems that were becoming arms and legs. This was a baby, not just an idea, or a mistake she had made with a total stranger. This was already a life, with a heart, and one day a soul and a mind. As she looked at the screen, April felt sick, as tears ran down her cheeks. She had never felt so overwhelmed or so alone, and at the same time so close to anything or anyone in her life. It was an avalanche of conflicting emotions all at once. She hadn’t been prepared for how she would feel when she saw it. It changed everything she had thought about a baby for the past week.

  “Everything is fine,” the technician patted her arm and reassured her, then handed her a printout of what they had seen on the screen. April was still holding the photograph in her hand when she walked back into the office to see the doctor.

  “I’m keeping it,” she said in a hoarse voice, as she sat down across the desk from her again, and the doctor watched her.

  “Are you sure?” she asked her, and April nodded.

  “I’m sure. I’ll make it work somehow.” She couldn’t get rid of it, and now she didn’t want to.

  “Then we’ll see you in a month,” the doctor said as she stood up, smiling at her. “If you change your mind, let me know. We still have some leeway timewise, not much, but we have a few weeks, if you decide not to proceed with the pregnancy after all.” But it was no longer just a pregnancy to April, after what she’d seen on the sonogram, it was a baby. This wasn’t what she had wanted to do with her life, but she was two months pregnant. Her due date was in June. She had a baby now and a due date. She walked out of the doctor’s office in a daze, feeling stunned. The decision had been made. And April knew she wouldn’t change her mind.

  She hailed a cab and went back downtown to the restaurant, and as soon as she got there, she went upstairs and called her mother.

  “I’m keeping it,” she said softly. Valerie was still at work.

  “Keeping what, darling?” She had just come out of a meeting and had a thousand things on her mind. “Oh my God,” she said, before April could answer the question. “You are? Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” She wasn’t happy to hear it, and April could tell.

  “I saw it on the sonogram, Mom. It looks like a baby. I can’t do it. I want to have it.” She was crying as she said it, and listening to her, Valerie started to cry too.

  “Are you going to tell the father?” She was desperately worried about her daughter.

  “I don’t know yet. All I know is that I’m going to have it. I’ll have to figure out the rest as I go along.”

  “All right,” Valerie said firmly, “let me know what I can do. Thank God you’re not feeling sick. I was sick as a dog with you.” This wasn’t the choice she had hoped April would make, but she was willing to go along with it and support her. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” April said firmly.

  “And when is this going to happen?” Valerie asked with dread.

  “In June,” April said, smiling for the first time in a week.

  “I have to admit,” Valerie said, sounding shaken by the news, “it’s a bit much turning sixty and facing becoming a grandmother all in one week.” She was trying to be a good sport about it. It had been one hell of a week, but surely for April too. Her thirtieth birthday had brought with it an unexpected gift. Valerie hoped that it would prove to be that and not just an intolerable burden for her daughter. It was not going to be easy. She had a demanding business to run, and her mother knew how much her restaurant meant to her. She had been willing to give up her personal life for four years in order to do it, and now suddenly she was going to have a baby on her hands too, with no man to help her. It was certainly not what Valerie would have wanted for her. “I was the same age when I had you,” she said, sounding pensive. “But I had your father to help me, and he was very good with you.”

  “I’ll figure it out, Mom. Other women do it. It’s not the end of the world.” And maybe, just maybe, it was the beginning of a whole new life for her, and she was willing to do all she could to have her restaurant and a baby. In the beginning at least, she could have the baby in the restaurant with her. And after that there was day care. Other single mothers did it, she told herself. So could she.

  Next, April called Ellen to tell her that she had decided to keep the baby, and Ellen was thrilled for her. She promised to lend her baby clothes and a stroller. By the time she hung up, April felt reassured and a little less scared. She kept reminding herself to take it one step at a time. She still had to decide if she wanted to tell Mike Steinman, but she wasn’t ready to do that yet, or anyone else. She had to get used to the idea herself first. And it was a lot to get used to. She sat staring at the photograph from the sonogram after she talked to Ellen. It still didn’t seem real to her. She put the photograph in her desk drawer, then put her apron on and wrapped it around her, stepped into her clogs, and went downstairs to work. But this time, she was smiling, and everyone in the kitchen was relieved to see that she was her old self again. She was scared but excited, and she told herself all night that she had seven months to figure out how to make it work.

  Valerie was thinking about her daughter that night, as she lay in bed watching TV. She was flipping through the channels, and worried about April’s decision to have the baby, when she saw Jack Adams, the sportscaster, interviewing a well-known wide receiver and she recognized him from the elevator on her birthday when he could hardly walk. She watched him for a few minutes. He mentioned having injured his back recently, and he seemed to have recovered as he moved easily on-screen, but talked about how excruciating it had been.

  She smiled, thinking of the condition he’d been in. He looked a lot different now on the screen, and very smooth. He appeared to be humorous and light-hearted, and he was very different from the disheveled creature who could barely walk that day, in gym clothes and rubber flip-flops. On-screen, he was a nice-looking man and more articulate than most sportscasters, and she had to admit, as she watched him, that he was very good-looking. She knew that when the network had signed him, it had been a big deal. A very big deal. She had heard too that he had a reputation for dating very young women. It was funny to see him on the screen, after being in the elevator with him that day. Doubled over in pain, he had looked like Rumpelstiltskin, and without thinking about it any further, she changed channels to a sitcom she watched occasionally, but a few minutes later, she turned the comedy off too. As she turned off the light to go to sleep, she reminded herself to call Alan and tell him about his accurate prediction about April’s baby. She had thought he was crazy when he said that April would have one. But he was right. He certainly was good at what he did. She fell asleep thinking about him, and about April. She dreamed of her all night with a baby in her arms, crying and saying it had been a terrible mistake, and begging her mother to help her, and there was nothing Valerie could do.

  Valerie woke up in the morning, convinced that April was making a huge mistake, but equally certain that she couldn’t sway her. Once April made up her mind about something, she rarely changed course. She had been that way with the restaurant, dogged and persevering every inch of the way, overcoming every challenge and obstacle to reach her goal. Valerie was that way too, and always had been with her career. She was a woman who always knew what she wanted, and so did her daughter. It was a quality, not a flaw, but in this case, Valerie was convinced she was wrong. She called April to talk to her about it again that morning. She was s
till upset by the disturbing dream she’d had the night before.

  “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Valerie pressed her. It was still early, and April was at her desk, poring over the bills intently. She had been up since four and back at the fish market again at five that morning.

  “Yes, I’m sure, Mom,” April said quietly. “It’s not a choice I would have made intentionally, but now that it’s happened, I don’t feel like there’s any other option. I’m thirty years old, I don’t know if I’ll ever have another shot at having a baby. I haven’t had a relationship in five years, not a serious one, just the kind of thing like what just happened, although it’s usually not a total stranger. I work all the time. When do I have time to go out and meet anyone? I’m always working. And it’s never going to be the right time for me to have a baby. I want to open another restaurant one day, then I’ll have two of them and I’ll be working even harder.

  “If I do meet someone, I’m not even sure I’d want to get pregnant. I’ve never been a hundred percent sure that having children would fit in my life, or that I’d be good at it. But now that it’s happened, I don’t have the guts to just give it up and walk away. What if I never get pregnant again, or never meet anyone? I will have had this opportunity I threw away, and maybe I’ll never get a second chance. Maybe if I were twenty-two, it would be different. But not at thirty. I’m too old to refuse a gift like this.

  “And I’m not even sure I’d have felt differently at twenty. That little person with the heartbeat you see on the sonogram screen is pretty compelling. That’s a baby in there, a real live human being, not just a kink in my lifestyle, or a glitch in scheduling. It’s a person, and for some incredibly stupid reason, this happened to me. Now I need to rise up and meet the challenge, even if it scares the hell out of me, which it does. I’ll just have to figure it out as I go along.

  “And fortunately, it’s no longer a big deal to have a baby if you’re unmarried. People do it all the time. Women go to sperm banks and get inseminated by strangers. At least I know who this baby’s father is. He’s a smart, educated, employed, decent-looking guy. I may think he’s an asshole, and he hates my restaurant, but he doesn’t seem like a terrible person for this child to be related to. And it’s what I have to work with for now. Under the circumstances, this is the best I can do, to face what happened. The responsibility here is mine.”

  “But you don’t even know this man, April,” her mother said mournfully. She was voicing all of April’s own fears.

  “No, I don’t, Mom. I didn’t pick this, and I wouldn’t have. But I want to make the best of it, instead of doing something I may regret for the rest of my life, if I abort it.”

  “And what if you regret having it, for the rest of your life?” her mother asked her honestly, and April closed her eyes as she thought about it, and then opened them and smiled. No matter how strong her mother’s doubts were on the subject, the decision had been made.

  “I’ll send it to live with you then. You can tell everyone it’s your baby, and even look properly embarrassed about it. Then no one will believe you’re sixty. I think that’s the perfect solution.”

  “Very funny,” Valerie said. She had already decided that under no circumstances would she admit it publicly in her professional life when she was a grandmother. Some things were just more than she was willing to endure, and this was one. She wanted to help her daughter, but not admit to grandmotherhood as part of her “image,” or her age. “I just want you to be sure you know what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t,” April readily admitted. “I don’t have the remotest idea of what I’m doing, or what will happen when the baby gets here. I’ll just do the best I can to manage. This stuff happens to people all the time. I’m hoping maybe I can get Heather to come in and help me on weekends. Or maybe I’ll have to hire an au pair.” She knew her mother would help her if necessary, but she wanted to try to do this on her own. It was her baby, and her decision to have it. She was a thirty-year-old woman, she had lived on her own in Europe for six years, she ran a successful business, it seemed unlikely that she couldn’t manage a baby. When she tried to think about it calmly, she felt confident about it, and at other times she was as frightened as her mother sounded now. This was all very new to her. But she had seven months to get used to the idea and make plans.

  “I think you should call the baby’s father,” her mother said, still sounding worried, and April looked pensive before she responded.

  “I might. I haven’t made up my mind. I’ve only known about this for eight days. It’s not like he and I are friends. It was a stupid thing to do. A classic one-night stand, and I got him drunk because he was smart, attractive, and maybe he’d give us a good review. And look what I wound up with. A baby and a shit review. And what am I going to say to him if I do call him? ‘Remember me? I’m the one you gave the lousy review to, the one who designed the overly simplistic menu, is confused about whether to serve delicacies or comfort food, and is cooking below her skill level. Well, how about sharing a kid with me for the rest of your life?’ He said I should only be cooking for children, so I guess I could lead in with that, and tell him that since he thought so, I decided to have one of my own. I can’t even imagine what I’d say to him, or what I want from him. I don’t even know if I like him. From what I know so far, I don’t think so, other than that he’s cute and was pretty good in bed, if I remember correctly, but I have no idea if I’d want him to be involved with our child. Maybe he’s really a jerk, or hates kids, or there are a million things I would hate about him. I just don’t know.”

  “But you’re having his baby anyway,” Valerie said in a shaken voice. “This is a little modern for me,” she admitted. “Maybe I’m even older than I think. I still like the idea of loving the man you have a child with, and wanting him to stick around.”

  “So do I. But this didn’t happen that way. I’m not the first one it happened to, and at least today you don’t have to marry a man you don’t like, or barely even know. You don’t have to hide in another city and give the baby away. And I don’t have to have an abortion if I don’t want to. There are plenty of women having babies today by men they scarcely know, or not at all. I’m not saying it’s the best way, or even the right way, but I think I’m lucky that I live in a world, and a society, and even a city, where I can handle this any way I want. It’s not going to be anyone’s problem except mine, and I’m willing to take it on. I don’t know if I want the baby’s father helping me, or interfering with me, or maybe even getting involved in my baby’s life. For now, it’s my baby, not ‘ours.’ And the only reason I might tell him eventually is because I respect his right to know. But beyond that, I don’t think I want anything from him. He never called me after we spent the night together, he never even thanked me for dinner, so he doesn’t have any investment in me either. If he’d been interested in me, he would have called.” Valerie realized she had a point, and April had been thinking about that all week. Since she had never heard from Mike Steinman after his bad review, she assumed he was either embarrassed or didn’t give a damn. It made it that much harder to call now. It would have been hard enough if they were dating, but since they weren’t, she didn’t know if she should call him now, or after the baby was born, or not at all. And she had wanted no input from him in order to make up her mind about whether or not to have it. She wasn’t counting on him. She was relying on herself. And her mother couldn’t help admiring her for it, although the decision to have it wasn’t the one she would have made, particularly not on her own. She was more than willing to admit that she wasn’t that brave.

  “All right, darling. I just want to be sure that you know what you’re getting into.” She sighed. “When are you going to tell your father?” Valerie sounded worried again. She knew her ex-husband, Pat, was not going to like it. He was very conservative and traditional, and a grandchild born out of wedlock was surely not what he had in mind for his oldest daughter. But he was also crazy about Apri
l.

  “I don’t know yet,” April said, glancing at her watch. She had a meeting with their butcher that morning and wanted to order all the cuts she needed for the next month, and she had to see their poultry supplier for Thanksgiving. She had been letting things slide for the last week, while she wrestled with the decision about the baby. Now she had to focus on the restaurant again. She knew that from now on her life was going to be a juggling act, between the restaurant and the baby. She’d better get used to it, but at least for now she could concentrate on the restaurant full-time. “I’ve got to go to work, Mom. You’re coming for Thanksgiving, right?”

  “Of course.” For the past three years, April had done their Thanksgiving dinners at the restaurant, and they all loved it. Maddie no longer had to cook Thanksgiving on alternate years, and Valerie no longer had to hire a caterer for the years it was her turn. Now her father, Maddie, her two sisters, and her mother all had Thanksgiving dinner at the restaurant with her. She served a full Thanksgiving dinner that night, and nothing else. And she did the same on Christmas Eve. They were open on holidays too, and usually jammed. She wanted to be there for lonely people or those who had nowhere else to go. Thanksgiving was three weeks away, and they were already almost fully booked. For an insane moment, she thought of inviting Mike Steinman to Thanksgiving dinner with them, and telling everyone then. It was a nice fantasy, or at least an interesting one, but it made no sense to ask Mike to join them for a family holiday, and it would make even less sense to him. If she decided to tell him, she knew she’d have to meet with him alone.

  “I’ll call you soon, Mom,” April promised. “I have to get to work.”

  “So do I. We’re taping our Christmas show today. I have a thousand things to do. We’re covering decorations, holiday menus, doing the tree, and unusual gifts. We even have a puppy on the show. I’m giving it to Marilyn for Christmas, but she doesn’t know it yet. I thought I’d do it on the show!” April knew her and liked her too. She had been her mother’s assistant for four years, and she not only helped with production details, but she handled personal errands for her too. She was forty-two, had no boyfriend, and was married to her job. April thought the puppy was a great idea for her too.