“LYNDI, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”
Lyndi looked up and saw Paula peering down from the loft offices’ windows. Lyndi had just finished loading up her bike with Stan’s delivery route of flowers, and was about to flip up the kickstand.
“I’m about to learn a tap routine for my Broadway debut,” Lyndi said sarcastically. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You can’t take your bike out.”
“Stan’s not here—again. Someone has to take his run.”
“Not you,” Paula replied.
“We’ll walk the floor of the market as soon as I get back, scout tomorrow’s flowers. I won’t be long, I promise.”
“No you won’t, because you’re not going. Come upstairs. Now.”
Rarely had Paula taken the “I’m the boss do as I say” tone with Lyndi. But when she did, it was worth heeding. So, Lyndi unbuckled the backpack full of bouquets from her body, and quickly moved up the stairs.
Paula was sitting behind her desk, and had put on her best stern boss face, her hands laced in front of her.
“Lyndi, I can’t have you taking runs anymore. It’s not appropriate.”
Lyndi sighed. “Listen, I know you want me more in the warehouse, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Honestly, I think we need to let Stan go, he’s become too unreliable. I can cover his runs until we get someone new, and I won’t be neglecting my duties as your second in command. I’m already half done with the new website skins, and our Instagram is booming . . .”
“That’s not why. Although, you’re right, we do need to let Stan go,” Paula mused. Then, she shook her head, got back to what she wanted to say. “We can’t have you doing bicycle deliveries while you’re pregnant.”
Lyndi felt her stomach flip over. And no, it wasn’t the baby moving. She wasn’t even showing yet, so she certainly couldn’t feel the baby kicking—at least according to Dr. Keen. No, it just turned out her stomach flipped over a lot these days, as she wondered.
Not worried, just . . . wondered.
Wondered what it would be like to have the baby in their tiny apartment. Wondered where the crib would go. Wondered if their little girl would have Marcus’s eyes or hers. Wondered if Marcus was ever going to stop giving her foot rubs, since she was suddenly ticklish and it didn’t exactly relax her.
Wondered if the fact that her gums bled every time she brushed her teeth was a pregnancy symptom or a reason to buy stock in gingivitis mouthwash.
Turns out, it was a pregnancy symptom.
Turns out, a lot was a pregnancy symptom. Like, basically everything.
Twitchy legs? Symptom.
Bloated and gassy? Symptom.
Carpal tunnel? Symptom.
Drooling like a basset hound? Symptom.
Weird darkening patches of skin on your face? Yeah, it’s called melasma, and it was a symptom, too.
Lyndi had not been trained to expect any of this. Television had really only told her about morning sickness, and she thought that once that was done, she’d be free and clear, with only the occasional craving for odd foods (her desire for eggs Benedict had gone from a whiny want to a freakish obsession), and a gleefully expanding waistline.
However, so far, the gums were really the only symptom—other than the aforementioned morning sickness—that she’d experienced. But thanks to those pastel emails she still continued to get, and still continued to open with the pathological need of the morbidly curious, she knew what to expect in the nearish future.
But it was also one of those emails that betrayed her to the Favorite Flower.
Well, it wasn’t really the email’s fault. It was very much her own. But she’d been walking the floor with Paula and one of their arrangers, Judy. Judy was taking pictures of all the flowers that Paula and Lyndi pointed out that they wanted to earmark for arrangements for the next day. Unfortunately, while Lyndi was negotiating the price for wholesale roses (Valentine’s Day was only a few weeks off and if they didn’t have a good relationship with a rose supplier they were screwed, as she’d convinced Paula to do a special preorder link on the website for the Big V) Lyndi motioned Judy over to take some pictures of the fat English rose varieties.
“Oh damn, my phone died,” Judy said. “I didn’t get the pink or red hybrids.”
“Here, use my phone,” Lyndi said, absentmindedly typing in her code to unlock it before handing it over, before even looking at it.
“Oh my God! You’re pregnant?”
And wouldn’t you know it, but one of those pastel emails was open on her phone. (Congratulating her on having reached the eighteenth week of pregnancy, with a video comparing her fetus in size to the latest in a long line of incrementally sized vegetables—this one a bell pepper.)
Lyndi snatched the phone back as fast as she could, but the damage was already done. Judy was gawking at her with wide, unblinking eyes. And all of Lyndi’s protestations of “that’s um . . . I mean, it’s only . . .” did nothing to help her case.
“Paula!” Judy had called out. “Did you know our little Lyndi’s expecting??”
And that was that. If it had been Paula who had found the email on the phone, Lyndi guessed that she would have been discreet about it, but since it was Judy, who spent her mornings arranging flowers and spreading gossip, news of Lyndi’s pregnancy had lapped the LA flower district by the very next morning.
It wasn’t that Lyndi didn’t want to tell people about her pregnancy. It was simply that, whenever she did, she wasn’t really met with any kind of enthusiasm. She had endured the glitter-covered gender reveal party, where everyone kept telling her she was so smart to have her baby while she was young. As if a rebounding body was the only potential silver lining they could think of.
Not to mention, her own friends didn’t even bother to show up. In fact, these days Allison, Olivia, and Elizabeth were barely texting her back. All her “hey wassup?” and “We are so overdue for brunch!” missives were either met with silence or with a banal “OMG I’m so busy! Let’s try and hang next week!” type response.
However, Judy and the other arrangers were incredibly enthusiastic, wondering when the wedding would be. When Lyndi made it clear that there wouldn’t be a wedding, their ardor cooled considerably.
And her boss, Paula, hadn’t mentioned it once.
Until now.
“I’m not incapacitated, Paula,” Lyndi said, testily. “I can ride my bike. I rode my bike here this morning, didn’t I?”
“True, and unfortunately, I can’t stop you doing that—how you get to work is your own business,” Paula said, taking off her horn-rimmed glasses, a sign of her exhaustion. “But deliveries come under the company’s umbrella, and if something happened while making a delivery . . . it would be a big liability.”
“Oh.” Because what else was there to say? Not only was her baby a shock and occasional inconvenience, she was now a liability.
“Doing deliveries isn’t in your job description anyway,” Paula said, not unkindly. “Believe me, you have plenty to do.”
Lyndi’s eyes flew up to Paula’s. “I do? I’m sorry, I thought I had a handle on all of my new responsibilities . . .”
“You do.” Paula practically laughed. “So much so, I’d like to shuffle some of the stuff on my plate to yours. Especially with Valentine’s coming up, I’m going to need all the help I can get. Inventory of the wrapping materials, double-checking the website to make sure it’s processing orders correctly—ever since that update it’s been buggy—I need a new spreadsheet template tracking our monthly profit margins . . .”
“Wow,” Lyndi said, blinking. That was a lot of work—but it was all stuff that Lyndi knew she could do. Paula trusting her with this much was a huge vote of confidence.
Or, she wondered as a peal of unbridled laughter drifted up from Judy and the other arrangers below, was it a way to keep her sidelined?
Either way, she was capable. And her boss was asking her to step up.
“Okay,” Lyndi said finally. “I can manage that. But who’s going to take Stan’s run this morning?”
“Guess I’m getting back on the bike.” Paula sighed, taking her massive ring of boss-related keys out of her pocket and handing them to Lyndi. “I’d love a full accounting of the decorative ribbons, especially the pinks, reds, and whites for V-Day, by the time I get back. But first things first . . . we need to make a job listing.”
“A job listing?” Lyndi felt her insides freeze with worry.
“Yeah—we need to hire a new Stan.”
ONCE LYNDI WAS done with work, it was still barely two o’clock in the afternoon. When she’d been just an arranger and occasional delivery person, she used to love these golden hours. She could spend the afternoon going to a movie, or riding her bike over the little hills of Echo Park, looping around the man-made Echo Park Lake, letting ideas run through her head for new floral arrangements while she idly watched dog walkers, out-of-work actors, yoga devotees—and sometimes, all three at once—take the same pleasure in their free time.
But today, she didn’t head that way once she climbed onto her bike. Instead, she found herself cutting across Silver Lake, then enduring the grueling hills of Griffith Park to cross into the San Fernando Valley and the city of Burbank, where her sister Nathalie lived and worked.
Movie studios gave way to big-box stores, then gave way to restaurants and diners, that then gave way to neat little 1950s bungalows on rectangular sixteenth of an acre lots. It was the cookie-cutter life Nathalie had always wanted and that always bewildered Lyndi.
It had always felt like life was muted here. The colors just weren’t as strong as they were in Echo Park.
But as she rode through the neighborhoods, Lyndi couldn’t help but notice the number of kids. School had just gotten out. Elementary-aged kids were walking home, wearing backpacks bigger than themselves, escorted by parents or in gaggles of friends. One mom was riding alongside a kid, a toddler strapped into a bike seat on the back of her old-school beach cruiser.
Would Lyndi be able to put her daughter on the back of her bike?
Could she do that in Echo Park? With all the hills and the, er, characters that populated the streets and doorways, and occasionally peed in her stairwell?
Or would she have to turn to the cookie-cutter life?
Nathalie would probably say yes.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. Nathalie had always been the person who told Lyndi she could do anything. That didn’t judge her on trying to find her path to what made her happy.
At least, the old Nathalie did that.
Current Nathalie seemed to have judgment coming off of her in waves.
But maybe, just maybe she had shifted a little bit. The shock of Lyndi being pregnant threw her, but at the gender reveal party, they seemed to get along pretty well. They had something to bond over, after all—mutual horror of being molested by your French teacher would do that. (Oh yeah, Madame Craig got to Lyndi’s stomach too by the time the party was over, and the pink-and-blue cocktails were running low.)
And Lyndi really needed someone to talk to at the moment. About what was happening at work. About feeling sidelined. About her hormones being completely out of control—seriously, Marcus must have whiplash from her overt horniness one second and her revulsion at being touched the next.
About whether or not she could ride her bike with her daughter behind her in Echo Park.
In the midst of all the cookie-cutter bungalows was Nathalie’s school. The bell had rung probably about a half hour ago, but there were still some kids milling around the front, waiting for rides. Or they were in team uniforms, heading out to the field for various sports practices. The smallest high schooler Lyndi had ever seen was hauling a tuba over her shoulder like it weighed nothing, headed for the marching band in a far field.
Lyndi knew Nathalie usually stayed an hour or two after the school day ended, grading papers and meeting with students. She could only hope that she did today, too. But if she wasn’t there, she had an excuse all prepared. She had brought tear-off flyers for the Favorite Flower, looking to hire a new Stan—or rather, a new bicycle delivery person. Lyndi had visited the school before, and knew there was a bulletin board near Nathalie’s room for posting things like this. Last time she was here, there had been an advertisement for a photography service that took pictures of you with your cats (and they would lend you some cats, if so desired).
Of course they had also posted listings online, and she would hit the coffee shops of Echo Park and Silver Lake with more flyers after this visit. But just in case anyone questioned a twenty-four-year-old pregnant woman (who didn’t really look pregnant yet, at least not in her blousy shirt) walking into a high school, she had things covered.
She made her way through the halls and found her way to the English department wing, where she had to glance from room to room to remember which one was Nathalie’s—pausing only to put up her flyer.
The more she searched, the more sure she felt that talking to Nathalie could help. Not solve her problems per se, but at least she would be able to understand them.
Nathalie had always been the one she turned to when she needed to understand.
But when she finally peeked into the right room, she found that Nathalie was not alone. She was speaking to a dark-haired woman around the same age as Nathalie, and they were laughing.
Laughing hard.
Laughing . . . about Lyndi.
“My sister is so irresponsible, she got knocked up by her bisexual roommate, I don’t think she’s the one I need.”
The other woman’s eyes went wide with shock, and she covered her mouth to keep the laughter from overwhelming her.
Lyndi felt her stomach sink to the floor.
Well. Guess the gender reveal party didn’t mend as many fences as she thought.
Because once again, while Nathalie was the one everyone treated like an adult, Lyndi was on the outside looking in.