Chapter 28

Alexander

Meet me outside the clinic. 9 tonight. I have a surprise for you. I sent the message to my lovely bride-to-be and hoped that she was crazy enough to go out— to her former place of work, no less—after a long day of work, and the wedding just over a week away.

I knew this was the perfect final date for us to have before the wedding—and probably before the baby. After all, as strange as it was, it was the place that had brought us together. I never liked to use my money and means to my advantage, but this was an exception. It had to be. It turned out, you could rent out just about any place in the world for the right price. In exchange for a generous donation to their charity organization, the doctors at 6th Street Fertility Clinic had granted me access to their waiting area after business hours. They had evening appointments running until eight o’clock, and then I could go set up.

I looked down at my phone. 6:43 PM. I had plenty of time to kill, so I decided some extra decorations wouldn’t hurt. I had already called Lotus twice in the past two days to make sure they would have our meals dropped off by 8:45. Ok, that may have been another case of flashing my wallet. They normally didn’t deliver, but I’d given them enough business between dates and work lunches that they’d made an exception.

Everything was set. I found myself parked in front of the clinic, as if it was something that needed to be scoped out. I just wanted everything to be perfect. Nothing about my relationship with Casey had been normal or conventional, so I wanted us to have at least one normal, wonderful night.

My phone buzzed in the center console on my way to the nearest party store, and I anxiously awaited the next red light so I could check it. Color me curious. Baby and I will see you then. Xoxo. Excellent.

I scoured the aisles of the party store looking for anything that could add to the picnic dinner I had planned for the two of us. It had been years since I’d been in this store, and I couldn’t believe what it had become. There were aisles of luau décor and Star Wars party favors and fiesta-themed paper goods. I just wanted something simple. I stumbled across the bridal shower and bachelorette party sections and decided it might be fun to include some element of them into the surprise dinner.

“Getting married?” a voice behind me asked. I turned to see an elderly lady who had probably half a dozen rolls of streamers in the basket she was firmly gripping.

“Next week,” I said, smiling. It was weird to say the words aloud.

“Good for you, sweetheart,” the woman said. “I wish you many years of happiness.” She looked at the two packages of confetti I had been debating between. “Go with the rings. Much more fun!”

I nodded as a gesture of thanks and put a package of the confetti in my basket. I thought it would add a nice element of glamour to our picnic blanket. The tiny, metallic pieces of paper were cut into the shape of engagement rings, all different sizes. It was very possible that they were much more suitable for a bridal shower and engagement party, but oh well. This is why Casey was in charge of the décor for the actual wedding.

A “bride-to-be” sash and pack of white fabric rose petals made their way into my basket, and I concluded that I had enough. Even though I was bound to have plenty of time to set up at the clinic, I was still always the type to worry about being late.

The moment the last patient and doctor headed out the clinic doors, I ran inside with my bags of supplies and began setting everything up just as I’d envisioned it. Setting up an 80” x 90” picnic blanket solo proved more difficult than I had anticipated, and I was just thankful that I’d allotted myself some extra time in case something took longer than I’d planned. The manager of Lotus hand-delivered my order, which he had put together in catering trays that were much nicer-looking than the typical takeout containers Chinese restaurants used.

It was show time. I sat in Casey’s old chair and spun around and around, anxiously waiting her arrival. When 9:08 hit and she still hadn’t arrived, I began to get concerned. As she’d gotten further along in her pregnancy, she’d been going to sleep earlier and earlier. Maybe she’d simply fallen asleep for the night.

Finally, before I had the chance to overthink things any further, the shadow of Casey’s silhouette appeared on the sidewalk in front of the clinic.

“Sorry I’m late,” Casey said, greeting me with a sweet kiss. “I wasn’t exactly sure what to wear to some sort of surprise at my old job after business hours.” I could sense the mockery in her voice, but I opted to ignore it.

I eyed her up and down and admired the form-fitting red dress she had decided on. “What you’re wearing is absolutely perfect,” I said. Casey smiled. “But I have one more thing to add to your outfit.” I pulled my left hand from behind my back to reveal the sash I’d purchased earlier. Casey giggled as I placed it on her.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

“It’s your night, babe,” I said. With that, I led her into the vestibule of the clinic and locked the door behind us. “Right this way.” We emerged into the waiting area, and everything looked just as I wanted it to. In front of the desk Casey had sat behind for so long was a large picnic blanket spread out across the carpet. Atop the picnic table, I had set up our meals from Lotus and the confetti and rose petals from the party store. The lights were dimmed, and our primary source of light was the two candlesticks in the center of the blanket.

“What is all this?” Casey asked, visibly choked up. She wrapped me in a tight hug and rested her head on my shoulder.

“I thought we’d take it back to where it all started for us,” I said. “You know, one last big date before the wedding.”

Casey looked up at me and smiled. “Everything looks beautiful.”

“Including you.” I directed her to the side of the blanket on which I’d put her chicken dish, and I sat across from her with the fish entrée I’d decided on for myself. The look of pure surprise and bliss that appeared upon Casey’s face when she realized the food was from Lotus was one I wished I’d captured on camera.

“How’d you know I’ve been craving Chinese food?” Casey asked.

“Because you’ve mentioned it, oh, I don’t know, twice a day for the past week,” I said. I chuckled, and she joined in with me. God, I loved to see her smile.

We ate our dinners in sweet silence as we scraped up every morsel in the containers. Our normal dinner time was closer to 6:30 or 7, so, by now, we were starving. Casey and I took turns picking out bites from the other’s container and sharing the dumplings and spring rolls I’d placed between us. “Babe, this is amazing,” Casey said, when her container was nearly empty. “Thank you for all of this.”

“Anything for my soon-to-be wife,” I said. I got chills saying the words, and Casey’s face brightened. When we were done eating, we cleaned up our mess and laid on the picnic blanket like we were looking at the stars. Instead, our view was that of the clinic ceiling’s white textured paint, but neither of us seemed to mind. With confetti in her hair, Casey told me stories about the picnics she had gone on with her mother when she was young.

“My favorite picnic was to a local park when I was six or seven,” Casey said, looking over at me. “My mom picked me up early from school and told me it was the perfect day for a picnic. She had packed us little egg salad and peanut butter finger sandwiches, like the kind you see at tea parties, and pudding cups, and juice boxes. That’s one of my favorite memories of my whole childhood.”

I nodded gently. “It sounds like it was a great day,” I said quietly.

She smiled. “It was. Just like today.”

Casey knew exactly how to reassure me that things were going to be ok. Whenever I worried about her, she said the exact thing I needed to hear to know that she was going to be alright. She bared her soul to me, counting down—or was it up? – her favorite childhood memories. She counted her top two as the picnic and a beach trip with her mother. The third was one that caught me by surprise. Casey had briefly mentioned to me before that one of her foster families had thrown her a birthday party, but that was the extent of my knowledge.

It turned out that the Foresters had spent weeks planning a surprise party for Casey in their backyard. They had rented out a moon bounce and trampoline, set up a slip and slide, and even had carnival foods like snow cones and popcorn. Casey had no idea it was coming, and her foster sister, Clara, had initiated the big reveal. “I can still imagine that moment like it was yesterday,” Casey said. Her eyes were closed as if she was trying to picture it. “I was wearing a pink and purple striped t-shirt, and Clara told me there was something she wanted to show me out back. She opened the door and kind of nudged me onto the deck, and that’s when thirty or forty of my neighborhood friends and classmates yelled, ‘Surprise!’.”

Casey’s eyes lit up just talking about it. I had to admit that I was guilty of assuming that all of Casey’s experiences in foster care were negative. This was one of the few positive memories I’d heard, and I begged for more. “I want to hear about the good times, Case,” I said, trying to be gentle. “I love how you light up when you talk about them.”

“Let me think for a minute,” Casey said. We sat in silence as I watched her gorgeous face in the candlelight. “Did I ever tell you about the time I won a raffle at my school’s bingo night?”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“It was my fourth or fifth foster family, the Bells,” she started. “I was the first foster placement they’d ever had, so they didn’t have a clue what they were doing.”

“Sounds like a recipe for disaster,” I chuckled.

Casey rubbed her hands together for dramatic effect. “You bet. Although, all things considered, they got off easy. Anyway, there was a bingo night at my school and I really wanted to go. Mrs. Bell agreed to take me, and we met up with one of her friends, whose daughter was in my class. When the friend’s daughter asked her mother for money for some raffle tickets, I sort of froze. I knew better than to ask my foster parents for anything that wasn’t a necessity.”

I cut Casey off. “I thought you said this was a good story.”

“Hush, you,” Casey said. “I’m getting to it. Sooooo, my foster mom, who clearly really wanted me to like her, handed me a $5 bill without me asking and told me to go buy some tickets and put them in for the raffle baskets I wanted. Long story short, neither of us won any bingo games, but I won a raffle basket. I can still remember the look of pride on Mrs. Bell’s face, and the sense of accomplishment I felt, as I went up to get the raffle basket.”

“That’s sweet,” I said with a smile.

As if she was part of an infomercial, Casey threw her hands in the air and said, “But wait… there’s more.” I leaned in closer to listen to the rest of her story. “Well, the raffle basket ended up being this huge, decorative basket filled with chocolate bars and all sorts of candy. The Bells made the terrible mistake of leaving eleven-year-old me alone in my new room with a bunch of candy. Needless to say, I ate about ten times my weight in chocolate and threw up all over their house.”

I laughed, but a thought lingered in my mind. “Is that why you went on to the next foster home?” I asked.

“Nah,” Casey said. “I lasted there a few more months until they got off the waitlist for an adoption agency. They’d really been hoping for a baby.”

“Oh.” I wanted desperately to lighten the mood back to how it had been a minute earlier. “So, how many raffle tickets did you put in to win that basket?”

Casey flashed me a mischievous smile. “All of them,” she chuckled. I loved that Casey and I were still learning new things about one another. I knew she was a closed-off person, someone I would have to learn about layer by layer. I was just glad we were making headway.

Casey had never looked sexier than she did in the flickering light of the candle. I leaned in gently and took her lips in mine. We kissed passionately as we fell into one another on the picnic blanket. “I have an idea,” Casey whispered. Without another word, she led me back into one of the examination rooms, and I let her have her way with me.