Robyn Carr - A Summer in Sonoma

Kevin laughed into the phone. “Really, who would take you for a Good Samaritan.”

“That’s the thing. People never know who they’re dealing with, do they? This woman? She’d never go out with someone who looks like me, but the guy she thought was safe as a kitten, he turned out to be the bad guy.”

The fourth member of the tight group of girlfriends, and the least often available, was Dr. Beth Halsley. Beth started in premed at USC and stayed there for medical school, becoming a women’s doctor. She had always been one of those students who didn’t have to work for grades and excelled effortlessly on tests—until med school, at least. She had a nerdy brain inside a model’s body.

She had been more beautiful than any of the other high school girls, but not as popular—people thought of her as stuck-up. She wasn’t. She always had a lot on her mind and she was easily bored. True, she was a cheerleader like Julie, Cassie and Marty, but she was also a scholar, debater, gymnast, chess champion and president of the science club. She had almost never gone out on a date; it wasn’t long before boys avoided her like the plague. She was just too intimidating. And she’d never learned those wily, flirty games.

But the girls—Cassie, Julie and Marty—though nothing like her, loved her, understood her, envied her in so many ways. Beth was the one to unequivocally make good and when she graduated from premed and medical school in L.A., they were there, cheering the loudest of all. And now that she was newly transplanted back in the Sacramento Valley in a small women’s clinic, they were bringing their privates to her for their exams and other medical needs.

Beth called Julie in the morning. “Hey, don’t faint, but I can get out of the clinic for a couple of hours today. I got in touch with Cassie and Marty and they’re free for lunch. Noon at Ernesto’s. How about you?”

“Hmm. Lotta mommy stuff going on today, but I’ll see what I can do,” Julie said.

“Well, try,” Beth said. “I miss the heck out of you. I haven’t seen you in a couple of months!”

Julie couldn’t bear the thought of missing lunch with the girls. But she couldn’t afford it. And the morning had been stressful. Right after a bout of morning sickness, Julie spent a couple of hours going over the bills, trying to decide which one to pay, which one to let slide. She’d barely recovered from her early-morning nausea when the dog, Tess, threw up right on her shoes. In her shoes. Armed with paper towels she usually tried to ration, she began mopping. As she was on her hands and knees scooping and wiping, Tess licked her face, knocking her back on her butt, disgusted, with an “Ewwww.” She had to hose out her shoes on the back patio, which made her cry. If she’d had two nickels to rub together, she would have thrown the damn shoes in the trash.

When she had the kids all loaded in the car to take Jeffy to a Parks and Rec summer program, the engine wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t even turn over. She got her mom to drive over, give her a jump and, thank God, that did it. On to Jeffy’s program to drop him off, then to the auto supply to buy a new battery. She had to try three credit cards for one to be approved. It was looking like both those bills she was sitting on would have to slide. Then she dropped Clint and Stephie off at their grandma’s for a couple of hours so Julie could join her friends for lunch. She had already decided she would make an excuse, say she had already eaten, but wanted to meet them for at least a glass of iced tea. When she got back to the car, reaching into her purse for her keys, she noticed that her mom had tucked a twenty into her purse.

And she cried. Again.

“It’s just pregnancy,” she muttered to herself, wiping at her eyes. But it was also the anxiety of having no money, worrying about the shame of having the electricity shut off, having her mom always slip a twenty into her purse because she was so pitifully broke.

Julie had just one older brother—Brad. Brad went to college, met a girl and got engaged, married fourteen months later after he was settled in a nice, cushy CPA job. Then and only then he went to work on an MBA to make his job even cushier. After that he and his wife decided to start their family and, like many of their friends, they seemed to have a choice about that. When they used birth control they didn’t have children and they never had a slip; when they went off birth control, they reproduced. At thirty-two, Brad and his wife, Lisa, had a three-year-old boy, a one-year-old girl and a vasectomy.

Such was not the case with Julie and Billy. She’d been a few months pregnant already when they married at barely nineteen. Billy worked part-time and went to school part-time, earning his degree at twenty-four, when Jeffy was four years old. If they’d had it their way, Jeffy would be at least ten before they had another baby; they were still so young, completely strapped with school loans, credit-card bills and low-paying jobs. They were compulsive about protection, except one night when they didn’t use a condom and spermicide because they were so worked up, in a fever, wild. One time, just one time, and it hadn’t even been during a vulnerable time of the month. Hello, Clint! Clint arrived when Jeffy was barely in kindergarten, the first year Billy was with the fire department. The next year, Stephie—the result of a diaphragm that Beth said probably wasn’t a good fit.

Billy knew the value of an education and had pursued it while waiting for an opening in the fire department. He’d wanted to be a fireman since he was six; it was a childhood dream. It was also a good job with good benefits and a pension, but when you have three kids, lots of bills, a stay-at-home wife, the early years can be tight. If he had any real fascination with any other field, there were probably endless opportunities for a man with a degree, but in his job he had adventure and saved lives, and that meant more to him than anything.

Although Julie’s parents were both generous and patient, Julie felt she’d let them down by marrying so young, having three children before she was thirty. She could sense they were frustrated with Julie and Billy’s chronic trouble of keeping up with expenses. It was taking them a damn long time to get on their feet. Her parents slipped her money they didn’t have to give Brad, picked up the tab for things like Jeffy’s soccer or Parks and Rec programs, and Julie never told Billy about any of it. Any fancy toys the kids had, like the laptop or video games, came from Grandma and Grandpa or maybe Uncle Brad. The thought of telling her mother she was pregnant again chilled her. She would say, What about that vasectomy you’d planned on? What about it, indeed? Billy was supposed to take care of that and had simply put it off, a little nervous about having his testicles sliced into, as if oblivious to the complications of piling child upon child on a modest income. She had the IUD; they should have been safe for the time it took him to come to terms with it. But she was pregnant again, anyway.

Julie complained to Cassie about money, about stretching things so far month after month, but she could tell Cassie didn’t take it all that seriously. After all, they somehow always managed and Cassie would die to have her problems. To Cassie, who was getting by but alone, a tight budget seemed like less of a problem than not having a partner, a family. And Julie just couldn’t tell Marty, who seemed to have it made.

But Julie went to lunch even though she could’ve put that twenty in the gas tank, because sometimes she just needed to be with her friends. She was the last one to arrive and the girls greeted her as though they hadn’t seen her in a year, though she’d seen Cassie and Marty recently.