Tara Quinn - The Friendship Pact

But I was willing to live with them if that was what it took to have my friend back. To be the friend she needed. Maybe all friendships faced this. A growing up. I swallowed back tears. Like I’d said, I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was a wife. Soon to be an expectant mother.

And I had more than most.

“I want you to be honest with me, Kor.”

“I’m always honest with you.”

“No, I mean, I want you to do exactly what you’re doing.”

“Giving up?”

“No.” I straightened as silence fell between us.

“You want me to continue showing you the way I see you...” I said tentatively.

“Yes.”

Oh, my God. So I wasn’t losing it. My mind. Or our deep connection.

“You don’t agree with me,” I said.

“I know.”

“You believe I’m thinking of myself and what I want.”

“Yeah.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Right where we’ve always been, I guess,” she said, sounding tired, too, but better somehow. “We keep yakking until one or the other of us sees the light.”

“So you’ll wait to do anything until we’ve...reached a consensus?”

“Yeah. As long as we keep trying to figure out which of us is screwed up on this one.”

I swallowed again, so relieved to have my friend back.

“I love you, Bail.”

“Love you, too.”

I went to bed. And slept.

Chapter Eight

Over the next six weeks, Bailey and Koralynn had several calm conversations regarding artificial insemination for a single woman. Kora agreed that there were times when the process was a good choice, although she still liked the idea of both a male and a female influence in the formation of the child’s emotional and mental life.

Her objections were specific to Bailey. She remained certain that Bailey’s choice to be artificially inseminated was, in essence, a way of hurting herself, robbing herself of the ultimate joy and happiness that could be hers.

“You know, if you didn’t want to get married because you hated the idea of being tied to one guy for the rest of your life—or because you just didn’t like guys, I’d get it. But the problem is, you want exactly what marriage is supposed to provide—a life partner who will be with you every step of the way, no matter what.”

She couldn’t deny that. In theory. Trouble was, it was a pipedream. And she knew it. Even if Kora didn’t.

“It’s not marriage you don’t want, it’s failure. And so, because you’re afraid the marriage will fail, you’re robbing yourself of a chance to have it all.”

Kora was right.

But so was Bailey. For her, marriage would fail. For her, marriage would be a bad choice. Because she didn’t have what it took to make it work. Whatever you called it—a lack of faith, lack of belief, or plain crankiness, she was at least honest enough to spare some more guy a broken life.

And spare her children the same.

The more they talked, the more Kora objected to her proposed plan, for Bailey’s sake and the sake of the child, the more certain Bailey grew that artificial insemination was the only course for her.

“It’s because you know I’m trying to get pregnant,” Kora said as they were doing the dishes at Kora’s house one Friday night in July. Danny was out with the guys, and Bailey guessed that meant out with Jake, so she and Kora had plans to spend the evening hanging out in front of the TV. Bailey was already in the sweats she’d brought to change into after work.

“No, it’s not,” Bailey said now, rinsing plates for Kora to load. Her job had always been rinsing. Kora’s was loading and unloading. In the beginning, because Kora knew how her mother liked things done and where everything went. And later, just because they had their system established and it worked well. She had to trust that, somehow, this whole baby thing would work for them, too. “It’s because I’m positive I don’t want to get married, and because you’re right about part of this. What I want more than anything is a family of my own. You just don’t see that the only way I’m going to have one is to provide it for myself.”

Kora, still dressed in the jeans she’d worn grocery shopping and doing whatever else she’d done that day, paused, plate suspended over the bottom dishwasher rack. “You’re certain about that.”

Bailey met her gaze. “Yeah, Kor, I am.”

“Certain enough that you’re ready for me to back off? To support your decision regardless of how I feel about it? Because I will, Bailey. If you tell me that’s what you need.”

Bailey was all set to agree. But then she stopped. Kora knew her so well. Was there something she wasn’t seeing that her best friend could?

“We’ve always done everything together,” Kora said now. “Can you tell me that you aren’t suddenly feeling this acute need to get pregnant because you know Danny and I are trying?”

Yes.

No.

She couldn’t.

Kora was at least partially right. The acuteness of her desire to do this, the fact that she didn’t want to wait, might be because Kora was getting pregnant. Because they’d always said they’d raise their children together. Because she didn’t want to be left behind.

But the choice to have a child alone? That was Bailey’s true choice.

Wasn’t it?

* * *

I wasn’t just sitting around that whole summer trying to get pregnant and fighting my best friend’s attempt to—as I saw it—sabotage her life. I wasn’t focused all day long on changing Bailey’s mind about artificial insemination. Nor had I tried to set her up with Jake or any of the other eligible men Danny and I knew.

I was working on lesson plans for the next school year, making colorful bulletin board displays to accompany the upcoming major events over the next year, incorporating specific lessons into them. I painted our bedroom and the living room. Tried out new recipes for quick and easy meals that would come in handy when school was back in session.

I attended Thursday night fitness class religiously, and hoarded whatever other time I could get with Bailey. I drove in to meet her for lunch a few days a week—the days Danny had business lunches. She and I spent an entire Saturday at a new outlet mall, went to a couple of movies and she joined us for a Fourth of July barbecue at my folks’ house.

I had hot sex with my husband, went out on the town with him, both of us skipping the alcohol because I’d read that it could inhibit fertilization, attended several major league baseball games, enjoying the box seats his company had provided for us, and saw my parents and his mom, every chance we got.

And twice I drove by the small house rented by Mary Ephrain’s mother. I’d looked the address up online and could see from public records that it was a rental. I could see the landlord’s information.

The house had two bedrooms and at least one mother with three kids living in it. Mary’s older brother had been a student of mine in my first year of teaching and I knew there was another sister, younger than Mary.

The first time I drove by no one was home. I’d hoped that Mary had been off to visit grandparents for the summer. Or was on vacation at the beach. Both things I might have been doing had I been her age.

But spending the summer with grandparents and taking vacations at the beach didn’t usually produce troublemaking nine-year-old girls who asked their teachers if they could see them over the summer.

That last Tuesday morning in July, three weeks before school was due to start, and only two weeks before I was due back in my classroom, I saw lights on at the dingy little rental set in the middle of a block of similar houses. Pulling my Ford Mustang to the curb between an old mattress and what looked to be part of a bumper, I stepped slowly out.