Girls In Pants by Ann Brashares

Author:Ann Brashares
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780375843198
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2007-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Carmen had saved Win’s telephone message and replayed it fourteen times in one hour. So why was she in the hospital—the very place where he worked—hunkered over a book in a corner, wearing sunglasses and a hat? It was Wednesday afternoon and Valia had her usual physical therapy session. Carmen knew where to find Win. Win might even be looking for her.

Instead, she picked the most remote spot she could find, which happened to be a deserted hallway in labor and delivery. It was nice and quiet for a while, but suddenly there was a virtual gaggle of pregnant women waddling toward her. She bent her head and tried to read a few more pages, but she was distracted. So much for her solitude. There was nowhere to run in this place.

All the women and their spouses were piling into a room. Carmen was imagining what it could mean—a big, wild rave for the pregnant folks?—when something began to dawn on her. She looked at her watch.

For the most part, she meanly ignored anything her mother said that contained the words labor, birth, pregnancy, or baby. But vaguely in the back of her mind she knew her mom and David were coming to a childbirth class at this very hospital.

Could it be? Could it?

Oh, man.

She tried to get back into her book, but she couldn’t. For pages and pages, Jane Austen’s elegant banter went into her eyes and stopped short of her brain. Carmen was curious now. Once she framed a question, it was so hard for her not to answer it. She put her book in her bag and walked down the hall. She stopped at the room where the pregnant women had gone. It had a frosted glass window, fairly convenient for snooping. She saw the couples sitting on the floor. The men had their legs spread out with their rotund wives between them. It looked pretty peculiar, frankly. The teacher stood behind a table at the front.

Carmen had come to the conclusion that her mother wasn’t, in fact, part of this strange class when she peered farther in to the back and saw the familiar angle of dark hair. Christina was easy to miss because even with her big round belly, she seemed to be shrinking against the wall.

Everybody was a couple and Christina was alone. Why was that? The current exercise involved the men massaging their wives’ shoulders, and Christina just sat there.

Where was David? Carmen watched in puzzlement until Christina reached up her arms to massage her own shoulders. That was all Carmen needed. The ache in her chest caught her by surprise and propelled her straight through the door and into the room.

“Can I help you?” the instructor asked her.

“Hold on just a sec,” Carmen said. She went to her mother. “What’s going on? Where’s David?”

Christina’s eyes were pinkish. “There was a big emergency on his case. He had to fly to St. Louis,” she whispered. To her immense credit, there was lots of sadness in the way she said it, but no blame.

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