Only Ever You by Kate Kerrigan

Author:Kate Kerrigan [Kerrigan, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784082406
Publisher: Head of Zeus

21

AVA STARTED to ‘show’ early on in her pregnancy, partly because she quickly started to gain weight. She was happy to give up work in her father’s office and concentrate on making the perfect home for her and Patrick and the new baby. Although her pregnancy was unexpected, she quickly became very excited at the idea of becoming a mother. An only child herself, it felt as if very soon her family would be complete. Although her parents offered to buy her a home, they decided that they would stay in Ava’s small apartment which they were managing to pay for themselves. It was not pride so much as the feeling that, in some way, she had still let her parents down. She had a husband, and soon she would have a child. In a way, that was all her parents had ever wanted for her. Perhaps, also, it was all she had ever hoped for herself. And yet when she was with her parents she felt as if her relationship still fell under the shadow of the circumstances in which it had started.

The nursery was little more than a box room, a large cupboard. She and Patrick had chosen the paint together in a hardware store around the corner from the house. For weeks, now, the paint pot had been sitting at the door waiting for Patrick to get a day off. Since the opportunity to sing had opened out for him at work, he had been working nearly all the time. Ava missed having him around, and with the baby coming, and the ongoing awkwardness with her parents, sometimes she felt lonely.

However, she knew how important Patrick’s singing career was to him so she said nothing. Ava went ahead and picked out fabric for curtains and a quilt, a sky-blue cotton with small ducklings on it. She understood that men were not interested in such things, but nonetheless she wanted there to be a sense of occasion and excitement about the baby’s coming. Perhaps because its conception had been unplanned it was all the more important to make plans now.

On this particular day, Patrick promised he would stay at home and paint the room.

He told Gerry that on no account would he come in early for rehearsals. He and the wife were going to spend the day together decorating the nursery and, later in the afternoon, go to the hardware store and buy wood and other materials for him to make a crib. In the evening, he had promised Ava that he would take her out to their local bistro for a spaghetti dinner.

The day before, he had come into the bedroom and found her trying on a dress for the occasion. She was struggling to get her arms into it. ‘I’m getting so fat,’ she complained. ‘I have nothing to wear.’

As he attempted to zip it up, Patrick did experience a moment of alarm at how much bigger she had got in just a few weeks since the wedding.

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