Turn up the Heat by Jessica Conant-Park, Susan Conant Page B

hoped that I wasn’t nagging, but I wondered why Adrianna still didn’t have a ring and why they hadn’t set a date.
    “I don’t know. This baby thing makes things more complicated, I guess, in terms of planning a wedding. I’m just not up for anything else major right now. I suppose next year sometime. Owen thinks that the fall might be a nice time...”
    Much to my surprise, Adrianna burst into tears, and I don’t just mean soft crying, but huge, heaving sobs that left her in a state of near choking. Ade was not a crier. In all the years I’d known her, I’d seen her cry only a handful of times. One of those had been when she’d told me she was pregnant. Sure, the pregnancy had made her emotional, but she’d mainly taken her feelings out on Owen by being snippy and irritable. So far as I knew, she hadn’t been falling to pieces.
    Her weeping threw me. Worse, it alarmed me. “Honey, what’s wrong?” I knelt down next to her on the floor, surrounded by boxes and items ready to be packed.
    “I just... it’s just... God, I don’t know, Chloe! There’s so much going on right now. This is not what I planned at all. And Owen is so freaking excited and happy, and I’m just...” She paused, clearly embarrassed. “And I’m not.”
    “You’re not excited about the baby? Or is it about marrying Owen?” I asked softly as I rubbed her back.
    She looked down. “About this baby.” After more sobbing, she calmed down enough to speak again. “That sounds horrible, right? I’m an awful person for saying that, I know. But what the hell do I know about babies? Nothing, that’s what I know. I don’t even like kids. You know that. And now I’m having one?”
    Unfortunately, it was true that Adrianna didn’t really like children. She certainly had no use for my niece, Lucy, and my nephew, Walker. Their noise, their messiness, and their crying irritated her, and she totally failed to see the cuteness I saw during Lucy’s and Walker’s moments of being adorable. I guess I’d assumed that she’d feel differently about her own child. Or child-to-be. When she’d discovered that she was pregnant, she’d been anything but enthusiastic. Owen’s unfaltering exhilaration at the prospect of becoming a father, however, had overshadowed Adrianna’s doubts, at least from my perspective. In fact, Owen had acted so wildly overjoyed that I now made a mental note to see whether his behavior fit the DSM’s definition of a manic episode. Still, I had no excuse for failing to pick up on how freaked Adrianna was.
    “You must be so scared right now, huh?” I said gently.
    She nodded.
    “That’s okay. It’s okay to be scared and question how you feel about having a baby. That doesn’t make you a bad person, and it doesn’t mean you’re going to be a bad mother.”
    “Mother,” she said. “I’m going to be someone’s mother. That’s just unimaginable to me. Look at my mother! Do you think I learned anything from her?” She shook her head and managed a laugh. “Definitely not.” Ade grew up with a single mom who had tried to be her daughter’s best friend rather than a real parent or even a parental figure. Her father was out of the picture.
    “You can learn, Adrianna. You don’t have to know everything about how to be a parent the second the baby is born. It’ll take time, and you’ll learn as you go along.” I wished my sister, Heather, were around, but she and her husband, Ben, and their two kids were doing the whole nauseating Disney World vacation this week. Somehow my poor parents had been conned into going along. As much as my sister drove me crazy most of the time, she was an excellent, devoted mother who’d have words of wisdom for Ade. I did have some day care experience under my belt, but I had no children, and Ade, the mother-to-be, needed help from another mother. “Why don’t you call Heather when she gets back from her trip? I know she’d love to talk to you. And as moms go, she’s pretty