Page 93 of Wishing for Love

FOR CAUSE AND EFFECT

“I’m not interrupting you, am I, Mom?” Crystal asked her mother two days later.

She figured it was best to call her at lunch, as she knew her mother went home for an hour.

Elsie was in school today and tomorrow and then done for the summer and she wanted to get this call over with.

“No,” her mother said. “What are you doing? I can hear you moving around.”

“I’m making lunch. You’re on speaker,” she said.

“No Elsie?”

“She’s in school for two more days and then I’ve got her for the summer.”

“You’ve been on easy street raking in the dough,” her mother said, laughing.

“Hardly that,” she said. “I work a lot. You know that.”

“I think you do, but you argue you don’t. That you’ve got hours during the day when you don’t do much. Other than you work like a slave cleaning and cooking. Guess it’s nothing more than being a housewife who gets paid well for it. So yeah, good on you.”

She rolled her eyes. It was going to be even harder to share the news with her mother, but she had to. She’d already told Taylor an hour ago. Her sister was supportive and understood completely. She knew that Taylor would have had the same thing happen to her.

Maybe they were just really fertile women to both get pregnant even though they were protected against it.

“Whatever, Mom. You look at things differently than me. But I need to tell you something.”

“You’re not staying there much longer?” her mother asked. “You lasted longer than I thought you would.”

She ground her teeth. “You always do that,” she said. “You always knock me down.”

“Don’t get emotional,” her mother said. “That is part of being the baby of the family. You act like one too.”

Her mother was laughing on the other line. Those comments just made what else she had to say even harder.

“Mom, I’m pregnant.”

There was silence on the other end. “You’re joking, right?”

“Afraid not,” she said.

She finally accepted the fact that she was going to have a child and that Phoenix wasn’t upset over it. He was more excited than her, but she was trying to come around to it.

It helped that Carolina was happy even if Phoenix’s mother hadn’t reached out. She started to wonder if Phoenix was making it up.

“I didn’t even know you were dating someone,” her mother said. “Is this going to cost you your job now? It wouldn’t be the first time that you got fired for something.”

She blinked her tears a few times. “I’ve never been fired. I’ve quit, but never been fired.”

“It’s the same thing when you don’t show up and they tell you to quit or they will fire you.”

“I was seventeen,” she said. “And it was a part-time job.”

Her mother was good at rubbing everything in nonstop.

“It doesn’t change the facts,” her mother said. “So who is the father or just a one-night stand? Guess you decided you like men better than women?”

Her jaw dropped. “I’ve never had a one-night stand. You have a horrible opinion of me.”