“Hello,” Mormor said, standing by the sink, washing her hands, paintbrushes and a paint tray drying on a towel beside her. Cooking hadn’t been the only thing on her day’s agenda, apparently. She’d changed into her overalls—an ancient denim pair she used for all of her various household projects. The last time I’d seen her in them, she’d been stenciling the foyer with cardinals and twisty branches.

“It didn’t go well then?” she said to my retreating back.

I ducked into the bathroom with a shrug.

The front door slammed. Mom stomped into the house.

“Is she okay?” Mormor asked.

“I guess? Group was good, but she found Jack.”

“Who’s Jack?”

“The kid,” Mom said.

“What kid?”

“The baby’s father. He works at his dad’s garage in Cheshireville. Devi stumbled across him getting gas earlier. Sara and I stopped by after class. They exchanged numbers. I don’t know what’s next, but she’s—we’re—weirded out by it.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. I guess I didn’t plan on having him around. It’s change. Change is bad and scary. Boo change.”

Hearing Mom say that was comforting in a way. I supposed if anyone would get it, it’d be her, though; she knew the familiarity of an all-woman family. Her father had died when she was twelve, years before I came along. It’d been her and Mormor, and then her and Mormor and me until Mom married my father and moved away.

Knowing they were talking about me, I didn’t want to go back to the kitchen, but I had to. I couldn’t get to my room otherwise. Two sets of Larssen blue eyes followed me from bathroom to living room. They were so present. So expectant. I hovered on the threshold, my eyes rolling toward the ceiling.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“Of course you will,” was Mormor’s immediate reply. “You have us.”

“I know. I just don’t know what’s going to happen and it’s making me nervous. He might not want anything to do with the baby. And if he does, he has a girlfriend now and I have a boyfriend and I don’t know if we’re supposed to drop everything to try to be together for the baby or—”

“No,” my mother and grandmother said, in tones eerily similar to one another.

It was a relief. I didn’t want to uproot my life simply because Devi found Jack. Jack hadn’t made overtures suggesting he’d want to do that, either, to be fair, but I knew how some people thought, and some people thought parents should stay together for the kids. Not only did I not love Jack, I didn’t even know if I particularly liked Jack. How the heck was I supposed to think along lines of forever with someone I didn’t know, regardless of the womb fruit?