Chapter 24 – The C. Goths
“It's morning,” Bill said on the phone. “Can I come over and talk?”
Cassandra agreed readily. She was wearing a new outfit, one she'd picked up at Olivia's store. She still hadn't made up her mind about Bill, but it never hurt to look one's best. There was a knock on the door and she hurried to open it.
Awkward. Kristian – whom she hadn't seen in quite some time, not since Gunther had been born, in fact – had chosen the exact same moment to show up.
“I see you have company,” he said and withdrew in a huff.
“What – ?” Bill began.
“I didn't know he was coming,” Cassandra said hastily. “What was it you wanted to say?”
“I love you madly,” said Bill.
“I love you, too,” said Cassandra. “But – “
“Which means I'm not going to marry any other woman,” said Bill. “And if I get abducted and produce an alien child, it will be wholly alien, not my offspring at all. So if you want to get my genes into the pool, you're going to have to jump in with me.”
Cassandra opened her mouth to say something, but found that her brain had quit working.
“I know you don't want to marry me,” said Bill. “You want to work as a doctor when that becomes possible, and I want to work as a doctor, too, and we couldn't both do that.”
“True,” Cassandra conceded.
“Plus I'm a goofball and you're gloomy, and you probably think we'd get on each other's nerves,” Bill continued. “But I will always love you.”
“I need to think,” said Cassandra. “Let me have some space to think about this.”
Bill left, and Cassandra played her violin for a while. Gunther joined her in a slightly inharmonious duet, but Cassandra didn't mind. He was making good progress towards becoming creatively gifted.
When she set her violin down, she noticed that Bill had left a book behind. It was his book of poetry,
Plague Musing.
“Really?” she said to the air. “Isn't this the equivalent of dropping your glove and having to come back to get it?”
But she sat down to read it anyway. To her surprise, some of the poems were quite serious, even somber in tone.
The next morning, after Gunther had left for school, Cassandra called Bill and suggested that they go out on a date. “How about the museum?” she said.
They found a couch on the third floor where they could be fairly private. Instead of talking about anything serious, they started flirting with each other.
Cassandra had kept her feelings bottled up so long that when she finally took the lid off they all bubbled out. “Okay, I'll have your baby,” she said between kisses. “Let's go try for it in the Observatory,” she added with a giggle.
Later that evening she felt very odd. It was quite different from the way she'd felt when she was pregnant with Gunther.
“Mom, I think you're running a fever,” he told her.
A fever? Cassandra immediately thought of the plague. No one had developed a serum for it yet, which meant she would die. But if it wasn't the plague... “Do we have any orange juice?” she asked Gunther.
“In the fridge, Mom,” he said.
Cassandra began feeling better as soon as she finished the orange juice. It had just been a cold. She would have to remember the curative properties of orange juice when she became a doctor.
She went to bed, but woke up a little while later, needing to pee. And in her panic about the fever, she'd forgotten to take a pregnancy test. She took one now, and discovered the welcome news.
She started to call Bill, but then realized that at 3 in the morning, he would probably be asleep. She phoned him the next day.
“Where have you been?” she asked. “I've been trying to reach you.”
“I was writing,” Bill said sheepishly. “I must have turned my phone off.”
“That reminds me,” said Cassandra. “I read your poems – the book you left at my house – and they were really good. But they got your name wrong on the cover.”
“I know,” said Bill. “My first publisher got it wrong, and rather than confuse matters, I decided to stick with it. In fact, if you ever do decide to have my child, I'd like you to give it the last name of Pancake.”
“That was what I was calling about,” said Cassandra. “I'm pregnant.”
“Great!” said Bill. “And don't worry. I'll raise little Robert, or Beth, as the case may be.”
They talked a little more, and then Cassandra returned to the painting she'd been working on. It was the most excellent one she'd ever done, and she thought that she might paint those 3 palms again, in a different light, in the style of Monet.
When she finished the painting, she started making a cake for Gunther's birthday.
He invited a few friends over, and his father as well. Gunther blew out his candles.
And became a teenager who wanted to become a Painter Extraordinaire.
Gunther sat and talked to his father, who asked if there was anything he wanted to know about. There was one question that was uppermost in Gunther's mind – what was woo-hoo all about?
Kristian gave him a brief, clinical description and then said that he'd help him with his homework.
That night, Cassandra went into labor.
She named the little boy Robert Pancake.
And when he grew up into a cheerful little social butterfly, he went to live with his father.
