The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,35

led in Charleston. Which seemed to leave only one option, to find a new life.

Easier said than done. Suppose, just suppose, that everything went according to plan. Suppose the remodeling went smoothly, and the home visit went great, and the birth mother picked me, and the baby became mine.

Then what?

If there was one thing I’d learned from years of reading and writing Dear Calpurnia letters, it’s that there are about ten gazillion ways for parents to screw up a kid. Love went a long way, but there had to be more to raising a child than that. I’d told Calvin that as long as a child had one person who loved and believed in them, they generally turned out okay. But was that really true? Even if it was, I didn’t want my child to turn out just okay. I wanted her—assuming it was a girl, something told me it was—to feel happy, successful, loved, and spectacularly comfortable in her own skin.

How was I supposed to make that happen? How would I guide her, protect her, show her the right path? How would I keep her from repeating my mistakes?

And on a more practical note, how was I going to provide for her? I still wasn’t one hundred percent convinced about taking the severance, but if I did, the money would only last so long. How would we live after that? The only thing I actually knew how to do was write, and that, as my current circumstances illustrated, was a far from sure and somewhat ridiculous way to try and make a living.

If you’re a writer, you really can’t not write; it was too late for me to save myself. But I should try to guide her toward steadier, more lucrative lines of work, if possible. I definitely needed to make sure she took a lot of math and science classes and steered clear of student debt, as well as men who had too many ex-girlfriends, or whose eyes drifted toward other women when they went out to dinner with you, or who didn’t put up at least some kind of fight when you suggested splitting the check on a first date.

There were so many ways to go wrong in life, I thought to myself as I crossed the street and approached the shop with the red door and the black awning. The chances of everything working out the way I hoped were slim: I understood that. But suppose, just suppose, that everything did work out and the birth mother picked me. I didn’t want to leave everything until the last minute, did I? There were so many things I needed to tell her, all important. Maybe I ought to start writing them down?

At almost the exact moment these thoughts were circling my brain, I saw it—the bookstore display of exquisite leather-bound journals. They were beautiful. And they were calling to me.

Given the precarious state of my finances, I had no business going into a bookstore, even if I told myself I was only going to browse. And really, who was I kidding? Experience has proven that I am preternaturally incapable of leaving a bookstore without buying something. Buying a gorgeous, fifty-nine-dollar, chocolate-brown journal with hundreds of pages of thick, sturdy, cream-colored pages and end papers decorated with delicious red-and-gold hand marbling would be irresponsible bordering on crazy. The only books I’d ever spent sixty dollars on were college textbooks; this one didn’t even come with words.

I bought it anyway and, an hour later, took a seat at the too-small-for-real-writing desk in my hotel room, opened the journal, lowered my nose to the first pages, and sniffed.

The paper smelled like dust, leather, and beginnings. But several minutes passed before I was able to pick up my pen and start. How should I begin? What did I want to tell her? The answer of course was everything.

But if there was one thing I’d picked up during my career as a pseudo journalist, it’s never to bury the lede, which basically means you should get to the point, and quickly.

Dear Peaches,

My name is Celia Fairchild and, if everything works out like I hope it will, I’m going to be your mother.

If hearing that makes you nervous, I won’t hold it against you. I’m pretty nervous about it myself. Excited but nervous. But that’s normal, isn’t it? I mean, does anybody ever feel totally prepared for motherhood?

According to the Internet, at approximately twelve weeks’ gestation, you’re about two inches long, weigh half