One Day at a Time Page 0,115

Jane's on Christmas Eve. They had already turned the guest room into a nursery and they were putting her in a smaller guest room downstairs. She knew that it was going to be hard to stay in the house again. Everything about it reminded her of Leslie now, and the months she had lived there with him.

Her mother and Gabriel and his daughter had arrived in San Francisco that afternoon. They went straight to the Ritz-Carlton to get organized. They hadn't brought a nanny with them, and Gabriel was going to take care of her himself. Florence was a little anxious about it, she had admitted to Jane. She hadn't been around a child that age in a long time.

“Well, that's what you get for having a young boyfriend, Mom,” Jane teased her, and she laughed about it with Coco when she arrived.

They were spending Christmas Eve together, as they always did, and Christmas Day, and that night everyone would go home. Her mother and Gabriel were going back to L.A., since they were leaving for Aspen the day after Christmas. And Coco was going back to the beach. But for twenty-four hours, they would be a family, however unorthodox they were. And they seemed to be getting more so every year. Now Liz and Jane were going to have a baby, and her mother had a boyfriend young enough to be her son, and his two-year-old who could have been her grandchild. “We're not exactly your standard family anymore,” Jane commented, as she walked Coco to her room downstairs. “Maybe we never were.” And then she looked at Coco strangely, as though thinking back to the days when they were growing up and their father was alive. “I was so jealous of you then,” she said in a quiet voice. “Dad was so nuts about you. I always felt like once you came along, I didn't have a chance. You were so little and so cute. Even Mom was excited about you for a while. She had so little time to give either of us, there just wasn't enough of her to share. I hope my kids never feel that way about me.”

“I always thought you were the star, and there was no room for me,” Coco confessed. She had said it to her therapist two years before, and it almost felt better saying it out loud to Jane.

“Maybe that's why I was so hard on you.” Jane looked at her apologetically. “There was hardly room for me in that house, and then you came along. There was never enough love to go around.”

“They were both such busy, important people,” Coco said thoughtfully. “They never had time to be parents.”

“And we never got a chance to be kids. We both had to be stars. I bought into it. You didn't. You just said to hell with it, and threw in the towel. I've been trying to impress them all my life. And in the end, who gives a damn? Who cares how many movies I produce? This baby is more important than that,” she said, rubbing her belly, which got bigger every day. She almost looked like a cartoon of a pregnant woman now.

“It sounds like you're on the right track,” Coco said gently, and gave her a hug. It was more than she could say for herself. They all had partners, she didn't. She had walked away from the man she loved. “Are you thinking of having more kids?” Coco asked her then. Jane had just referred to “kids,” plural, instead of one.

“Maybe,” Jane said with a smile. “Depends how this one goes, and how cute he is. If he's as big a brat as I was, I may have to send him back. You were pretty cute though. It just made me hate you more.” Leslie had been right. Jane was jealous of her, and what she was saying now was finally letting the air out of that balloon. The air was pretty stale by now. They were no longer competing for their mother's attention, and their father was gone.

And these days, their mother was more interested in Gabriel than in them. She had already told Jane that she and Gabriel would be in the Bahamas when the baby was born. They would come to see it when they got back. It was who their mother had always been. The men in her life had changed, but she never had, and at her age, there was no