The cemetery lies at the top of the escarpment  and when Sharanne walks towards her dad’s grave, she glimpses the bay through white birch trunks. She has always loved this place. In high school she would cut along a dirt path bordering the cliff’s edge before doubling back along the old railbed with the cross-country team. Today she sinks to the ground beside Norm McKinnon’s headstone  and remembers her seventeen year old body – how her legs were strong and the slightest  injury healed in a few days. 

Tracing her dad’s name on the smooth stone she sighs. “So, this is a bit different from the last time…”

                  She was nineteen, standing at the kitchen table with Lorne behind her. In her high school yearbook she’d been nominated “most likely to bust a move”, a designation she’d read as both an endorsement and a condemnation of her independent spirit.

                  “Dad…” Why couldn’t she get the words out?

                  She was settled now. Lorne was happy; the store was in good hands. Someday Ella would inherit the building… so what was the big deal? Had he been living, had things been different, Norm McKinnon would have hand-picked Chuck Dalrymple for his only daughter. Chuck had his own business, times had changed, and his daughter had plans…

                  “ I came to tell you I’m having a baby.”

                  She touched her belly. Soon people would notice her cheeks getting rounder. And before that happened she had to tell Ella. But how do you tell the child who has been the very centre of your life that everything was about to change? 

            “I could really use one your hugs right now.”

Just then , Sharanne heard rustling in the pond behind her. A heron tilted its head towards her, blinked and took flight.

~

When Chuck Dalrymple and Sharanne first started seeing each other, he knew he wanted to start a family with her. But as the years passed, he was surprised how much he delighted in watching his step-daughter grow up. He poured a concrete pad  and taught her to shoot hoops so they could play 21 on the nights she stayed with them. She was such an easy kid he thought his friends exaggerated when they complained about the bratty things their children said and did. Maybe they just got lucky. Still, that winning-the-lottery feeling was overshadowed on nights when Ella was at Lorne’s, and Sharanne missed her daughter so much nothing Chuck could do or say made her happy. The price you pay for having a kid you like as much as you love.

            One year Ella had her birthday party at their place, since they had a huge backyard, and after they’d finished cleaning up, Lorne and his wife Monica took Ella home to their place and Sharanne just cried and cried. The next day Chuck went out and bought his wife a white corvette and they drove all over the county, Garth Brooks blaring. Suddenly, she turned the music off and said, “you still want to have a kid? You and me?”

            “Are you suggesting I pull into a scenic lookout right now?” he said, joking to buy himself some thinking time. His mind was racing. They’d been together for over a decade now; he’d put the idea of more kids aside because life was good. Would a baby make it better?

            “It just never seemed to be the right time before. But now…” her voice trailed off.

Chuck turned off the valley road onto a dirt path that wound uphill. He pulled off near a hiking trail and they got out. Glancing at the sports car he tried to imagine a car seat, a diaper bag. Did Sharanne really want to trade a corvette for a minivan? As she walked along the trail ahead of him he admired her athletic physique. He couldn’t see her pregnant, at least he couldn’t envision her slowing down. Sharanne hustled. At work she scheduled quick trims when another client was under the dryer so as not to waste a single minute. Sharanne stopped and he almost ran into her.

            “Tracy could fill in for me for a couple months. Then I could ease back in while the baby napped.”

            “Do babies always nap at the same time every day?” Chuck asked skeptically.

            She frowned. “Well…”

            He folded her into his arms. “I could take some time off, too. Maybe I could work mornings and you could work afternoons.”

            “My mother could help…”

            “Or mine?”

            “So…””

            “Let’s try .”

 

It’s Murphy’s Law that you can get pregnant at 18 when you’re broke and uneducated , but at 33 the stick comes back negative month after month. They tried not to get discouraged. 

            “We’re young,” they said to one another.

            Secretly, Chuck wondered if his plumbing was alright. Sharanne obsessed about putting her feet up every night. And then one morning, six months later, Chuck brought Sharanne a coffee and the smell turned her stomach, and she knew she was going to be a mother again.

~

Ella had noticed something in Chuck first. Her step-father loved a tidy garage. He tolerated a messy living room or a cluttered den but when it came to his workbench and the rakes and shovels neatly hung by the garbage can, he was fastidious. But last week, when Ella borrowed a wrench to tighten her bicycle seat and accidentally left it on the laneway, he didn’t get angry, or even annoyed, even though the wrench left a rust mark on the concrete. He just whistled, picked it up and walked it back to the garage, winking at her as though she was in on a secret.

            But what was the secret? She started watching her mother for hints. At first, she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Chuck and Sharanne danced around each other in the kitchen, but that in itself wasn’t so unusual. She needed to consult with an expert. Her best friend, Lizzie, was the youngest of four kids. Everything either of them knew about growing up came from Lizzie’s older siblings.

            “My mom and Chuck are acting weird.”

            “Weird, how?”

            “They have a secret.”

            “Good or bad?”

            “Good I think. They seem happy.”

            “Maybe they’re taking a trip.” 

            “Without me?”

            “When was the last time they went away just the two of them?”

            Ella couldn’t remember. And why would they want to? Her mom always said how much she missed her after she’d been at her dad’s for a few days.

            “No. It’s not a trip. It’s something bigger.”

            “Hmmm. Maybe you’re getting a pool this summer. Hasn’t Chuck been talking about a pool for, like, ever?”

            “That’s true.” Ella wrapped the cord around her finger. She didn’t think they were getting a pool. 

            “Lizzie…” she hesitated. “Do you think my mom is old?”

            Lizzie snorted. “Old? You’re kidding me, right? She had you when she was a teenager. My mom is old. My mom could be a grandmother if my sister got pregnant…”

            “Yeah.”

            “Wait… you don’t think?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “She would tell you if she was. You guys are like, so close.”

            “Yeah,” Ella said. They were.

~

Sharanne and Chuck decided they would tell Ella about the baby after the first ultrasound.

            “We could give her the picture,” Chuck suggested.

            “We could get her a present,” Sharanne said.

            Chuck scratched his head. “What for?”

            “You know, just to, uh…” Sharanne could say why she wanted to give her daughter a gift. She felt unsure of herself. Maybe a little trinket would guarantee a positive reaction, or at least smooth over any awkwardness. 

            “You’re worried she won’t be excited?” Chuck asked. “A baby IS a gift!”

            Sharanne shrugged. For them, yeah. But it couldn’t be easy for a kid to move over and make room for someone else, especially after so many years of having her parents all to herself. Even a kid like Ella, a good kid, could be expected to struggle a bit with the adjustment. 

            “If you think sooner is better than later, we’ll tell her tonight at dinner.”

            “Unless she’s already guessed.”

            “Nah. I heard her talking to Lizzie yesterday. Same old… volleyball, camp boys and birdwatching… she’s a teenager. They’re not paying attention to boring adults.”

            “Hey! I’m not boring!”

            Chuck laughed. “Yeah, I know how not boring you are, Mrs. Dalrymple.” 

They’d promised each other not to tell anyone their baby was conceived in a corvette.

            

~

In a good year, Chuck helps the local landscapers locate field stone in farmer’s fields. The municipality has a by-law that you can’t load up dump trucks with full loads during the spring thaw, so the loophole is to make plenty of small runs from the fields to the job sites. On this particular day, Chuck invites Ella to come with him and pick up a load. There’s an osprey nest nearby, and he knows she’d like to see it.

            They head out early. It’s crisp on the lawn, the kind of April day that feels like March. Ella makes hot chocolate in a thermos and they drive out to a century farm on the east side of the valley. The fence rows are lined with oak trees and a stone wall that’s been built up season after season of rock picking. Chuck has always liked that look. He likes a farm with its history built into the landscape. 

            Ella spots the pond and the platform with the deep osprey nest as soon as they’ve backed up to the waiting excavator. 

            “Go on,” Chuck says. “I’ll be here awhile.”

            Ella wanders off with her camera and binoculars. The mother osprey keeps her eye on Ella and doesn’t leave the nest, so after a while, Ella decides to go for a walk around the pond. It’s spring migration; she’ll come back to the osprey and try to find a few warblers in the meantime. She’s not sure how it happens, but she loses track of time. Just as she’s thinking she should head back, Chuck emerges from the bushes, looking frazzled.

            “Where have you been?” he calls out.

            “I…” She’s surprised to see him upset. What’s the big deal?

            “I wanted to be home by now to check on your mom…” he says, then stops himself.

            “Why? What’s wrong with mom?”

            “What? Oh. Nothing.” His cheeks grow red and he turns away from Ella.

            “Then why would you need to check on her?”

            “Forget it. It’s nothing. Let’s get going.”

            “Wait a minute. You’ve been acting weird for weeks. What’s wrong with my Mom?”

            “There’s nothing wrong with her…” He can’t help himself. He starts to smile.

            Ella looks back at the osprey nest just as the mother returns with a small fish for its chicks. She grabs her binoculars and spots three fuzzy heads. And she knows. 

            “Mom’s having a baby, isn’t she?”

            Chuck slows his stride. “We were going to tell you tonight. Please don’t tell your mother I told you. She really wanted to talk to you herself.”

            “When?”

            Chuck blushes. “Pardon?”

            “When is the baby coming?”

            “Oh. Oh…. in the fall.” 

Chuck opens the door to the cab and Ella climbs in. They exit the field in silence and a numb shock settles over her. When she was a little girl, she sometimes imagined what it might be like to have a sibling. Her grandmother Lois had given her a china tea set for her sixth birthday and they’d had a tea party on the apartment balcony. But Ella had known, even then, that once her grandma went home, the tea set would sit idle. She tried playing with her stuffed animals to please her dad, but her heart wasn’t in it. And now she would have a sister or a brother, but her tea party days were long behind her.

Chuck clears his throat. “I don’t want you to worry that we expect you to babysit…”

Ella glances at him. His jaw is set in a tight line. He’s really worried about this, she thinks. 

“…I want you to know that I love you like my own kid, and this baby won’t change that.” 

No, but now some little creature would call him ‘Dad’, instead of Chuck, and that changed things.

Ella has never seen Chuck cry, or even come close to it. The boulders in the trailer will make the ride home slow. She rolls down her window and lets her arm hang out. 

“So, Mom’s been pretty sick, eh?”

He exhales. “I never seen anything like it. Haven’t you noticed she’s only been eating soda crackers and ginger ale?”

Ella doesn’t answer. She feels a little flutter in her own stomach and realizes that she might be excited about the baby, too.

~

“It went better than I could have hoped for, Dad.”

Sharanne lays out a wool blanket on the ground in front of Norm’s grave and vows to eat a proper lunch – the baby needs a decent meal for goodness sakes. She leans against the cool stone and unpeels a banana.

“Chuck and Ella made spaghetti for dinner on Saturday night and before we ate Chuck announced we had something we wanted to share …we wanted to wait until after the ultrasound, but Chuck changed his mind and said we had to tell her sooner. I thought that was kind of sweet… he just wanted her to be part of everything…

“She was so mature about it, Dad. She gave me a big hug, and told me she was happy for us. We talked about where we’d set up the nursery and if we were going to find out the sex… we aren’t by the way… 

“And somehow now it feels very real. I’m doing this all over again. A teenager and a baby. It should be weird, but somehow it feels like it’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.”

 

If Norm McKinnon were alive, he might have rolled his eyes at that. He wasn’t a big fan of seeing his teenaged daughter pregnant with some city kid’s baby, but  had he known that baby was Ella, and what an amazing kid she’d turn out to be, he would have loved her more fiercely than his own daughter, if that were even possible. But no one can really know how things planned and unplanned are going to work out.

Next week Lorne will come by for a haircut and she’ll tell him about the baby. And he’ll feel a bit nostalgic and go home and fix up the old stroller he’s kept in the shed all these years. But when he brings it over to Chuck and Sharanne’s, they’ll pour him a drink and tell him the stroller’s no good because they’ll have just returned home from the ultrasound appointment and the grainy black and white photo shows not one heart, but two.