Jennifer Weiner - Then Came You

Then Came You

A LSO BY J ENNIFER W EINER

Good in Bed
In Her Shoes
Little Earthquakes
Goodnight Nobody
The Guy Not Taken
Certain Girls
Best Friends Forever
Fly Away Home

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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New York, NY 10020
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Jennifer Weiner, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Atria Books hardcover edition July 2011

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Designed by Dana Sloan

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weiner, Jennifer.

Then came you : a novel / Jennifer Weiner.1st Atria books hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. MotherhoodFiction. 2. MothersFiction. 3. InfertilityFiction.

4. Surrogate mothersFiction. 5. BirthparentsFiction. 6. Adoptive parentsFiction. 7. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3573.E3935T53 2011

813.6dc22 2011014411

ISBN 978-1-4516-1772-6
ISBN 978-1-4516-1774-0 (ebook)

For Phoebe Pearl

So, said Estella, I must be taken as I have been
made. The success is not mine, the failure is not
mine, but the two together make me.

CHARLES DICKENS, GREAT EXPECTATIONS

T he man in the suit was watching me again.

It was March of my senior year in college, a clear, chilly afternoon, when I felt what was, by then, the familiar weight of a mans gaze, while I sat by myself in the food court. I looked up from my dinner, and there he was, at the end of the line for the salad place, looking at me the way he had for the past three weeks.

I sighed. The mall was one of my favorite places, and I didnt want to give it up because of some creep.

Id found the mall my freshman year. If you walked off campus, across Nassau Street and into a kiosk in the center of town, you could buy a discounted ticket with your student ID, and the bus would take you to a fancy shopping center with a fancy name, the Princeton MarketFair. There were all of the chains: a Pottery Barn and a Restoration Hardware, and Gaps, both Baby and full-grown, a Victorias Secret where you could buy your panties and a LensCrafters where you could pick up a pair of sunglasses, all of them in a sprawling, sterile building with marble floors and flattering, pink-tinted lights. At one end of the mall was a big, airy bookstore, with leather armchairs where you could curl up and read. At the other end was a movie theater that showed four-dollar matinees on Mondays. Between them was the food court.

Shortly after my discovery, Id learned that only losers used public transportation. Id found this out when I heard two of my classmates scornfully discussing a date that a girl we all knew had been on. He took her to the movies. On the bus . Giggle, giggle ... and then a quick look sideways to me, for my approval, because, tall and blond and with two juniors on the varsity crew team vying for my affection, I couldnt possibly fall into the busgirls category.

The truth was I liked the bus, and I liked the mall. It felt real, and Princetons campus, with its perfect green lawns and its ivy-clad, gargoyle-ornamented, stained-glass-windowed buildings, and its students, none of whom seemed to suffer from acne or obesity or even bad-hair days, felt like a film set, too wonderful to exist. On campus, everyone walked around as if theyd never had a second of doubt, an instant of feeling like they didnt belong, carrying their expensive laptops and textbooks, dressed just right. People at the mall did not look as if theyd just stepped out of catalogs. Their clothes were sometimes stained or too tight. They walked past the shop windows yearning after things they didnt need and couldnt afford: end-of-their-rope mothers snapping at their kids, boyfriends sighing and shifting their weight from foot to foot as they lingered outside the dressing rooms at Anthropologie, teenagers texting each other from a distance of less than three feet away across the table; the fat people, the old people, the ones with walkers or oxygen tanks or wheelchairsall of them reminded me of home. Besides, I could practically be guaranteed to never see anyone from school therenot on the bus, for sure; not at the movie theater, at least in the daytime; definitely not scarfing kung pao chicken from China Express. Maybe my classmates came here to buy things, but they never stayed long, which made the mall my secret, a place where I could be myself.

Most Mondays, when my classes ended at 2:00, Id take the bus and Id browse in the stores, maybe trying on shoes or a pair of jeans, and Id see a matinee of whatever movie looked interesting, then have dinner in the food court, or at the sit-down seafood restaurant if Id managed to pick up some extra hours at my work-study job in the admissions office. For less than twenty dollars, I could make a whole afternoon and early evening pleasantly disappear.

I looked up from my plate again. The man was holding his briefcase, standing in profile, looking like he was trying to decide what to do next. It could, I knew, go one of two ways: hed keep staring, or hed work up the nerve to cross the tiled floor and say something.

When I was thirteen, my father sat me down and gave me a little speech. Theres something you should know, hed said. We were in the family room, half a flight down from the front door, a room with pine-paneled walls and mauve-colored carpet and a glass-topped coffee table on which there were a decades worth of yearbooks, one for every year my father had been the yearbook advisor at McKinley Junior High.

Whats that? This was in the fall; Id been wearing my soccer uniform; shorts and shin guards and a sweatshirt Id pulled on for the bike ride home. My dad was in his worn black recliner, a glass of ice cubes and whiskey in his hand, still dressed in the coat and tie he wore to school. My mom was in the kitchen making baked chickenshed dip each piece in a mixture of buttermilk and mustard, then roll it in cornflake crumbs. That chicken, along with Rice-A-Roni and a cut-up head of iceberg lettuce doused in bottled ranch dressing, was my favorite meal, and all I wanted was to take a hot shower, pull on my sweatpants and a too-big T-shirt, eat my dinner, and get to my homework. For the first time, math was actually hard for me, and I knew Id need at least half an hour to get through the problem set wed been assigned.