All the Difference: A Novel - Softcover

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Leah Ferguson holds a BA in English Literature and Russian Language from West Chester University, and a MA from Notre Dame of Maryland University. She began her career as a managing editor for a national law book publisher before leaving to teach English for Maryland and Pennsylvania public high schools and Immaculata University. Leah also contributed to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harrisburg Patriot-News, writing from the perspective of a newlywed urban expatriate adjusting to life in the suburbs. After the birth of her first child, she left teaching to focus on writing fiction. Leah posts quirky and often sentimental personal essays to her blog, One Vignette, and founded a Tumblr called What Duchess Kate Isn’t Doing. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, three young children, dog, and tailless cat. All the Difference is her first novel.

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CHAPTER ONE

New Year’s Eve

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Molly Sullivan stared at the thin white stick she held in her fingertips. She couldn’t keep her hand from shaking. The wand vibrated back and forth like a baton conducting the most cacophonous piece of music ever performed.

She sank down onto the closed lid of the toilet seat.

“You have got to be kidding me.” The words bounced off the beige walls of Molly’s tiny upstairs bathroom. She concentrated on the feel of the cool tile beneath the bare skin of her feet, forcing herself to slow her breathing down, and willed her body to stop trembling. It didn’t obey.

The test she’d used was one of those no-fail electronic ones. There was no second line that might not really be there, no vague plus sign that could raise a doubt of its accuracy. What Molly gripped in her hand, now moist with sweat, was a test—her third of the morning—with a window designed to say “pregnant” or “not pregnant.” She looked at it again, and closed her eyes.

It definitely said “pregnant.”

But it couldn’t be true. There was no way. No.

Molly opened her eyes again and swallowed hard. Denial is an uncomfortable emotion for somebody afraid to make mistakes.

“Coffee. Coffee can fix this,” she mumbled, and braced herself to stand up. Then she remembered that there was supposed to be a rule about pregnant women and caffeine, and her legs buckled underneath her again.

She didn’t know how she was going to do this. It wasn’t in her plan.

An awful metallic taste rose in the back of her throat, and Molly forced herself upright to reach for her toothbrush. She leaned against the shining granite countertop, grateful for its firm support, and swiped the brush around her mouth without looking in the mirror. She knew what she’d see, and that it wasn’t going to be pretty: hair flattened to one side of her head from sleeping in the exact same position for nine straight hours. Eyelids puffy over purple-shaded skin. Forehead and cheeks blotchy with broken veins from too many sudden bouts of morning sickness. Molly didn’t know why she’d been so surprised by the positive test. She’d been experiencing almost every symptom Google had warned her about.

Molly jabbed her toothbrush back into its holder and stumbled in the direction of the kitchen. She hadn’t felt like this since the night she went to that karaoke bar with her friend Jenny and drank so many of the margaritas on special she ended up performing the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” in a singing voice a little too close to hollering. Both the melody and the backing vocals, she winced to recall. In their entirety.

All of a sudden she felt nauseous again.

Molly reached for the coffee filters she kept in the pantry before she caught herself, groaning, and reached for the herbal tea bags instead. This, she thought, cannot be happening. She was thirty years old, knocked up with a baby she’d planned to want but just not quite yet, and the only way she’d know how to deal with it would be to dust the furniture so well she’d wear lemon-scented tracks into its wood stain. Molly had to make sure the little realities in her life were organized—scrubbed clean, shining, and sorted to perfection—before she felt confident enough to face the messier, more abstract ones. Because that’s helpful, she thought, and opened the cabinet that held her cleaning supplies. She couldn’t tell if the nausea rolling around her stomach was from being pregnant or just from knowing she was pregnant. Either way, she knew her house was going to end up spotless.

By that evening, Molly was on her hands and knees on the hardwood of her living room floor, scrubbing marks off the white baseboards with an eraser sponge. She was still wearing the old Amy Winehouse T-shirt she’d slept in, along with yoga pants she’d pulled from the folded stack of identical pairs she kept tucked in a dresser drawer. Her long brunette ponytail swung as she scoured the wall with a fury she didn’t know she possessed.

Molly knew what she was doing was ridiculous, and she finally sat back on her knees, frustrated. She threw the dingy sponge to the floor, looked at it for a moment, then picked it back up and turned her attention to the darkening day outside her front window. Liz Phair was belting “Johnny Feelgood” from the stereo speakers, singing like she was mocking Molly, laughing at her. “I hate him all the time,” Liz sang, “but I still get up when he knocks me down . . .” Molly curled her upper lip and shook her head in resignation.

She stood up, brushed herself off, and shuffled into the kitchen to set a plate of leftover carbonara into the microwave to reheat. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around her waist, hugging her elbows, and looked at a photo that hung on the side of her stainless steel refrigerator. Molly looked so happy in the picture, her arm slung around the waist of the man next to her. She should’ve called him by now. He’d have wanted to be here, too.

She thought about the night it all started, a few years earlier. After work one Friday evening she’d wandered into the Barnes & Noble that loomed over a park on Walnut Street in the same neighborhood as her office building. A bunch of coworkers had left at the strike of five o’clock to head over to McGillin’s Olde Ale House for the usual happy hour festivities, but Molly was feeling a cold coming on, so had decided to stock up on some reading material for a weekend of self-imposed quarantine instead. Wandering around a bookstore on a Friday evening was a treat for her, anyway. She’d buy a latte from the Starbucks and thread in and out of the aisles of the fiction section, checking out the cover art for the new releases, looking to see if that hardcover she’d had her eye on was out in paperback yet.

She had paused by the children’s area to smile at two toddlers chattering back and forth as they played with some cars on a train table. She was standing in the middle of the aisle between the literature section and the children’s room, coveting a little girl’s Converse All Stars, when he came ambling toward her for the first time. He had a grin spread wide on his face and a book held in a loose grip by his side.

“They’re cute, aren’t they?” he said, nodding toward the children. “I’ve always said I’d want kids of my own, but only if I could get a guarantee that they’d never cry and never poop.” He chuckled, gauging Molly’s reaction, and reached up to brush his dark hair off of his forehead.

Molly glanced up and met this stranger’s green eyes. She was only weeks out of a relationship that had ended before she was ready to let it go, so she was wary of new men. But Molly noticed that this man’s clear eyes were the color of olives, and that they were focused on her. She felt the quiet thrill of his attention, and mistook it for the feeling that she once again was in control.

“Hey, if you can find a kid like that, you’d have women lined up to help you raise him. Probably some men, too.” She grinned.

“I would, wouldn’t I? Babies are like dogs. It’s a proven fact that just holding one makes a man ten times more appealing to women. You agree with me, right?” Molly could swear his eyes sparkled as he looked at her. Ooh, he’s flirting with me, she thought. Keep it coming, dude.

“Ah, well,” the man in front of...