At First Sight Read Free Page A

they’re just too caught up in their own lives to take enough time with their children.”
Jeremy, still frozen in place, watched the last of the crowd vanish. “It definitely wasn’t normal,” he offered again.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
Okay, so they were deluding themselves. Deep down, Jeremy knew it, Lexie knew it, but it was easier to pretend that they would never be confronted with a situation like the one they’d just witnessed. Because they were going to be more prepared. More dedicated. Kinder and more patient. More loving.
And the child . . . well, she would thrive in the environment he and Lexie would create. There was no doubt about that. As an infant, she’d sleep through the night; as a toddler, she would delight with her early vocabulary and above average motor skills. She would maneuver the minefields of adolescence with aplomb, stay away from drugs, and frown on R-rated movies. By the time she left home, she would be polite and well mannered, she would have received high enough grades to be accepted to Harvard, become an all-American in swimming, and still would have found enough time during the summers to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity.
Jeremy clung to the fantasy until his shoulders slumped. Despite having zero experience in the parenting department, he knew it couldn’t be that easy. Besides, he was getting way ahead of himself.
An hour later, they were sitting in the back of a cab, stuck in traffic, on the way to Queens. Lexie was thumbing through a recently purchased copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting as Jeremy watched the world beyond the windows. It was their last night in New York-he’d brought Lexie up to meet his family-and his parents were planning a small get-together at their home in Queens. Small, of course, was a relative term; with five brothers and their wives and nineteen nieces and nephews, the house would be packed, as it often was. Even though Jeremy was looking forward to it, he couldn’t quite get his mind off the couple they’d just seen. They’d seemed so . . . normal. Aside from the exhaustion, that is. He wondered whether he and Lexie would end up that way or whether they’d somehow be spared.
Maybe Alvin had been right. Partially, anyway. Though he adored Lexie-and he was sure he did, or he wouldn’t have proposed-he couldn’t claim to really know her. They simply hadn’t had time for that, and the more he thought about it, the more he believed that it would have been nice for him and Lexie to have had a chance to be a regular couple for a while. He’d been married before, and he knew it took time to learn how to live with another person. To get used to the quirks, so to speak. Everyone had them, but until you really knew someone, they tended to be hidden. He wondered what Lexie’s were. For instance, what if she slept with one of those green masks that were supposed to keep wrinkles at bay? Would he really be happy waking up and seeing that every morning?
“What are you thinking about?” Lexie asked.
“Huh?”
“I asked what you’re thinking about. You have a funny expression on your face.”
“It’s nothing.”
She stared at him. “Big nothing, or nothing-nothing?”
He turned to face her, frowning. “What’s your middle name?”
Over the next few minutes, Jeremy went through the series of questions Alvin had proposed and learned the following: Her middle name was Marin; she had majored in English; her best friend in college was named Susan; purple was her favorite color; she preferred whole wheat; she liked watching Trading Spaces; she thought Jane Austen was fabulous; and she would, in fact, turn thirty-two on September 13.
So there.
He leaned back in his seat, satisfied, as Lexie continued to thumb through the book. She wasn’t actually reading it, he figured, just skimming passages here and there in hopes of getting some sort of head start. He wondered if she had done something similar whenever she had to study in