Our New Normal

by Colleen Faulkner

  Aunt Beth tries to light her cigarette again. This time the lighter flares. The slam-it-on-the-table method worked.

  “How far along? How many weeks?” she asks me, her tone still mean.

  I cross my arms over my stomach. As if I could protect my baby from her meanness. Because I don’t want my baby to grow up in a mean world, with people who are mean to him. Even mean around him. “Doesn’t matter. I told you, I’m not getting an abortion.”

  She takes a long drag on the cigarette. I take a step back to protect my baby from the carcinogenic fumes.

  “About fourteen weeks,” I say softly.

  “Fourteen weeks!” She exhales, blowing smoke, looking at me like I’m the scum of the earth. I can’t believe she’s being so mean to me. She’s just glaring at me now.

  “Mom wants me to put it up for adoption.” The minute the words are out of my mouth, I wish I could take them back. Mom says the best way to avoid an argument is not to engage. Then she told me I wasn’t allowed to do that with her.

  Aunt Beth cuts her eyes at me. She has the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen. Pale blue like an alien’s. She’s gorgeous. Tall and skinny with long, beautiful blond hair.

  “Adoption?” She laughs, a little like a crazy person. What’s the word? Manic?

  “That’s interesting,” Aunt Beth goes on, “considering the fact that Liv’s been angry her whole life that she was adopted.”

  What Mom’s really been upset her whole life about is the fact that her birth parents, her mother, didn’t want her and gave her up for adoption. She’s not upset that Gran and Granddad adopted her. I’m surprised Aunt Beth doesn’t know that. But this doesn’t seem like the right time to point it out.

  “What’s your dad say?” she asks me.

  “He agrees with me.” I reach across the table to a big flowerpot of mixed herbs and snap off a piece of mint. I bring it to my nose and breathe deeply. I like the sweet, fresh smell. Mom always makes me peppermint tea when my stomach is upset. “He thinks I should keep the baby. We should,” I amend. “Tyler and me.”

  She draws hard on the cigarette, shaking her head. “You and Tyler? Are you shitting me? That little jackass couldn’t take care of a flea on Willie Nelson’s ass.”

  “That’s not very nice,” I say. “Tyler loves me and I love him.”

  She eyeballs me. She looks like she’s going to bust out laughing, but she doesn’t. She just takes another drag on the cigarette, one step closer to some hideous cancer-related death. “You know it’s just a glob of cells.”

  “He isn’t and, Aunt Bethie, I’m not talking about this with you.” I take on a stubborn tone. “You’re not my parent. I don’t have to talk about it with you. I don’t have to talk about it with anyone if I don’t want.”

  She walks over to this giant old cabinet that used to be in some rich person’s dining room to hold dishes. Mom bought it at an estate sale and it stands against the side of the house, under the overhang of the roof. Mom filled it with potted plants. Aunt Beth pulls a little flowerpot full of dirt and cigarette butts out from behind a potted fern and drops ashes into it. She carries the improvised “ashtray” to the table.

  “She’s right, you know. Your mom.”

  I look at her.

  “If you don’t have an abortion, which I think is stupid, then you need to put the baby up for adoption. You need to give it to someone who wants a baby. Somebody who can take care of it.”

  “I’m not giving my baby to some stranger. I want my baby.” I bring my hand to my flat belly where I know it’s growing.

  “You don’t want a baby.” She points at me with the burning cigarette. “What you want is some crazy effed-up idea of happily ever after with that asshole, Tyler. And . . . and you somehow think a baby is going to give you your own little family. You’re going to have someone to love of your own.” She opens her arms wide, mocking me.

  I don’t say anything.

  “But you’re not, Hazel. You’re going to have nothing but sadness and misery and the worst of it will come knowing you brought a child into the world that you couldn’t take care of. And not only are you going to be sad and miserable, but you’re going to subject a child to that.” She puts her cigarette to her lips and inhales. “Why do you think I didn’t have children? Because I couldn’t take care of a child,” she blurts. “I can barely take care of myself.”

  I think she’s right about that. I also think I’m more capable of being a responsible parent right now at sixteen than she is at however old she is. Thirty-something. But what’s the point in saying that? It makes more sense just to show her. To show them all that I can do it. That I can love this baby and take care of him. That Tyler and I can do it together. I’m not saying it isn’t going to be hard. I’m just saying I can do it.

  I smell the mint I’ve crushed between my fingers again. “I’m not giving my baby away, Aunt Beth. You guys can’t make me.”

  “The hell we can’t!”

  “Beth, that’s enough.”

  I look up to see Mom standing at the back door. She looks pretty in the fading sunlight. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, but there are little wisps around her face. She’s wearing a cool T-shirt with a mermaid on it that we bought last summer at this shop in Portland. I got one with an octopus. Same artist. A girl. I like female artists.

  “Come on, Hazel,” Mom says, her voice so soft that it makes me tear up. “Inside. It’s time for dinner.”

  I cross the deck, past Aunt Beth and through the doorway. I want to tell Mom thanks for saving me, but I don’t because I’m afraid I’ll start crying if I try to say anything. Instead, I give her the little sprig of mint I picked. I don’t know why.

  She takes it from me and lifts it to her nose to smell it. And smiles at me. Just a little smile. Kind of a sad one.

  Then Mom looks away from me. “You, too, Beth,” she says to her sister.

  And then we all go in to have dinner and I try not to think about the little baby growing inside me.

  9

  Liv

  I glance at my phone. It’s eleven ten. Hazel’s late. And driving my car. This is her second day of unrestricted driving privileges, as mandated by the Pine Tree State and she’s already broken curfew.

  I sigh and glance at Oscar, asleep on the couch, a book on his chest. He’s snoring. Loudly. I think he needs a CPAP machine. He says he just needs to lose twenty pounds.

  I’m sitting across from him in an old leather chair we inherited from my parents, inherited meaning we stole it from their basement. It used to be in my dad’s office back when he still had a medical practice. It’s got to be forty years old. Soft, black, creased leather. I love the smell of it. The way it seems to surround me, reminding me of the days when he would take me to his office on a Saturday while he caught up on his charts. I’d sit in this chair for hours and read while he worked at his desk.

  I’ve been running some numbers on the Anselin house project. Like ours, their early-nineteenth-century home is a farmhouse built in a style referred to as “continuous architecture.” While our home just has a large barn attached, the Anselins have a kitchen, a shed, a carriage house, and a large barn, all attached to their farmhouse. The additions would have been built as the family became more prosperous, and the tradition of attaching the outbuildings was for convenience’s sake. Less snow shoveling during our hard winters. Farmers could get to their stored firewood, their sleigh or carriage, and their animals without having to go outside.

  I shift in my father’s leather chair. I use the downstairs bedroom just off our family room as an office. I could be working in there at my desk, but I settled here earlier in the evening so I could be with Oscar. I was hoping we could talk about Hazel. Start coming up with a plan. How she’s going to finish out the school year. What she’s going to do with the baby while she’s in class. How Baby Daddy is going to support his progeny and what that will look like financially. Didn’t happen. After dinner, Oscar turned on the TV to watch B
oston play the Orioles and read. Both at the same time. I tried several times to start a discussion, but he wasn’t having it. I got one-syllable answers and eventually gave up.

  I glance at my legal-sized notepad on my lap. The Anselins have already set a budget, but then they keep adding upgrades. I can’t seem to get them to understand that details like granite countertops and radiant heating in the floors can add considerably to the final cost.

  Oscar gasps. Snorts.

  I glance at him over the top of my reading glasses. His. I couldn’t find mine. His strength is stronger than mine anyway. Sadly, I see better in them. And he must have half a dozen pairs here and there in the house. “Oscar?” I pause. Wait. He doesn’t move. “Hon?”

  He groans.

  “Hon,” I say a little louder. “You should go to sleep.”

  “I was asleep,” he mutters, his eyes still closed.

  “Asleep upstairs in bed.”

  He rolls over on the couch, taking his book with him, presenting his back to me. His T-shirt rides up as he moves and those few extra pounds around his waist spill out of the back of his shorts.

  My cell vibrates, and I pick it up, thinking Hazel is texting me that she’s on her way.

  Still up? It’s my bestie, Amelia.

  I turn my phone so that it’s horizontal the way Sean showed me. Easier to text with the larger keyboard. Waiting for Hazel. She’s late. In my car. Prob wrapped around a tree

  Prob not Amelia responds.

  I smile despite the fact that I truly am concerned about Hazel. Amelia has a way about her. She’s the kind of friend that can talk me off a ledge. Any ledge.

  How was your date? I ask.

  Good. Nice.

  The bubbles appear. I wait.

  Ok, she adds.

  He look like his pic or was it another one taken ten years ago? I ask.

  In bed?

  Working, I text. Watching Oscar sleep on the couch. O’s beat the Sox in ten innings.

  My phone starts vibrating steadily. Amelia is calling.

  “Hey,” I say, getting up out of the chair, setting the notepad on the end table. “What’s up?” I pad barefoot out of the living room, turning off the lights as I go.

  “We need better pitching,” Amelia says, referring to the Red Sox.

  “Our pitching was better than theirs. Lucky double in the top of the ninth.” I push the readers up on my head so I don’t trip.

  “He did look like his photo.” Amelia sounds morose. “Even better in person. He’s an attorney—”

  “I thought you said no attorneys.”

  “He’s an attorney,” she repeats. “And I liked him. He was nice and smart. We had a good time. . . .”

  “But?” I ask when I hear her hesitation.

  “I don’t know. I thought we were hitting it off, but then . . .” She sighs. “I don’t think he was that into me.”

  The disappointment in her voice makes me sad. I don’t know what to say.

  I struggled to support her during her divorce. I think she gave up on Sam too soon. On their twenty-three-year marriage too soon. Too easily. I think they could have revived their marriage with some counseling, with some effort. Neither was willing to put in the effort. Now Sam’s dating a CPA ten years younger than Amelia. His and Amelia’s daughter, a sophomore at Providence College in Rhode Island, is having a fit, according to Amelia. Lizzie says her dad is doing things with the girlfriend’s children he never did with her. The whole thing is an ugly, sad mess. The way divorce usually is.

  “Did you make plans to meet again?” I ask into the phone. “Dinner or something?” Amelia’s formula for online dating is to exchange a few texts in the app and then meet for coffee or a drink, depending on how optimistic she’s feeling. Then additional dates to follow if she and bachelor #18 connect. So far, she hasn’t met the new love of her life, but she’s hopeful and I’m trying to be encouraging.

  I lean against the sink with my hips, peering out the double windows into the darkness, waiting for the headlights of my car. I hope she hasn’t wrecked it. For the obvious reasons, but then also because I think I’ve decided to trade it in on a pickup. It makes more sense for the job. I’ll be hauling samples of tile and hardwood and assorted supplies back and forth to the Anselins’ house. And once the remodel is done, I’ve got a budget for decorating. I’m hoping to pick up some nice odds and ends like tables and chairs and armoires at estate sales to fill the space.

  Amelia sighs and I hear her take a drink. I wonder if it’s chardonnay or vodka. I decide not to ask. In the early days, after Sam left, I was worried about her. She was drinking too much, too much to the point of going into work late. Missing work. Not cool for a public school principal. Not cool for anyone. Or healthy. Luckily, by the time I brought up the subject, she already knew she was skating on thin ice and was able to back it off to a safe place before she fell through. That doesn’t mean I don’t worry about her starting the whole cycle over again. Especially now that she’s out in the world of online dating and it’s not going as well as she had hoped.

  Amelia takes another drink of the unidentified beverage. “He asked for my number.”

  “That’s good, right?” I try to sound enthusiastic, but not too enthusiastic. Supportively enthusiastic, without blowing smoke up her skirt. “He wouldn’t ask for your number if he wasn’t planning on calling you. Asking you out.”

  “I don’t know.” Amelia groans. “I asked him for his, and he brushed over it. I wonder if he thought I had stalker potential.” She takes on a desperate tone. “Do I come off as having stalker tendencies?”

  I laugh. She sounds so serious. Which also makes me sad. “No, you do not seem like the stalker type.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re my friend and you have to.”

  “If I thought you had stalking propensities, I’d be the first one to tell you and you know it.”

  “True,” she agrees. “Hang on. I have to take my top off. Going to put you on speaker. This underwire bra is killing me.”

  I smile at her comment and glance out the window again as I see headlights coming up our road from the direction of Hazel’s friend Katy’s house. It passes. I check the time. She’s now seventeen minutes late. I wonder how long I should let it go before I call her.

  “Can you hear me, Liv?”

  “I hear you. Lost you for a second.”

  “God, that feels better,” Amelia says. “I think maybe I need to make a new rule for first dates. I’m getting quite a list of them. New rule: No underwire bra unless it’s something more than a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. I want at least three courses in exchange for a lacy torture device that cost me sixty-two dollars.”

  I laugh.

  “Who came up with the idea of an underwire bra, anyway?” she demands.

  I hear sounds that suggests she’s still undressing. Dressing.

  “Had to be a man,” she tells me.

  “I’m sorry your date didn’t go better.” I’m genuinely disappointed for her. “But who knows, maybe he’ll text or call.”

  “Right. And maybe hell will freeze over. Enough of my pathetic life. Tell me what’s going on in your house in crisis.”

  “Now I’m putting you on speaker so I can text my wayward daughter.”

  I text Hazel, On your way home?

  “No change,” I tell Amelia. “I’d say it’s like a battlefield around here, but it’s worse than that. Instead of lobbing grenades, we’re all tiptoeing around each other, trying not to lose our shit. Hazel can’t speak to me without a mean voice.”

  “Eh. Try not to take it personally. It’s probably the easiest way for Hazel to react right now. To be angry with you.”

  “It’s not even Hazel. I mean, yes, she’s angry just on general principle, but Oscar, he’s . . .” I turn and lean against the kitchen sink, propping one elbow on the edge behind me and lifting the phone to speak directly into it again. “He’s really angry with me, Meels. Angrier than . . .�
� Emotion tightens my throat. “Angrier than I can ever remember him being. And not pissed off, shouting anger. That would be fine. That I could handle.”

  “When has Oscar ever hollered at you?” she scoffs.

  “I know. But you know what I mean.” I exhale, trying to find the right words to explain without bursting into tears. “This is like a quiet . . . stewing anger.”

  “He’s not talking to you?” she asks.

  “He’s talking to me. About making Sean’s tuition payment. About not wanting to stop for zucchini on the way home from work. But he’s not talking to me.”

  “Hmmm,” she intones. “Is he in denial that his teenage daughter had sex with a cretin and is now going to give birth to a baby cretin?”

  She makes me smile even when I don’t want to. “No. He’s not in denial. He just doesn’t want to talk about it with me. He doesn’t want to talk about anything with me.” I try not to sound sullen, but I don’t pull it off well.

  “Are you having sex?”

  I laugh though it’s not funny. “I wish. At this point, I’d take a little angry sex.”

  Amelia laughs with me, but it’s the kind of laughter you share with someone you love when you’re feeling her pain.

  I glance at the clock on the back of the stove. “Hazel hasn’t called, and she hasn’t texted. Think I should go looking for her?”

  “You call her?”

  “Don’t want her answering the phone while she’s driving. I texted her.”

  “So you do want her texting you while she’s driving?” Amelia asks.