Holding on to Nothing

by Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne

  “Is Lucy home, please?” he said.

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  Jeptha swallowed, preparing himself for her to hang up. “Ma’am, it’s Jeptha Taylor.”

  “Now, Jeptha. Do you really think this is a good idea?”

  “I just want to talk to her.”

  “Well, honey, she tried that. If you recall, you messed it up pretty good.” He’d thought maybe LouEllen might be on his side, after she told him where Lucy had gone that night, but it didn’t seem much like it. Still, no amount of LouEllen could keep him from finding out if Lucy was having his baby.

  “I want to ask her one question.”

  “Jeptha, there’s no question you could ask that she wants to answer.”

  “Please, ma’am. Just let me talk to her.”

  “Jeptha, I’ve been real polite. I even told you where she went that night. But, she’s said her piece and you need to respect it. If you can’t listen to what I’m saying, I’m going to give Rick Mullins a call. I believe you know him? I don’t think you want the police involved, now do you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Jeptha sighed.

  “All right, then. Now you have a real nice day. Bye-bye.”

  JEPTHA STARED AT the phone for ten minutes, not sure what to do. He had to see Lucy. He had to try one more time. He would have to risk the wrath of Lucy and LouEllen and the possibility of a run-in with Officer Mullins. It wouldn’t be his first.

  He hopped in the shower and mulled his options. Flowers seemed flimsy. Chocolates weren’t enough. Besides, maybe pregnant women couldn’t eat chocolate? He dried off as he walked into his bedroom, then let his towel puddle on the floor under him. He opened his drawers, but they were empty. Jeptha turned to his bed, pulled some clothes off the footboard, and brought them to his nose. He stopped, staring at the bed in front of him.

  A crib. That’s what he’d bring to Lucy. He threw on his clothes, grabbed his keys, and hightailed it to Cody’s, where he borrowed the truck off his very confused friend, and screeched into the parking lot at Walmart a half hour later. After checking to make sure Lucy wasn’t working any of the registers, Jeptha spent ten minutes searching for the baby section and another hour figuring out what to buy. The number of choices was overwhelming. Light wood, dark wood, white. Curved ends, flat ends, sleigh ends. The baby beds were nicer than anything he’d ever slept in. And more expensive too, he thought, as he looked at the price tag. The one he liked the best was the display one—a simple white one. He dragged over a girl working two aisles away and pointed to it.

  “Do y’all have this one?” he asked. “I didn’t see it boxed up over there.”

  She shook her head. “It’s all out. You can maybe have this one, though.”

  “The display one?”

  “It’s pretty new,” she said. “It ain’t been up but a few weeks. These things is a pain in the ass to box back up once they’s put together.”

  “I’ll take it,” he said. He walked an aisle over and grabbed a box of diapers. He threw it into the crib. He picked it up by the sides and walked awkwardly toward the checkout, stopping only once to grab a big fuzzy teddy bear on the end of the toy aisle and chuck it into the crib.

  After paying, Jeptha hoisted the whole thing up over his head and carried it out to Cody’s truck. He set it down in the bed of the truck and stood back. There was something disturbing about a fully assembled baby bed standing up in the bed of a truck. Besides, the way his luck went, no matter how many tie-downs he put on it, it’d probably bounce right out and get smashed to pieces on the highway. So Jeptha dug around in Cody’s truck until he found a set of Allen wrenches and took the crib apart right there in the parking lot. He laid the sides flat in the bed and tied them down with some webbing he found in Cody’s back seat.

  Now, driving up Lucy’s street in the dark, he wondered if he’d gotten the right thing. Maybe she would have liked that wood crib rather than the white one. Maybe he should have gotten a box of size one diapers, which apparently diapered babies seven to fourteen pounds, rather than newborn, which diapered babies five to ten pounds. He remembered Big Jim and Deanna bragging about their babies’ weights, like it was important for some reason, but he’d be damned if he could remember the numbers.

  He parked in front of Lucy’s house. The teddy bear sat next to him on the bench seat, strapped in by a seat belt so it wouldn’t fall over onto the muddy floor. He and the bear looked out the window toward her house. They saw her pass by the window, her shape too blurred by the curtains for Jeptha to make out if she had a belly. He hoped like hell that LouEllen was out; this was going to be hard enough with Lucy.

  He stopped with his hand on the door handle. It suddenly occurred to him that he could drive off and never acknowledge the responsibility that might be his. It didn’t seem like she had any plans to tell him. He had an out. He didn’t have to get out of the truck. He could take the crib and the diapers back and pretend that no one had ever told him he might be a father. No one would know, least of all Lucy. He watched as she passed by the window again. Her silhouette was clear this time. Jeptha could see the slightest round in her belly, the smallest indication that his kid was making itself known inside the body of a girl he had loved since he was sixteen. He remembered that curly-haired toddler from that awful night at the Fold and how silky his hair had felt against Jeptha’s palm, how much trust the little boy had put in him—a complete stranger—not to hurt him. Of course, that trust had been misplaced, but Jeptha’s knocking him off the stair and onto his head had been an accident. When it was his kid, he’d be more careful. He wouldn’t squander that blind trust this time.

  Jeptha unbuckled the seat belt from around the bear and, hugging it to him, opened the door. He walked lightly up the sidewalk, with the bear and the diapers under his arm, and set them by the door. Then he went back to the truck for the crib, which now lay in a heap three feet from where he’d originally loaded it into the truck. He hoped it wasn’t too scratched. Staring at the disassembled crib in the back, he worried he wouldn’t be able to get it all back together again. He fingered the screws and washers in his pocket and tried to calm himself.

  Finally, he got all the parts up on the porch. His mouth was dry and his hands were sweating. He should have something in his arms. He wiped his palms on his jeans and picked up the bear. Then he picked up the diapers. Two things would be good—he’d hold the bear and the diapers. This would work. She would have to forgive him.

  Jeptha leaned down and rang the doorbell.

  6

  “OH SHIT. YOU KNOW,” Lucy said, after a full minute of silent, open-mouthed shock. Her brain would not process the sight of Jeptha in her doorway, a massive teddy bear and a box of diapers clutched in his arms.

  The smile on Jeptha’s face faltered. “Uh, hi,” he said, hoisting the bear and the diapers a little higher, as if for her to see better.

  “Hi.” Lucy squinted in astonishment at the sight in front of her. How did he know? And why was he here?

  “Can I, uh, come in?” Jeptha asked.

  She was so suddenly, violently sick to her stomach that it took her a minute to hear the question. Then she shook herself out of her stupor and nodded. “You’d better, I guess, before my neighbors see you.”

  “I came to bring you this stuff,” he said. He shrugged and looked down at his feet. “To apologize.”

  “Well, you better get to it. I’ll take that bear.” Lucy hugged the bear to her belly and eyed Jeptha as he stacked four sides of a white crib against the wall. It was pretty, she thought, nicer than the ones she’d been looking at.

  “How’d you even find out? I haven’t told anyone but LouEllen,” she said.

  “Deanna. She guessed you was pregnant,” Jeptha said. “Based on your reaction, I guess she was right.”

  “Your sister ruins everything,” Lucy said, feeling her stomach rise all over again as she thought of Deanna’s knowing smirk the night before.

  “That’s always bee
n my experience,” Jeptha said. He wasn’t looking at her, but at a piece of carpet that had come loose years before. He nudged it with his toe. “She didn’t guess nothing about it being mine though.”

  He paused and cleared his throat, looking up at Lucy. “Is it?”

  A wave of anger swept over her. “Yes. You ass. It’s yours.” She suddenly felt like a woman, more than being pregnant or turning twenty-one had ever made her feel. It was the pure, unmitigated fury provoked by a man’s stupidity that had done it. “I’m not some slut.”

  “I never thought that. Never,” Jeptha said, violently shaking his head. His eyes turned white blue in their seriousness. “That night in my car … It was the best … Um, I mean I’ve never regretted it for a second.”

  He loved her; Lucy knew it for sure in that moment. Everything she had been dying to escape in the last few months was, for Jeptha, a dream come true.

  “So, do you know how to put this thing together?” she said, putting a hand on the crib parts stacked against the wall.

  “Well, I took it apart, so I think I can put it together,” Jeptha said. Lucy smiled a little as she noticed him nervously fiddling with something in his pocket. He pulled out a handful of screws and washers and laid them on the floor in a pile. Then he grabbed the crib sides and laid them on the floor too, like a tiny hurricane had collapsed the four walls. “Is this one okay?” he asked. “It’s the display one. The girl sold it to me for cheaper, but it ain’t been used or nothing.”

  “I honestly have no clue, Jeptha. It’s a crib. That seems good.” She stopped herself when she saw the hurt look on his face. “It’s pretty, I mean.”

  “Ain’t you looked at any cribs?”

  “Not really. I’ve mostly been trying to pretend none of this is happening.”

  “How come?”

  “I think I hoped it might go away if I didn’t think about it too much,” Lucy said, slowly.

  “You aren’t … you aren’t going to Knoxville, are you?”

  Lucy sighed. Every once in a while, she caught herself imagining what her life would be like if she was okay with going to Knoxville for an abortion. She’d be on her way to leaving this town instead of taking extra shifts, trying not to throw up in front of Deanna, and being worried about everyone knowing her business. She wouldn’t be spending twenty minutes before bed every night examining every crackle and pop in her stomach to see if the baby was moving yet. She wouldn’t be experiencing bone-chilling waves of fear about how she would care for a baby when she’d never so much as kept a fish alive.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t do that.” She watched as his body grew slack with relief. It surprised her. She would have expected him to be thrilled with the notion. She kneeled on the ground beside him.

  “What can I do?” she asked, nodding at the crib.

  Jeptha’s sleeve brushed her bare arm as he reached over her. A shiver worked its way down her spine. Was it possible that after all this she still had a flicker of excitement over him? She could hardly get in more trouble than she was already in. That horse had definitely left the barn.

  “So these long pieces go on the sides and these are the ends,” Jeptha said. “It was pretty easy to take apart. Can’t be much tougher to put it together.”

  Lucy watched as Jeptha counted and sorted the screws and two different kinds of washers. He slid two washers over the bottom of each screw before laying them down on the floor, four to each end of the crib. He nodded at the tall piece toward the couch.

  “You want to hold that other end up and I’ll screw this side in?” he asked.

  Lucy knee-walked over to the other end and held it up straight. Jeptha’s long tanned fingers quickly slotted the necessary screws into the wood without even having to check the directions. It was like watching him play mandolin, as if his fingers knew what to do, without him having to think about it. Her father had always pored over directions, asking questions, calling the number, and still assembling things wrong, all while her mother stood, arms crossed, sighing pointedly. Once her parents were gone, it was just Lucy and LouEllen, struggling to figure out directions worded in such a way that she was sure actual Chinese would have been easier. No one had ever done something like this for her, and with such ease.

  Is this how he would be as a father? Would he be the kind of dad who could make anything, fix any problem as long as he had his pocketknife, a hammer, and some duct tape? Lucy could imagine the steady joy in that, the satisfaction of seeing something come together. Was a man like that really so bad? Lucy knew what everyone said—he was a Taylor, he was a drunk, he was lazy, he couldn’t hold a job. Hell, he hadn’t even been able to be on time—or sober—for their date. But watching him work, she wondered if maybe there were worse fates than a man like the one in front of her. Maybe this was the real Jeptha, this quiet, sweet man, not the drunk, late, shambling one from a few weeks before. She remembered then the earnest singing she’d heard from his room years before during Lucy’s brief try-out as Deanna’s friend. He’d actually sounded good—Lucy hadn’t been able to force herself to laugh along with Deanna and Marla because goose bumps had risen up when he got to the chorus. He’d been sweaty and flushed when he came to the door, as if he were putting on a true per formance in there. She wanted to tell him it was good but was too afraid of Deanna, so she smiled at him and hoped it was enough. Long after Deanna had dropped her, Jeptha’s voice had floated through her head for weeks, its gravelly depth catching her unaware.

  “Can I?” Jeptha said, holding up a screw near her face. She started, brought out of her memory by the man Jeptha had become. He was kneeling on the ground right by her, one hand above hers on the corner of the crib. He had a clean, leathery smell that Lucy remembered from his back seat. She wanted to lean into his neck and fill her nose with it.

  “Sorry, what?” Lucy said, pulling her face back and looking down so he couldn’t see her blush.

  “Can I just get in there and put this one in?”

  “Of course,” she said, and scooted out of the way. “So, Deanna told you about me throwing up?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Bet she loved that.”

  Jeptha laughed. “Nothing my sister likes more than people embarrassing themselves.”

  “She doesn’t know it was you?”

  “No. I think Marla may have figured it out, but she ain’t told Deanna.”

  “Really? I didn’t know she was capable of that.”

  “Me either, honestly.”

  “How’d Marla figure it out?” Lucy asked.

  Jeptha looked embarrassed, his face bright red. “I told Cody. That night I messed everything up.”

  “Jeptha, I’m sorry about what I said that night. I shouldn’t have.”

  “I deserved it. I was late. Drunk too. I shouldn’t have been,” he said. He looked her in the eye. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Thanks,” Lucy said, hurriedly looking down at the floor.

  “Can you hand me that little Allen wrench?”

  Lucy handed him the Allen wrench at her side, his fingers brushing the palm of her hand as he picked it up. She pulled her hand back.

  “Can I ask you … Why were you late?” Lucy asked.

  “It ain’t worth saying.”

  “I’m asking. I want to know.”

  “I wasn’t gonna come, actually. Seemed like everybody I mentioned it to thought it was a waste of time, thought there was no chance you’d give me a shot. Bobby didn’t even believe me when I said I was going on a date with you.”

  “But I’d asked you,” Lucy said. She knew she ought to be angry that he was going to stand her up, but she was sad for Jeptha. He actually went through life believing he was as bad as everyone said. Maybe he was, but it didn’t seem like it in this moment.

  He shrugged. “Yeah. But you’d avoided me a lot too. Besides, I ain’t a fool. I know I don’t bring a lot to the table.”

  “You brought this crib,” Lucy said. She
wasn’t sure what more to say.

  Jeptha moved to the other corner of the crib, inserting the last two screws into the slots. After a few minutes of silence, he nodded at the boxes in the corner marked Knoxville. “You still planning on going?”

  Lucy looked over at them and sighed. She shifted positions from her spot on the floor, stretching her legs out and pulling the waistband of her jeans down so it would stop cutting into her belly. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to unpack the boxes, as if she might, by some stroke of divine intervention, still be able to leave town and rent that apartment. She knew it was never going to happen now, but she still avoided that corner of the house.

  “How can I? I’m going to need LouEllen to help. We’re going to turn that back room into a baby’s room.”

  She turned away when Jeptha stared at her, not wanting him to see the tears in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. Then she looked down at his crotch and laughed. “Well, not on purpose.”

  “Definitely not on purpose,” he said, smiling.

  “Thank you, by the way, for this stuff. This was nice of you.”

  Jeptha nodded, but didn’t say anything more, just went around the crib, tightening each screw in turn until it was steady on all sides. He straightened up and offered Lucy his hand. She scrambled up and stood beside him, looking at the crib. He leaned over the side and touched the coils at the bottom of the crib, the metal clanging slightly as he bounced his hand against it. She heard him curse so quietly that she couldn’t even hear the word he used. She heard the anger behind it, though, and saw his shoulders deflate, his whole torso sinking in on itself in a way that made her think, Aw, there is the Taylor in you.

  He looked up but couldn’t meet her eye. “Should have known I’d fuck this up somehow,” he said. “I didn’t get a mattress.”

  “Well, we don’t have a baby yet either, so I’m not too worried.”