by Jessica Pine
I could feel her lurking, lying in wait. "So...um...how do you wanna play this?" said Clayton, rubbing the nape of his neck. "Because people are going to talk."
You mean my aunt is going to talk, I thought. And it's going to be awkward for you working with my Dad when you're sleeping with his daughter. Once again I felt that tangled muddle of anger and fear; he was thinking of himself, of his own feelings, his own embarrassment. How do you expect a man like that to rise to the kind of levels of self-sacrifice demanded of a father?
Or maybe I was projecting again. There was nothing mature or sensible about my desire to shock, to fling my arms around his neck and give him a long, sloppy Hollywood kiss goodbye. He looked confused as I pulled away. I felt bad for using him as a prop for some post-adolescent attempt at outrage, but it was too late - Aunt Cassandra was already advancing down the alley like she hadn't been waiting there the whole time.
"Both of you on time," she said, with a theatrical brightness that confirmed my suspicions. "Will wonders never cease?"
She had a pile of tax documents under one arm and her hands were taken up with a box of pastries, her morning coffee perched on the top. "Help," she said, half thrusting the box towards me. The tax file was slipping down under her armpit. Clayton made his escape, receding into the workshop.
"If I didn't know any better," she said. "I'd say that was a walk of shame."
"It's not," I said. "We're adults. We have nothing to be ashamed of."
She raised an eyebrow. "It's an expression, Lacie," she said, unlocking the side door. "A figure of speech."
"It's a stupid one. What is this? The Fifties?"
To my intense surprise she laughed. "Back then they used to make exploitation movies about girls like you, my dear. All-Night, All-Nude! Unwed Mothers!"
Yeah. Hilarious.
Cassandra dumped her book-keeping on the counter and flipped open the box from Rita's. There were donuts, bear claws and cream-filled sfogliatelles. Cassandra took one and pushed the box towards me. "So how long has this been going on?" she said, flipping open the file with her free hand. She didn't look up at me and I was glad; the usually welcome sight of pastries filled me with a wave of nausea so sudden and powerful that it almost knocked me right off my feet.
"Five weeks," I said. Five weeks out of forty. The next thirty five weeks stretched and arched and loop-the-looped before me, a kind of hormonal hell-rollercoaster I still had no idea whether I had the stomach to ride or not.
She looked up, took one look at my face and said, "Oh my God. You're pregnant."
I burst into tears.
She pulled over a chair. It seemed pointless to ask, but I did anyway. "How did you know?"
"You're measuring time in weeks and you turn green at the sight of one of Rita's sfogliatelles," she said. "Is that how far along you are?"
I nodded. "It's also the same length of time I've known him. How fucked is that?"
"Not as fucked as you, evidently," she said. "First things first - do you want to be pregnant?"
Life was astonishingly easy in Aunt Cassandra-land. In some ways I envied her clarity but already I could see that in my position it was impossible. It was never going to be that simple. "I don't know," I said, which was an understatement. On the one hand I was terrified at the prospect of my life being taken over before it had already began, but the alternative filled me with fear and was further muddied by the fact that I still hadn't told Clayton. He should get a say; that was the one thing I was clear about.
"I don't think I want an abortion," I said, slowly. The idiotic idea was out of my mouth before I could think. "Do you want it? The baby, I mean?"
Aunt Cassandra sighed. "Lacie, why would I want to raise your kid when I never wanted kids of my own?"
“You don't?"
"Ugh," she said. "Generation Y. God help you. You talk a big game about walks of shame but you still think the last thing every woman wants is a baby? In case it's slipped your attention, I'm extremely selfish. I would never inflict myself on a child."
I started to cry again. Trust Aunt Cassandra to make it all about her, even if she was right.
"Don't cry," she said, perching on the end of a chest that probably shouldn't have been perched on. "It won't make a difference one way or the other.
"I can't help it. I haven't even told him yet. I keep trying but the first time he thought he was going to get kerb-stomped by Hell's Angels and the second time he was asleep..."
"Yeah," said Cassandra. "Men aren't the greatest at paying attention. Best to grab them when they're at least conscious. And I'm going to pretend I didn't hear the first thing you said, okay?"
"We don't know the first thing about each other."
"Well, yeah. It's been five weeks, honey."
I blew my nose. "Oh my God will you stop? I know I fucked up, okay? I know what you're thinking, and you may as well say it. I've just pissed away my entire education and my whole life because I didn't make him wear a condom. Just fucking say it. I know you want to."
It was so quiet you could hear the dust settle. I sniffed and stared at my feet. I wondered what it would be like not to see them for months on end.
"I wasn't going to say that," said Cassandra.
"You weren't?"
"Nuh uh. But you raise a fair point, Lacie. If you have this baby and you use it as yet another excuse for why your life didn't turn out exactly like you wanted it to, then God help you I am going to petition every court in the nation for custody and I will raise your kid. Now nobody wants that to happen and the poor little thing will probably end up a bona-fide basketcase, but better that than carrying the blame and guilt of a whiny-ass mother who could never get her shit together."
I swallowed. I'd never asked her this. "Is that what you think of my mother?"
Her hand closed over my knee. She exhaled. "I won't deny," she said, slowly. "That I've felt a lot of anger towards her over the years. I've tried to tell myself I don't know what it means to lose a child, but I never could square it. I'm sorry. I could never forgive her for leaving you in that way."
These were the things we never talked about, the reason why half the town treated me like I was made of glass. And thank God for Cassandra - thank God she was honestly evil enough to speak the truth, the truth that nobody wanted to hear. "Same," I said, and it felt so small a word for so much pain.
"You have to," she said. "I'm allowed to be bitter - it's my maiden-aunt duty or something. If you're having a baby then you'd better forgive, forget or learn." She put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed me close. "And write that fucking book already."
Chapter Ten
Clayton
Her eyes were red when she came back into the workshop. Something was up and I knew, from the little pieces last night had left swirling around in my head, what it was. Still, she hadn't directly said it, so I waited.
"I'm pregnant," she said. Okay - there it was. Oh God.
I meant to say something constructive or useful, but what came out was a kind of strange yelp. Maybe a yell? I don't know. I'd never made a sound like it before or since.
"Yeah," she said. "I thought you'd say something like that."
"Like what?" My face felt strangely numb and my feet seemed to want nothing to do with the floor. "I'm not exactly clear what that was I just said."
She folded her arms. "Well, no. Me neither. It was more of a kind of 'argh' sound."
"Like a pirate?"
"No, not like a pirate. Clay, can you just fucking focus here for a moment?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yep. Yep. Yep." Oh God. I was stuck in some kind of loop. My knees were having second thoughts about this whole gravity business. I sat down on a packing crate and tried to catch my breath.
Lacie came over and sat next to me. She didn't speak at first. Her hip was pressed against mine and I could feel the tension coming off her in waves. "So," she said. "There's that."
Somewhere in my mind were all the right things to say - 'Whatever you
decide, I'll be there for you', 'I promise I'll still love you even when you look like the dome of St. Peter's' - all those things. What came out was, "Was it like a Trey scream? It wasn't like that, was it?"
You could have cut diamonds with the look she gave me. I deserved it.
"Okay," I said. "Well, obviously this is a big thing."
"Yep."
"And whatever you decide..."
"...I'm having it."
Wow. Okay. I'd gone strangely numb from the neck up, like my brain had checked out altogether. Or maybe it checked out last night when she jumped my bones. Holy shit. Maybe that's what last night was about. "How far along?" I heard myself say.
"Five weeks," she said.
I did the math. "Shit. But I didn't even..."
She shook her head. "Come on - you must have taken that health class. Sometimes the sperm sneak out before the main event."
"They would. Seriously? That first time?"
"All it takes," she said. "Another thing I should probably have taken on board in health class."
"I know," I said. I was regressing by the second. "My Mom is gonna kill me."
I was so relieved to hear her laugh that it set me off. "I haven't even met your Mom," she said. "And I'm carrying her grandchild. We have so much catching up to do."
I squeezed her hand. Grandchild. Holy shit. "Have you told your Dad?"
"God, no. But relax. He's not the kind to chase you up and down the street with a shotgun." She gave me a sidelong look. "But my Aunt might."
"Yeah, and your enormous Uncle Jerry over at the diner."
"He's not my Uncle. Besides, he's gentle as a kitten. I've known him to turn verklempt for an entire afternoon because they had one of those animal shelter commercials on TV."
"What? The ones where they show the animals that are all fucked up and skinny and then they cut to them a year later and they're healthy and happy and their fur has all grown back?"
"Yeah. Those."
"Everyone cries at those," I said. "Everyone who isn't a terrible, broken shell of a human being."
She kicked the side of my foot. "Yeah," she said. "You'll do."
"For what?"
"You know what. I have approved your genetic material."
I brushed the hair from the side of her head and looked at her ears. "What are you doing?" she said.
"Checking your ears for pointiness. Was your mother a Vulcan or something?"
She groaned. "Oh my God. You're a Trekkie."
"I'm not a 'Trekkie'. Let's just say I have a healthy appreciation for..."
She put her hands over her ears. "La la la not listening."
"...Patrick Stewart. Come on. Everyone loves Sir PStew - he's like Shakespearean and everything."
Lacie lowered her hands. "Fine. He is pretty great. And George Takei is an international treasure. Just...please don't tell me you have a Klingon dictionary under your bed."
"I swear - I don't. I can do the Vulcan thing though." I tried to do the Vulcan salute but my brain was still too stunned to let my fingers work properly.
"You're doing it wrong," she said. "That's the Shocker."
"The what the fuck now?"
"The Shocker. Two in the pink, one in the..." She covered her hand with her mouth. "You know what, I'm not going to say anymore."
"Yeah, I know what the Shocker is. But you? I thought you were a delicate flower who only did Shakespearean vagina jokes."
She sighed and shook her head. The door to the shop was open and she leaned over to glance through it. “Oop. Customer,” she said. “Back to work.”
She kissed me lightly on the mouth and disappeared through the door. Work, she said, like it was a thing we just go back to, like the world hadn’t changed forever. The end of the world as we know it, I thought. I didn’t exactly feel fine – my heart was still beating a mad fandango and my knees felt like water – but I could have felt a whole lot worse.
I did as I was told and tried to act normal; the alternative was explaining to my boss that I’d gotten his daughter pregnant. If there was one thing I did know for sure right now it was that I was definitely not ready to have that conversation.
I didn’t do so well. I nearly fried the legs of a dining table by leaving them too long in the stripping vat. I think Gus knew, either from instinct or courtesy of his loudhailer of a sister, that something was going on. He kept me the hell away from the power tools all afternoon.
“You can go on out early,” he said, at half past four. “I guess you’ve got something on your mind.”
“Kind of,” I said, and ducked out. Like I say, so not ready for that conversation.
Lacie was still in the store, writing something on her laptop. All day she’d loomed so large in my mind that in the flesh she seemed tiny, like her head was too little and her neck too slim to hold up that mass of flossy hair. When she reached up to push back her hair her woven silk bracelet looked like it might slide off her wrist. I thought of her last night in the Fuzzy Duck, standing there all hobbit-sized and don’t-give-a-damn. Would I ever live it down?
Down by the junkyard the frogs were already singing. The sun was low in the sky. So long, summer. Then fall, then winter. Another year older. The more I thought about it twenty-six sounded like quite a respectable age to become a parent. Sure, she was younger, but that way she’d be in her late thirties when we saw the kid off to college, and young enough to enjoy ourselves when the nest emptied.
I laughed to myself. My face was wet and I hadn’t even realized the tears had come. God, what was I doing? What was I thinking? The kid wasn’t even born yet and already I was counting down the days until it left home. There was so much more in-between, so many things ahead – baby steps and baby shoes, height charts on the wall, finger-painting, pre-school. School plays, bedtime stories – all those things I’d wanted from my own Dad.
Reaching into my pocket to find something to wipe my face, I found a squashed blunt that had somehow settled into the seam. I straightened it out and realized it was probably not so battered that it couldn’t be smoked. For a while I sat staring at it, this dumb little chrysalis of paper and herb. Once upon a time I would have thought ‘score!’ and gone to find somewhere to smoke it, but the part of me that didn’t want to was bigger than the part that did. It was no longer important – not in the way the future was important.
I was still staring at it when Lacie came swishing through the long grass, her jeans already stuck with burrs and thistledown. She climbed up onto the front of the car next to me. “You gonna smoke that?” she said.
I shook my head. “I think maybe I’m done with that.”
“Really? You sure?”
It was like I’d wandered into a test. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure. I should be responsible. Got a baby on the way – don’t know if you heard.”
She smiled and shaded her eyes against the long, slanting evening sun. “Yeah. I might have heard a thing or two about it.”
I turned the joint over and over in my fingers. It was close to falling apart. “I dunno,” I said. “Maybe the time has come to put away childish things.” The phrase rang familiar. “Wait, is that Shakespeare?”
“No. The Bible. I think. You should know. You’re the religious one.”
“I’m not religious. I’m Catholic.” I scrunched the joint up into a crunchy little ball, rested it on the flat part of one hand and flicked it with my finger and thumb. The breeze took it as soon as it was airborne.
“You know, you don’t have to become the most clean-living man on the planet,” she said. “You don’t have to turn into your Dad, but you don’t have to become like a Mormon Missionary or something. You’re still allowed to have fun.”
“Huh? You mean you wanted me to smoke that?”
“God, no,” she said. “That wouldn’t have been fair. Since I can’t.” She pulled out her phone and scrolled through the menu. “I’m just saying...”
I watched her futzing with her phone. If it was a girl I hop
ed she'd have her mother's hair. All those beautiful golden-brown corkscrew curls.
“Make me good, God,” I said, remembering my saints. “But not yet.”
“Something like that, yeah. I don’t think it’d be good for a child to grow up with parents who are trying too hard to be perfect. Try, but don’t forget you’re human. I don’t want her to be as neurotic as me.”
“Her? You can know that already?”
“No,” she said. “And I don’t. I’m just having enough trouble processing that there is another actual person growing inside of me. It’s an even bigger mindfuck grappling with the possibility that there could be a Y-chromosome in there somewhere.”
She held the phone to her ear. “Hey Court,” she said, and then frowned. “Hello?...yes. Who is this?”
She slid off the front of the car, like her spine had suddenly gone too stiff for her to do anything but stand up straight. Her voice had an edge I knew all too well, like the way my mother sounded when anyone official called. When the phone wasn't ringing we could pretend that Bryan was going to be okay, and that wars weren't nearly as dangerous as they used to be. It wasn't like Vietnam or anything. Except every time the phone rang our hearts leapt into our mouths all the same.
"Yes. This is her phone," said Lacie.
Oh shit. This didn't sound good. I saw her hand go up to her face. "Oh my God. Is she okay? Do you have her parents' contact number?...yeah...yeah. They’re all the way out in California. Oh my God.”
I touched her shoulder. She was shaking and there were tears streaming down her face. “That’s crazy,” she was saying. “She’s twenty-two! Is anybody there with her?” Lacie took a long, shuddering breath. “Okay. St. Luke’s. Thank you. Thank you for calling.”
“Is everything okay?” I said. Obviously it wasn’t.
“She had a heart attack,” said Lacie, sounding bewildered. “She’s twenty-two. How the fuck did she have a heart attack?”
