Vinnie's Diner

by Jennifer AlLee

  Her eyes narrow. “Cody. Does he already know about your condition?”

  My condition. Like I have a terminal disease. “I told him yesterday.”

  It had been terrible. When I showed up at his house the day before, he thought I was there to talk about the prom. It goes without saying he was more than a little shocked when he found out what I really had to say had nothing to do with fancy gowns, corsages, or whether or not to rent a limo.

  “Did Cody tell you he’s willing to drop his college plans and get a full-time job so he can support you and junior?”

  We hadn’t talked about details. We hadn’t talked much at all. After the initial panic in his eyes faded, he’d said, “Baby, we’re going to work this out. Don’t worry.” Then he’d taken me in his arms. Kissed me. And we ended up in his bed, back in the same spot where our little problem had been created in the first place. So no, I can’t say for sure what Cody’s plans are, but I know that he loves me, loves our baby, and that he’s going to take care of us.

  “We’re going to do whatever it takes.” I’m surprised how cool my voice sounds. It bolsters me with a newfound confidence.

  Mom nods her head, slowly, assimilating the facts. “I see. Well, let me fill you in on how life really works. When a man says he’ll do whatever it takes, he means he’ll do whatever it takes to make his life easier. Your prince of a boyfriend is probably going to offer you the same solution I just did.”

  I take another step away. My resolve begins to crumble as tears push and burn against the back of my eyes. “No. He wouldn’t do that.”

  Once more, she ignores me. “And even if you do manage to snag him and get him to marry you, it won’t do you any good in the long run. One day, he’ll wake up and realize that his life isn’t what he wants it to be and he’ll run out and leave you. And while he’s creating a great new life for himself, you’ll be tied down at home with nothing but a screaming baby, a broken heart, and a miserable future. Is that what you want?”

  Tears cascade from my eyes, rolling down my cheeks. Some flow, hot and salty, onto my lips. Some barrel down my chin and drip onto the floor. I’ve always accepted that I don’t have the kind of close relationship with her that some girls have with their moms, but I’ve never been able to figure out why. It certainly wasn’t because I didn’t try. No matter what I did there was always a wall between us. But now, standing there, hearing her predictions for my life, I really see my mother for the first time. And everything becomes achingly clear.

  I was her stupid mistake. The thing that changed her life from the promise of what it could be to the reality it had become.

  Of course she doesn’t love me. She never wanted me in the first place.

  23

  Southern California

  I’m walking up the front steps to Cody’s porch, but I’m not quite sure how I got here. The time since I ran away from my mother and out of the house is a blur. But now, as I push my finger against the illuminated plastic doorbell button, a sense of calm settles over me. I’m finally able to breathe without feeling like a rope is wrapped around my neck. This is a safe place. A place where I’m loved. I’ll show my mother. I don’t need any help from her. Cody and I will get through this, together.

  I’m about to push the button again when Cody pulls the door open. When he sees me, his face is blank at first, but then he smiles. Not the full out, sexy smile that makes me want to throw my arms around him, but the polite, reserved smile he uses on teachers and other kids’ parents. His eyes dart back and forth before he speaks. “Hey, Allie. What’s up?”

  What’s up? That has to be the worst choice of words ever. Does he not remember what I told him yesterday? “I need to talk to you. About the—”

  “Sure, yeah.”

  Okay, so he does remember. I expect him to step aside so I can pass by, but he just stands there, one hand on the doorknob, the other on the opposite side of the doorframe, turning himself into a human barricade. “Can I come in?”

  He looks around again, glances behind him, then gives his head a sharp shake. “You’d better not. My parents aren’t home. Let’s sit out here.”

  Like a yellow light flashing at a school crossing, a warning goes off in my head. He’s never cared before if I was inside when his parents weren’t home. In fact, he always preferred it that way. My legs wobble beneath me as I move to one of the white wicker chairs on the far side of the porch. Cody sits next to me, his hands clasped in a tight fist in front of him. I’ve seen Cody look a lot of different ways: sexy, angry, self-assured, sensitive . . . but never like this. He looks nervous. I put my hand on his balled up fingers and he jumps.

  “Are you okay?” It’s something he really should be asking me. Are you okay? What can I do for you? Is there anything you need? But instead, I’m the one checking on him. I try to cut him some slack. After all, I’ve been agonizing over this for two weeks. He’s only known about it for a day.

  “Yeah,” he answers. “I’m just a little freaked out about the, well, you know . . .” He waggles his head in my direction.

  “Yeah, I know. I’m freaked out, too. At least you didn’t have to endure the wrath of my mother.”

  His eyes grow wide, looking twice their normal size. “You told her?”

  “This morning.”

  “What did she say?” His voice is tentative. He’s just as afraid of her reaction as I was.

  “That I’m a screw up. Of course, I already knew that.” I give a harsh laugh and wait for Cody to put his arm around me, to offer me some kind of comfort. But he doesn’t. He just keeps looking at me with that scared, wide-eyed stare. So I just keep talking. “You’re not going to believe what she suggested.”

  I didn’t think it was humanly possible for eyes to get any wider, but his do. “What?”

  “She wants to take me for an abortion.”

  “Thank God!” A huge burst of air rushes from Cody and his whole body seems to deflate. His eyes become slits, his shoulders sag, his head drops into his hands. He rubs his palms over his face, saying something I can’t understand. When he pulls himself together and sits up, his old smile is back. Only I don’t find anything sexy about it anymore.

  “Cody?” It’s all I can say. I can’t even put into words what I’m thinking: that I don’t know the person sitting next to me now, sitting back in his chair, ankle crossed over one knee, acting so relaxed it looks like he’s getting ready to watch a football game.

  He shakes his head and lets out a low whistle. “Boy, that was close, huh?”

  Close. Like he dodged a bullet. “What do you mean? I thought . . .”

  He looks confused. “You thought what?”

  I feel small and stupid. “I thought we were going to keep the baby.” I thought you were someone else.

  His foot slides off his knee and hits the floor with a hard thud. Now he looks horrified. “Whoa, hold on. I never said I wanted to keep it.”

  It. He doesn’t want to think about her as a person, either. “You said we’d work it out.”

  “Sure, and your mother just offered you the perfect solution.” He takes my hand and pats it. It’s an awkward gesture, like he’s forgotten how to touch me. Or he’s afraid to touch me. “Look, if you kept it, it would mess up both our lives. Why should we have to pay forever because of one stupid little mistake?”

  What part of it was stupid, I wonder? Making love to me? His insistence that we’d be okay without a condom just this once? Or my being careless enough to get pregnant?

  I can’t look at him. Instead, I stare straight ahead, past the lawn his father obsesses over, past the flower bed his mother’s so proud of. It’s a beautiful day. There are kids out in their yards, playing with balls, running in circles for no other reason than the joy of falling on the grass in a dizzy heap. In front of one house, a young man blows soap bubbles through a tiny plastic wand. Beside him, his wife claps and their chubby toddler swats at them, shrieking in delight each time one bursts. Everything around me blurs e
xcept for that little family. They stand out, crisp and brilliant, vivid in their happiness. That was supposed to be us: Cody, the baby, and me. We were supposed to work this out by becoming a family.

  “You—” The words stick in my throat. I swallow, blink hard, and start over. “You said you loved me.”

  “I do, babe. You know I do. But I’m too young to be tied down. There’s a big old world out there, and I don’t know what I want yet.” He’s got both my hands now. He stands up and pulls me to my feet with him. “Listen to your mom. It’s the perfect solution. You know, you’re lucky to have someone like her to take care of things.”

  Yeah, I’m the luckiest girl alive. A tear leaks out of the corner of my eye, igniting a burst of anger in my chest. I’m so tired of crying. I swat the tear away.

  Cody tries to smile. “Hey, we knew we’d be going in different directions once college started. But we had fun while it lasted, huh?”

  He moves closer, pulls me up against his chest, and even though I’m furious with him, even though he’s essentially just told me that we’re not a couple anymore, I let him kiss me. Because even though I hate him, I still love him. And there’s a small part of me that expects him to realize he’s made a mistake and to be the man I thought he was.

  But when we pull apart, the relief radiating from his face is all I need to see. It’s finished.

  I remember every step of the walk home. Not my surroundings so much, but the journey I went on in my mind. I would have this baby. I couldn’t count on my mother, but maybe Aunt Bobbie would help. And if she didn’t, it wouldn’t matter. I would raise her by myself. It would be hard, but we would persevere. It would be the two of us against the world. I even gave her a name: Penelope. I would call her Penny, for short, and use her first and middle names—Penelope Roberta—when I needed to be firm. Which wouldn’t be often, because Penny would be such a good little girl. My spirits started to lift. I imagined us playing together, going to the zoo, to the beach, Disneyland. I pictured her first day of kindergarten and how proud I’d be when she graduated from high school. For about a mile, I talked myself into believing that I could be a successful, happy, single mother.

  Then I turned onto my street. I walked up to the house. The same house I’d lived in with my mother ever since she married Ethan. The house she’d gotten from him in the divorce based on her promise to keep her mouth shut about his lecherous ways. I thought of my mother. How she hated me because I’d messed up her life. How much she would hate Penelope for adding to her grief. I really would be totally on my own.

  The happy thoughts I’d had before changed, morphing into a more realistic image of the future. There would be sleepless nights. Times when she was sick. Times when there wasn’t enough money to pay the bills. And I would continue to be alone, because no man wanted to take on the responsibility of a ready-made family. I’d had enough proof of that in my lifetime.

  I thought I could raise this baby on my own, but how could I know? How could I know I wouldn’t end up exactly like my mother? How could I know I wouldn’t resent my daughter for keeping me from living the life I wished I could have had?

  How could I know that I wouldn’t end up hating my baby?

  The weight of my situation pushed down on me, bending my will, as I trudged up the front steps.

  In the end, I couldn’t take the chance.

  24

  Vinnie’s Diner

  I stare down between my knees at the black and white checked tile floor. There was tile like this in the clinic. At the time, I thought it was weird. It was the kind of thing that belonged in a restaurant or a beauty salon, not a medical facility. There were also paintings of huge flowers on the walls, as if some interior designer thought the overly brilliant buds would distract everyone and make them forget why they were there. But the colors where so bright and glaring, they almost hurt your eyes. I couldn’t look at them for long. So I looked down.

  “I counted the number of tiles on the floor.”

  Vinnie scoots closer. “What floor?”

  I drop one hand and run my thumb nail along the seam between two squares. “In the clinic. While my mother checked me in and filled out the papers, I counted the tiles. There were thirty black ones and thirty-one white ones.” I look up at Vinnie, but I don’t see him. I look right through him. “That’s a strange thing to remember, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Sounds like it was the only way you had of removing yourself from a situation you didn’t want to face.”

  “Maybe.” I couldn’t tell you what any of the people looked like in that office, but I’ll never forget the floor. Or those darn ugly pictures.

  My shoulders sag and I drop my forehead on one of my raised knees. I don’t want to talk anymore. I want to close my eyes and sleep, forget any of this ever happened. I want to wake up in my own bed, back in a black and white reality like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and realize this multi-colored circus was all a crazy dream.

  But Vinnie keeps telling me I’m here for a reason, so I know he won’t let me run away from this newest revelation.

  “You had the abortion, then?”

  I roll my head back and forth, letting the coarse denim fabric of my jeans grind into my skin. “Procedure,” I mutter to the floor.

  “What?”

  I lift my head, but I still don’t look at Vinnie. Instead, I stare over his shoulder across the room at a poster for Gone with the Wind. What I wouldn’t give to be Scarlett O’Hara right now. She’d just say, “fiddle-dee-dee, I’ll think about it tomorrow,” and move on to something else. But I’ve been doing that most of my life, and it hasn’t done me any good.

  “They called it a procedure,” I answer him. “No one ever used the word abortion.”

  The whole thing had been very neat and quick. The staff was friendly in a detached kind of way. I could tell they’d said the same things to any number of women, too many times to count. Like telemarketers with memorized scripts, they tried to put some feeling behind their words, but the spiel still came out flat and empty. When the doctor said “You’ll just feel a little pinch,” it reminded me of the time I had a tetanus shot and another time when I had blood taken. The lab techs always said the same thing—you’ll just feel a pinch—and it always hurt worse than that. So I knew better than to believe this doctor. It wasn’t horrifically painful, but he still lied. I felt more than a little pinch.

  After it was over, they put me in a recovery room. Only it didn’t look like a room you’d recover in. It looked more like a little lounge. Instead of a bed there was a brown leather chaise. There was an overstuffed chair next to that and a television on a table at the end of the room. A counselor—her word, not mine—got me settled, gave me orange juice, turned on the TV, and left. In a few minutes, my mother walked in. She stood in front of me, looked from my head down to my toes and back again. Then she nodded and sat in the chair beside me. Not a word passed between us. We just stared at the figures flashing on the TV screen. I have no idea what was playing.

  “How did you feel afterward?” Vinnie’s voice breaks into my thoughts, pulling me out of that room and back into the diner.

  “Fine. I spent the day in bed. Mom treated me a little nicer than usual. She brought me soup.” She brought me ice cream, too. The way she was acting, you’d have thought I had my tonsils removed. It was just the beginning of the denial. I sigh. “The next day it was like nothing had happened. She went to work. I went to school. Everything went back to normal.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  My eyes burn. “Are you calling me a liar again?”

  Vinnie shakes his head. “No. I just think you’re denying how deeply affected you were by the situation.”

  I suck in a breath, try to steady myself. He nailed that one. I had thought the hardest part was making the decision, having the procedure—no, the abortion. Might as well call it what it was. I owe my daughter that much.

  But in reality, the hardest part
didn’t come until days later. That’s when I took a good hard look at the situation and realized what I’d done.

  “I knew it was wrong. In my gut, I knew. And it wasn’t something I really wanted to do. But Cody had abandoned me. My aunt had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, so I didn’t want to dump anything else on her. My mother was so insistent, and I . . . I was scared. Scared and totally alone.”

  A deep sadness shadows Vinnie’s face. He reaches for my hand, squeezes it. “Child, you were never alone. How I wish you’d known that.”

  Being that he’s an angel, I figure he means God was with me. If that’s true, I never felt it. And I’m certain God didn’t walk into that clinic with me.

  Vinnie looks up and to the side. When he turns back to me, there’s a smile on his lips. “Even in the dark times and in the places you’d never expect, you’ve never been alone. Just like you’re not alone now.”

  I want to believe him. I want to believe there’s someone in the world who loves me, even when I’m at my most unlovable. I want to believe there’s something or someone who can fill this awful, empty void at my core. But I can’t.

  My mother and I didn’t stop going to church after she threw Ethan out. We stopped going a month later when the rumors Ethan started about me began to spread. The gossip and finger pointing was finally so bad, we couldn’t stand up under it anymore. I’ve seen firsthand how church people judge and turn on each other. How can the God they represent be any different?

  How could Jake be any different?

  “I’ve been let down by so many people, Vinnie. But this was something I did to myself. I made the choice to sleep with Cody. I let fear get the best of me, and I went to the clinic and asked them to kill my child. This was my own fault.” I’m pounding on my chest now with the flat of my hand. My heart aches, as if someone’s slowly tearing a Band-Aid from it, fraction by tiny, painful fraction. “I haven’t been able to make peace with what I did. How could I expect Jake to accept me if he knew?”