The Latecomers Fan Club

by Diane V. Mulligan

  “I guess this is why they sell three packs,” Abby said.

  Breanna took Abby’s hand and squeezed it. Abby looked at the shiny diamond engagement ring on Breanna’s finger and swallowed a sob. She had ruined Breanna’s big announcement. This had to be the worst New Year’s Day in history. Poor Breanna came home excited to share her good news, which wasn’t a surprise to Abby since Pat had asked Abby to get Breanna’s ring size, but which deserved a real celebration, and instead she found Abby huddled in the bathroom, puking her guts out.

  “It’s going to be ok,” Breanna said, wiping a tear from Abby’s cheek.

  Abby nodded. She knew what the second test was going to say. She had noticed that her period was late, but her period was always irregular, so she talked herself into thinking it was just stress. But as soon as Breanna timidly suggested that maybe the cause for her peculiar nausea, moodiness, and exhaustion was pregnancy, Abby knew that was the explanation. It was so obvious. She had willfully ignored the signs for weeks. Things with Nathaniel had been so strained lately. She could hardly remember the last time they’d even had sex. And she always used her diaphragm. Always. Nathaniel hated condoms, which she knew were more reliable, but he insisted they ruined the mood and all of his pleasure. So it was up to her to handle their birth control, and she just didn’t like being on the pill. Sure, diaphragms aren’t foolproof, but her doctor assured her that if she used it properly, she’d be protected.

  Thinking about it now, she wondered why she was so deferential to Nathaniel. It wasn’t like he was amazing in bed. Still, she was always trying to please him. That was how she let this happen—by always putting her own best interest after his desires.

  She wasn’t ready to be a mother. It was all wrong. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Abby with a baby carriage. She thought girls today should probably be taught a new version of the old rhyme, updated for the twenty-first century. Sex before love, babies before marriage. Almost everyone she knew who was in a relationship hooked up before officially dating, and everyone she knew who was married lived with their significant other before the wedding. Everyone but Breanna and Pat. They had known each other for a year before they ever dated, and now they were engaged without first living together. She was glad someone was doing things right.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, Abby thought, laying on the ratty old couch and studying the outlines of water stains on the ceiling. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and yet. What if? What if this was it? What if this was her one shot at motherhood?

  “I don’t know how I’m going to do this,” became Abby’s refrain for the rest of the day.

  “We’ll figure it out,” became Breanna’s.

  It made Abby feel a little better every time Breanna said “we.” “We’ll figure it out,” like she was Abby’s partner. She doubted Nathaniel would share her impulse to think things through together. Abby had no idea how he was going to react. He liked little kids and he talked about wanting to be a father, but he also told her over and over that he wasn’t the marrying type. She didn’t know how he reconciled his desire to have kids with his aversion to being a husband. She tried to imagine the conversation she would have with him, but she couldn’t even begin to picture his response to the news. She couldn’t get past her own simple declaration: I’m going to have a baby.

  She felt strangely calm as she repeated this thought in her mind. She was going to have a baby. As long as she only let her thoughts go that far, she was ok. She just had to tune out the ten thousand other thoughts trying to crowd in on that one. She always wanted to be a mother, and though she didn’t plan for it to be this way, she felt utterly certain that the right thing to do was to have the baby and raise it. Despite her Catholic upbringing, Abby wasn’t especially religious. She went to church on holidays but skipped the Sundays in between. And yet, she believed things happen for a reason. If she was pregnant, God wanted this for her.

  But there were so many things to think about. Like, for instance, her job. She didn’t want to be a pregnant bartender. Just the idea seemed so trashy. In her dreams of motherhood, she was a stay-at-home mom, like her own mother. That seemed unlikely now, at least in the short term. And is pregnancy really the best time for a career change? Besides, she had no qualifications that would get her a job any better than the one she had.

  And her parents. They might disown her. She was supposed to be their good girl. And what would her brothers say? They’d want to kill Nathaniel. And what about Breanna’s wedding? Would she be a nine-month-pregnant maid-of-honor? Or a flabby new mom with breast milk leaking through her bridesmaid’s dress? Not that Breanna had even considered dates yet, or officially asked Abby to be in the wedding, but still—all these of problems were inevitably going to come up.

  Thank God for Breanna, Abby thought. She wished she could just enjoy Breanna’s good news. They should be out toasting her engagement, not sitting in their shithole apartment waiting to see if Abby was going to hold down a slice of toast.

  In the afternoon, when Abby had been able to eat some lunch, Breanna said, “So I’m supposed to have dinner tonight with Pat and his parents. Will you be okay?”

  “Of course,” Abby said, keeping her voice cheerful. Breanna had been with Pat and his family most of the past week for holiday festivities. She had been certain Breanna would stay home tonight to regroup before getting back to a normal workweek the next day. She felt her stomach flutter at the thought of being left alone again.

  “Are you sure? I can cancel.”

  “No, this is your day,” Abby said, mustering all of her courage. “I’m going to try to sleep. I’m tired.” This was a lie. She had been sleepy a lot lately, but now that she knew why, she was wide awake. Her racing thoughts would keep her up all night.

  “Okay, you need anything?”

  Abby shook her head, but then she thought of something. “Don’t tell Pat.”

  “What?”

  “You know, just don’t tell him about this. I mean, you aren’t supposed to tell people for three months and—”

  “Just because Pat and I don’t keep secrets from each other doesn’t mean I have to tell him yours. When you’re ready, you’ll tell him yourself. Give me some credit.”

  “I’m sorry I ruined your day.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m going to be an honorary aunt. You made my day.” She leaned over and gave Abby a little kiss on the forehead and then she went to get ready for dinner.

  The next morning, after a sleepless night, Abby couldn’t stand sitting in her apartment anymore. She tried to distract herself with an old Danielle Steele novel when she got sick of makeover shows on TLC, but it was no use. Around ten o’clock, she decided she had to get out. She’d called Nathaniel twice, but he hadn’t answered. For all she knew, he was already back from Worcester and was screening his calls to avoid her. She put on her warmest coat and walked the half mile or so to his apartment.

  He wasn’t there. It was one of those gray January days on which the sky never changes colors. Gray from sunrise to sunset. In the steady gloom, Abby had a sense of suspended time, as if the entire world was standing still, waiting for Nathaniel to return. She sat on his stoop in the cold until she was numb and called him twice more, but each time it went straight to voice mail. She walked down the street to Starbucks and ordered a mint tea. She tried him for the fifth time with no luck and settled into a small table by the window. She watched for his car even though she knew he preferred not to drive through Davis Square. He’d go blocks out of his way to avoid the traffic lights and pedestrians.

  In her mind, she traced the history of their relationship, from those first flirtations at the Watering Hole to nights she met up with him after her shift for “dates” which mostly amounted to going back to his place. And then the big turning point, his father’s death. God, what a mess he’d been. And what would have happened to him if she hadn’t been there? He probably would have
drank himself to death. Where were his friends, the ones he’d preferred to spend New Year’s with instead of her, when he needed them the most? They certainly weren’t making sure he got out of bed and went to work when, left to his own devices, he would have just quit. They weren’t helping him find his way to AA. No. They were back in Worcester, whispering about what a shame it was that Nathaniel’s life was such a mess. She knew he was pissed when she showed up for his father’s funeral, but he was singing a different tune when she was taking care of him after a bar fight that ended when he was kicked in the jaw and left barely conscious on the sidewalk. And when he did sober up after that, for a while anyway, things had been good. They hung out at his apartment and she cooked them dinner, poor renditions of the dishes her mother always made, and he complimented her as her techniques improved.

  The drinking. That was the problem. If she could just get him to quit again, they would be able to make a life together. What better incentive than a baby? In fact, she mused, maybe he’d never grow up until he had a clear reason.

  There was a good, loving man inside Nathaniel. She had seen it. She had seen it in the way he had taken care of his mother since his dad died and in the way he was with her when he was sober. Abby had seen Nathaniel at his worst, those first months of confused grief after his father’s passing when he was drunk all the time, to the point of having to take a leave of absence from his PhD program, delaying the completion of his dissertation for a year, and she had seen him put himself back together again.

  She was so proud of him when he decided to join AA, when he was finally able to realize he needed help and then to seek it out. She watched so many of her male peers abuse alcohol, spending every weekend in a hazy wash of cheap booze that left them with only vague recollections of anything that happened between quitting time Friday and waking Monday morning, and none of them considered their behavior problematic. No, they were proud of their “high alcohol tolerances” and the stupid feats performed under the influence and turned into legends later when everyone who had been there pieced together a story from their fragmented, fuzzy memories. The few times in her life that Abby had gotten to the point of blacking out, she’d been utterly mortified the next day; she’d been ashamed to look her friends in the eye for fear of whatever she might have done. But most guys had no shame. They seemed to believe they were just being guys, that men are supposed to make pounding beers an integral part of any experience. And yet they’d make fun of a middle-aged man alone at the bar, quietly getting shit-faced, as if they had no idea how a person could become so pathetic.

  Her years as a bartender had left Abby with little interest in getting drunk, much as she imagined people who worked at ice cream places lost their taste for ice cream. Sure, she could enjoy a nice beer, a good glass of wine, a well-made cocktail, but she hadn’t had more than two drinks in a single night in years.

  Around one o’clock her phone rang and she jumped, spilling the dregs of the second cup of tea she had bought to justify her continued occupancy of the table, but it was only Breanna.

  “You feeling better?” she asked.

  Abby confirmed that she was.

  “Have you talked to Nathaniel?”

  “I don’t want to tell him over the phone,” Abby said, mopping up her table with a handful of paper napkins. “I went over there this morning but he’s not home yet.” She didn’t bother saying that she’d been sitting at Starbucks for hours or that there was no way she was going home until she saw him.

  “Okay, I’ll call you after work,” Breanna said.

  Abby hung up the phone and cursed Nathaniel again. Shouldn’t your boyfriend treat you at least as well as your best friend? She got up and got another cup of mint tea and picked up a newspaper someone else had left on a table. She flipped the pages but she couldn’t concentrate. All she could think about was Nathaniel. She wished he’d stuck with AA—he was so much nicer when he was sober—although she wasn’t surprised that he didn’t last long. He was too much the philosopher to buy their rhetoric. But he did stop drinking for almost a year, even without the meetings to keep him on track. It was a nice year. They stayed in a lot, watching movies on TV, mastering the game of rummy 500. The only thing Abby hadn’t liked was that he stopped playing music. He said he quit the Latecomers to avoid the temptation of bars, but Abby didn’t think it was healthy to give up something he loved so much.

  During the summer of his sobriety, they went on their one-and-only vacation together. Abby took a week off from work in August, right before Nathaniel was to resume his studies and teaching, and they went up to Maine to Old Orchard Beach, where her uncle let them stay at his place. It was just a trailer, permanently parked at a camp ground, but it was well-appointed, and they could walk to the beach. They didn’t have any money to do much besides lay on the beach when the sun came out, lay around the trailer when it rained, and eat hot dogs on the grill, but it was so nice to spend a whole week away from the usual daily concerns. It rained half the week, but that gave them an excuse to stay in bed, making love and reading the trashy novels her aunt left there. A few times, Abby caught Nathaniel looking at her with such love and tenderness that she felt certain he was going to propose.

  One night near the end of the week, she woke up at two in the morning to find he wasn’t in bed beside her. When he didn’t return after a few minutes, she got up to look for him. Her stomach rolled nervously, her old habit of fearing the worst. Was he off drinking somewhere? Had he been sneaking out every night? Had the entire peaceful week been an illusion? He wasn’t in the trailer. The door was open. Abby stepped into the light of the full moon and walked down the path to the beach. Nathaniel was there, sitting on the sand, letting the tide swirl around his toes. Abby knelt behind him and put her arms around him. From the unevenness of his breathing, she knew he’d been crying. She knew better than to ask him what was wrong. She pressed her face into the space between his shoulder blades. He put his hands on hers and wove their fingers together. After a few moments, he slipped free of her arms, turned around and kissed her. He laid her on the damp sand and kissed her with an intensity she’d never felt before. He reached for the waist of her pajama pants and she pulled away.

  “Not here,” she said, standing and brushing the sand from her hair.

  He stood and followed her back to the trailer, but when they got into bed, she knew she’d disappointed him. All of the passion he’d shown moments earlier was gone. He rolled away from her and went to sleep.

  In the morning when she woke, he was already up making breakfast, pancakes with blueberries and bacon on the side. He put a plate in front of her and smiled, and she knew they’d never talk about whatever he’d been going through the night before.

  The good feelings of their vacation didn’t last long when they got home, and by Thanksgiving, Nathaniel was drinking again. He said the real problem had been liquor, so he only drank beer. That was, of course, absurd.

  But he’ll see that now, Abby thought, playing with her empty paper cup and staring out into Davis Square. He stopped drinking before, and he could stop again. He would stop and become a loving father. That was the right thing for him to do.

  Around two o’clock she walked back to Nathaniel’s apartment, but he still wasn’t there. Abby paced up and down the block to keep warm. She was on the verge of giving up and going home when she saw his old blue Camry turn onto the block. The look on his face as he came up the walk was unmistakable: he was not happy to see her. Before he could say a word, she blurted it out. The words seemed to hang in the cold air between them. Abby wanted him to put his arms around her, to rush inside and kiss her, but he just stared at her.

  “So I guess we’re having a baby,” she said, breaking the silence.

  Nathaniel squinted at her as if she were a stranger he’d met before but he couldn’t remember when or where. Then he stepped around her to the door and went in. She followed him.

 
Maggie

  Around the end of January, Gloria started asking Maggie more questions about her job plans, and she stopped being so deferential when Maggie tried to put her off. Finally, one night when Frank was working late, she took Maggie out to dinner, a ploy Maggie should have recognized: Her mother cornering her into the heart-to-heart conversation she had been deftly avoiding. This had been her mother’s trick since she and Claire were teenagers. If she needed to talk to her daughters about something that might make them uncomfortable, she took them out to some nice, public place so they couldn’t escape or make a scene.

  “It’s been great to have you home. Last winter I didn’t know what to do with myself when the college was closed for winter break,” Gloria said once they were seated in a quiet booth in a small, upscale Italian restaurant.

  Gloria had always worked long hours before her current job as community service coordinator at the college. In her previous positions at a nursing home, she worked for hourly wages with terrible benefits and little time off. In fact, Maggie couldn’t remember a time in her life when her mother had more than two consecutive days off. But her new job—much deserved, Maggie knew—left her plenty of free time, and during winter break, she only had to go in for a few hours a week. But Maggie knew her mother was also skillful at finding ways to stay busy; she didn’t need Maggie’s company. After all, Gloria spent most of her free time with Frank.

  They ordered dinner and waited for their food to arrive in awkward silence—awkward because Maggie had realized that her mother had ulterior motives and because Gloria wasn’t sure how to start. Their salads arrived, and Maggie gave her full attention to cutting up her vegetables and eating in small, careful bites.

  At last Gloria sighed and said, “So, how are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” Maggie said without looking up.

  “You’ve certainly had plenty of time to think.”