Todd had been fixed six weeks when the stick in my hand came up PREGNANT.
I carried it down the hall wrapped in a square of toilet paper.
He was on the couch with his phone propped on his chest.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
He didn’t get up.
He didn’t ask how I felt, or how far along.
He turned the phone over on the cushion like I’d tracked mud across the carpet.
“That can’t happen.”
“Can’t how,” I said.
He laughed. One short note with nothing under it.
“I got it done six weeks ago, Jenna. I look like an idiot to you?”
Idiot.
Nine years married, and that was the first word he grabbed.
This was the man who called the snip the smart move, because of the camper payment.
I reminded him what the urologist told us both. It isn’t finished the day you leave. They check you at twelve weeks. Use something till they do.
His mind was already made up.
“Who’s the guy,” he said. “Say his name.”
That night he packed his bowling duffel. The duffel, not the suitcase.
“I’ll be at Kelsey’s.”
Kelsey.
She’s twenty-eight and works the front register at his lumberyard.
The same Kelsey who copied my grandma’s rhubarb bars onto a napkin at my kitchen table in April.
That afternoon she said Todd and I were goals.
His mother pulled in at seven-thirty the next morning with an empty laundry basket.
She hadn’t come to sit with me. She’d come for his work shirts.
Debra is sixty-one and doesn’t believe in knocking.
Her eyes went to my stomach like it was a water ring on a coffee table she’d paid for.
“I knew you could go LOW,” she said. “My son didn’t DO a thing to earn this.”
“I haven’t been with anybody, Debra.”
She smiled with her mouth shut.
“They all say that, sweetie.”
Within ten days his whole FAMILY knew, then half of Ottumwa, the version where I cheated.
Todd posted him and Kelsey on a bar patio, captioned something about finally getting to breathe.
A month later the papers came.
The house in his name. Support at a number I read three times. Weekends, if he felt like it.
And near the bottom, a line saying if the baby wasn’t his, I’d pay back EVERY dollar we’d spent as a married couple.
A muffler shop magnet on my fridge had been holding up nothing since Memorial Day.
I didn’t sign.
Friday I sat through the twenty-week scan by myself, in my one ironed blouse.
The doctor measured, typed, and told me it most likely happened the first week of May.
Sunday morning Debra called.
“Come to supper and bring the papers. Let’s do this proper, as a family.”
I took the folded page out of the coffee can over the stove and put it in my wallet.
It came out of Todd’s work coat in May, when I went through his pockets on laundry day.
Creased in thirds and worn fuzzy at the folds, with one line I couldn’t figure.
I never asked. Ask Todd a question and you got a fight about the question.
Kelsey was in my chair.
Todd’s grandpa Arlen sat at the head, eighty-four, cutting his roast into little squares.
Debra set a pen next to my plate like it was silverware.
“This is only fair,” she said. “If it’s his, fine. If it isn’t, she pays back what she took. That’s fair to everybody.”
“Cleaner for everyone,” Kelsey said.
Todd pointed his fork at me. “This family was fine till you.”
“Is there a line in there for all the shirts I pressed?”
His ears went red. “The dates don’t work. I had it done the ninth of April. Ask anybody.”
Arlen set his knife down.
“I didn’t ask you, Todd.”
He looked at me. “Jenna. The doctor gave you a date. Say it.”
I had to swallow first. “The first week of May.”
Debra counted it off on the tablecloth with one finger.
The ninth of April to the first week of May is four weeks.
“A MONTH AFTER,” she said. “That’s your answer, Dad.”
Kelsey reached for the rolls.
Arlen didn’t look at either of them. “Is that everything, Jenna?”
I opened my wallet.
I spread the page from Todd’s coat flat beside Arlen’s plate, next to the gravy boat.
He read it. Then he read the date printed at the top. Then he looked at his grandson.
“Nobody at this table eats another bite,” he said, “until you READ THAT TO YOUR MOTHER.”
May Fourteenth
Todd didn’t sit.
He stood behind his chair with his napkin still tucked in his belt. For a second I thought he’d go out the side door and leave the rest of us with the roast.
Arlen held the page up to him between two fingers.
“Read it,” he said. “Loud enough for your mother.”
Todd took it. His mouth moved once before any sound came.
“Cedar Valley Urology,” he read. “Your procedure on April ninth has been moved to May fourteenth at the patient’s request.”
He stopped there.
“The rest,” Arlen said.
“Please arrive fifteen minutes early.”
That was the whole thing. A clinic name, a date, another date, and a phone number across the bottom.
Debra’s hand came up off the tablecloth.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “They move those around all the time. Todd, tell him.”
Todd laid the page down beside his plate like it might go off.
“I moved it. So what. I got it done.”
“May,” Arlen said.
“Yeah. May.”
“The fourteenth.”
Todd didn’t answer that one.
I kept my hands in my lap. My wallet was still open on my knee, my library card showing through the little plastic window.
Arlen gave his water glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth. He did that at every meal I ever ate in that house, right before he said whatever he’d already made up his mind to say.
“So the ninth of April,” he said. “Where were you.”
“Home. Sore. Ask her.”
The whole table looked at me.
“He came in at twenty to four,” I said. “He told me Merle from the yard drove him.”
Kelsey set her fork down very carefully, the way you put down something that belongs to somebody else.
If it wasn’t Merle’s truck he climbed out of that afternoon, whose was it?
Frozen Peas And A Push Mower
I was behind the deli counter at the grocery on the ninth of April, slicing ham for the church lunch crowd, when Todd texted me one word.
Done.
A minute later he sent another. Merle’s got me.
I got home a little after two. His truck sat in the drive where it had been since morning. That made sense, because Merle was driving.
He came through the front door at twenty to four, walking like a man carrying a full pan of water, one hand on the wall.
“Peas,” he said.
I dug the frozen peas out of the back of the freezer. He took them to the couch and stayed there two days.
He called it the smart move again from under my grandma’s afghan. The camper was $389 a month and would be for four more years, and a baby on top of that would sink us. We could talk again in a couple of years if we still felt like it.
I brought him soup on a tray. I took three calls from his mother, who wanted to know if I was keeping ice on it.
Two days after the clinic, I came home from my shift and the front yard was mowed.
Straight stripes, both directions. The push mower was still ticking in the garage, and Todd was at the kitchen counter with a beer.
“Felt better than I figured,” he said.
I figured he’d played it up to get out of dishes, and I let it go.
The twentieth of April, Todd had people over from the yard for burgers out back, on folding chairs borrowed from the church basement.
Kelsey found me in the kitchen cutting rhubarb bars and asked if she could have the recipe.
I told her it was my grandma’s and she could have it anyway. She sat at my kitchen table and copied it onto a paper napkin in round handwriting, with a little circle over every i.
She looked up about halfway through the crumb topping.
“Is he still going through with his thing?” she said.
“He already did,” I said. “Couple weeks back. He mowed two days later, if you can believe it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Good for him.”
She wrote something small in the corner of the napkin, folded it twice and put it in her purse. That was when she told me Todd and I were goals.
Sometime in the middle of May, Todd came home from an inventory count at the yard walking careful again. He asked me where the peas went.
I told him he’d finished them in April.
“Never mind,” he said, and went to bed at eight.
That same week the letter came out of his work coat on laundry day, folded in thirds. I read the part about April and the part about May and couldn’t make them fit together, because he’d already had it done. I put it down to the clinic mixing something up.
It went in the coffee can over the stove, with my grandma’s button jar and the warranty for the water heater. That was where I kept things I didn’t want to argue about.
A week later I was carrying a test down the hall in a square of toilet paper.
I wrote Kelsey’s question off as small talk. For four months, that’s all it was.
Seven-Thirty That Wednesday
Debra let herself in with her own key the morning after he left. I heard the deadbolt turn and thought, for one stupid second, that it was Todd coming home.
She walked past me in the hall without a word and went straight to our closet.
I stood in the bedroom doorway in my robe with a mug of decaf. I watched her take his work shirts off the rod, hangers and all, and lay them in the basket like she was pulling them out of a fire.
She didn’t ask when my appointment was, or how I was sleeping. She asked if I’d washed the blue ones yet.
Then she stopped in the hall on her way out, looked at my stomach, and said the rest of it.
Word got to the deli counter by the following week.
Women I had sliced turkey for since high school stood at the glass and looked at my hands instead of my face. Todd’s cousin’s wife asked for a half pound of the smoked. She said she was praying for all of us, and the way she leaned on “all” told me which one of us she meant.
The patio picture went up on a Friday. I saw it on my break, sitting on an upside-down bucket behind the loading dock.
Her hand was around his arm. He was holding a beer I had watched him pour a hundred times. He looked lighter in that picture than he’d looked in years, and that was the part I couldn’t stop looking at.
Three days after the picture, my debit card came back declined at the gas pump out by the fairgrounds.
I called the bank from the car. The joint checking had $61 in it.
Todd had moved the rest into an account with only his name on it, the same afternoon he packed the duffel.
When I got him on the phone he said it was his paychecks, mostly.
“Mostly,” I said.
“Want to count whose money is whose?” he said. “Start with whose baby that is.”
He hung up before I could answer.
I paid for the gas in quarters out of the coffee can, reaching right past his letter to get them.
The Clear Sleeve
The papers came a month after he left. They were in a clear plastic sleeve, stapled in the corner like a work order off the yard printer.
The house went to him. Support was $240 a month. Weekends were his when he wanted them.
I read the line near the bottom standing at the sink until the words quit being words.
He called that evening to make sure the envelope had come.
“Sign it and we’re done dragging this out,” he said.
“Dragging it out is you hanging around the front register all day while I go to the appointments alone.”
“Jenna, you blew this family up.”
“Then I guess I owe it back,” I said. “It’s in the paperwork.”
He didn’t think that was funny.
The next morning his mother came again, and this time she brought a folder of her own.
She sat at my kitchen table without being asked and laid out a copy of our mortgage, with a pink tab stuck on the last page.
“My name’s on this,” she said. “I co-signed for you two when nobody at the bank would look at Todd’s credit. Don’t forget it.”
I hadn’t forgotten. I’d baked her a pie to say thank you.
“So here’s how it goes,” she said. “Sign his papers and be out of this house by the first of November. My son is being generous. I wouldn’t be.”
“And if I don’t sign?”
“Then I call the bank, and we find out how generous the bank is.”
She put the folder back in her purse and left the mortgage copy on my table with the pink tab sticking up.
After she left I went down the hall and stood in the little room at the end of it. I’d painted it yellow in July, two coats, by myself, with the window up and a box fan going. The crib from the resale shop was still in its box against the wall.
The scan was the second Friday in September.
Dr. Salas shook my hand and asked if anybody was coming.
“My husband says it isn’t his,” I said.
She didn’t blink. She told me to lie back.
The gel was cold enough that I jumped. Then the screen came up and there was that quick little knock, faster than anybody grown, and I put both hands over my mouth.
“Hi,” I said, to nobody in the room.
She measured and typed for a long time. Then she told me it most likely happened the first week of May. She printed me a strip of pictures, and I put them in my wallet.
Sunday morning Debra called.
“Come to supper and bring the papers,” she said. “Let’s do this proper, as a family.”
She said bring the papers twice, like I might forget what I’d been handed.
Kelsey’s Napkin
The roast was going cold in its juice.
Debra had both hands flat on the tablecloth again.
“Moving an appointment isn’t a crime,” she said. “People get busy. That letter doesn’t say one word about whose baby that is.”
Todd pulled his chair out and sat down hard.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you. That’s what I’ve been saying.”
Arlen didn’t say anything. He gave his glass another quarter turn and looked at me.
I hadn’t planned to talk. I’d planned to set the page down and let it sit there.
But my mouth was already going.
“The eleventh of April you mowed the lawn,” I said. “Both directions. Two days after.”
Todd shrugged. “So I heal fast.”
“The middle of May you came home from inventory with one hand on the wall,” I said. “And you asked me where the peas went.”
Debra’s head turned toward her son. It was the first time since we sat down that she’d looked at him instead of me.
Todd’s face went the color of the beets.
I looked across the table at my chair, and at Kelsey in it.
“Kelsey, you sat at my kitchen table in April,” I said. “Copying my grandma’s bars. And you asked me if he was still going through with his thing.”
Kelsey’s hand stopped halfway to the butter.
“Still,” I said. “That’s the word you used.”
Nobody moved. The clock over Debra’s stove said 5:40, and the second hand was the only sound in the room.
Then Kelsey pushed her plate an inch away from her.
“He told me it was May,” she said.
“Kelsey,” Todd said.
“He told me the April day was ours,” she said. She wasn’t looking at him or at me. She was looking at Arlen, like he was the one person there who might sort it out. “He took the two days off paid. I dropped him at the end of your block at twenty to four so you’d see him walk up.”
She swallowed.
“He said you’d never check.”
Debra’s Side Of The Table
Debra found her voice first. She always did.
“Well, that’s between the two of them,” she said. “That’s a grown man being stupid with a girl from his work, and I’m not defending it. I’m not, Todd. But that letter doesn’t tell me one thing about what she was doing the first week of May.”
“Ma,” Todd said.
“I won’t have my son paying for eighteen years on the say-so of a piece of paper she kept in a coffee can.”
Todd was leaning over his plate now, both elbows on the table.
“Since May,” he said. “That’s how long you had it. My mother telling the whole town, me walking around the yard like the guy who got played, and you had that sitting over the stove the whole time.”
He shook his head at the ceiling.
“One question. That’s all it would’ve taken. One question, and you couldn’t ask it.”
I let that sit a second.
“I asked you one question in May,” I said. “You asked me for a name.”
Debra started in again. She talked about the house and the pink tab, and how the bank didn’t care who dropped who off at the end of what block.
“The first of November stands,” she said. “Letter or no letter. My name is on that house.”
“I know it is,” I said.
Kelsey got up. She took her purse off the back of my chair and went out the side door without her jacket, and nobody said her name.
Todd half stood to go after her.
“Sit down,” Arlen said.
He sat.
“Now look what you did,” Todd said to me.
I reached across the gravy boat and took the page back off the tablecloth. I folded it along its soft creases and put it in my wallet, next to the strip of pictures from the scan.
When I stood up my knees were going so bad I held on to the back of the chair.
The packet stayed on the tablecloth in its clear sleeve.
I left the pen exactly where she’d put it.
The Coffee Can
The next Friday I signed a lease on the downstairs half of a duplex on Locust Avenue. It was $650 a month, with a landlord who wanted first and last and nothing else about me.
Merle from the yard showed up on moving day with his truck and a dolly. Merle had never once driven my husband to any clinic, and he didn’t ask me a single question.
I left the yellow room the way it was.
Two coats, and the box fan still in the window. I took the crib in its box. I couldn’t take the walls.
Arlen called that Sunday at four, the way he used to call to ask if I was bringing rolls.
“Your chair’s there,” he said. “Whatever they do.”
“I know, Arlen.”
“But you’re not coming.”
“I’m not coming.”
He was quiet a while. Then he told me to eat something green, and hung up.
That one cost me more than the house.
A second packet came the week after, in the same clear sleeve. The line near the bottom was gone, and the support number had moved. I put it on top of the fridge under the muffler shop magnet. I haven’t signed that one either.
Todd texted once, late, wanting a test after the baby came.
I wrote back that he could bring his own pen.
The coffee can went up on the shelf over the new stove the first day. It held the button jar, the warranty for a water heater I didn’t own anymore, and the strip of pictures from Dr. Salas. The letter went on top, folded in thirds.
Wednesday morning at seven-thirty a car pulled onto the gravel in front of the duplex.
I knew the sound of that engine. I’d heard it in my own driveway for nine years.
I stood in the kitchen with my decaf and waited for the door.
The knob turned once and stopped against the lock.
Then it was quiet for a long time.
Then Debra knocked.
Three knocks, polite, like a woman selling something.
I set my mug down, went over and opened the door.
She was standing on the step with the laundry basket on her hip. It held my winter coat, the rhubarb pan I’d left at her house at Easter, and a folded pale green baby blanket I’d never seen before, with the tag still on it.
“Arlen says you’re not coming Sundays,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said.
She held the basket out.
I took it, and I didn’t ask her in.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s ever had a pen set down next to their plate.
If you’re looking for more tales of family antics, you won’t want to miss when Arlene tucked the piece with the frosting school bus into her housecoat pocket, or the time My Mother Turned The Thermostat Down To 52 And Took The Formula Home, and even the story of how My sister-in-law pushed me in the same red dress she wore to our wedding.
