Full of Grace (14 page)

“No,” she says.  I explode.

“What do you mean,
no
?  You can’t say
no
!  That’s not an answer!”

“I told you,” her tone warps and wobbles, “it’s not your business.  I keep making mistakes and I’m sorry!  I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it!  You’re so nice and I want to be with you, but I can’t.  I can’t!  You don’t deserve my mess, Landon!”

She breaks down in buckets of tears, but I have to get to the bottom of this.  I can’t let it go.

“Your mess?”  I say.  “It’s my mess too!  What do I have to say to get it through to you?  I’m not just sticking it out!  You’re living with me and having my baby, but it’s not just that.  If you want me—if you haven’t noticed, Sher—I’m bending over backwards to be with you!”

“I know,” she sniffles.  “I know you are.”

“Then what the hell is the problem?  Don’t you want to be with me?”

She wipes her nose, nodding, but she still isn’t looking at me. 

“Yes you do, or no you don’t?”

“Yes, I do,” she squeaks.

“So what’s the problem?”

“The baby,” she sobs.  “The baby might not be yours, Landon.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FOR SUCH A LITTLE GIRL, it feels like she’s actually a heavy weight champ that just delivered the winning punch to my gut.  I roll down the window and let the night air in.  When it doesn’t help, I wrench open the door and get out.  I walk to the trunk.  If I throw up, I don’t want her seeing it.  If I decide to leave her sitting in my car and walk home by myself, I don’t even want her to know until I’m gone.

What she said churns my guts.  It’s a million times worse than when she told me she was pregnant.  At least then, I could resolve myself to the terror.  But this, this is just terror, wild and loose, and there’s no way for me to get a hold on it.

Sher’s door slams.  She joins me at the back of the car.

“I’m sorry.” She hugs her arms around herself.

“What do you know…me too.  Real sorry.  Who is it?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“I mean who’s the other guy, Sher?  Or should I ask how many other guys there were?”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Like what?  Like somebody who sleeps around, but pretends to be a virgin?”

There’s no warning.  She just heaves her leg back and kicks me in the balls.  Square in them.  I double over and fall, coughing, onto the gravel.

“I don’t sleep around, you son of a bitch!” she shouts from over my head.  I’d answer with something sarcastic if my nuts weren’t lodged in my throat.

“You were my first!  You were it!  I just wanted…”  She paces, the gravel crunching under her feet, right beside my head.  I try to breathe and get a mouthful of exhaust.  Sher keeps on babbling, as my balls slowly drift down, out of my esophagus.  “Hale went and got married!  You don’t know any of this, but we were going to do it all together, me and Hale!  We used to say we were going to go to college together and meet our husbands there.  We were going to have a double wedding, and we were going to move into houses next door to each other.  We wanted to have our kids close together, so they’d grow up being best friends, just like we are.  She’s always been my best friend.  She’s my only friend.  I can’t be anything but happy that her life took off like it did, but I can’t help being sad that it happened before I could even get mine off the ground.  You know what that feels like?  She’s my best friend and I’m happy for her, I am, but I’m jealous.  I’m so horrible, awful jealous, I can’t stand it!  She started our life without me!

“And then, there you were at the wedding.  You looked so damn good in your tux!  You were drunk and I didn’t care that you only wanted a one night stand.  I just wanted to pretend a little, that I wasn’t going to be stuck forever in my stupid old life.  I wanted to pretend that we were getting married too, and I thought that being with you would help.  I figured I deserved to have one good night, just one good one in my whole life!

“But then, after we did it, I knew that was going to be it.  I knew you didn’t want more and I was going to be okay with it.  You never needed to know that I was planning on using the memory of that one night to get through the rest of my life.

“But then you found out I was a virgin, and you dropped all that pity on me.  I didn’t answer your calls, because I didn’t want you to ruin my fantasy with your stupid shame.  Don’t you get how much I needed that night to just stay good?  But I
knew
, Landon.  I’m not a dumb ass.  I knew you were calling afterward because you were on a guilt trip.  I didn’t answer because I was
trying
to let you off the hook.

“And that’s why I got with Trent.  I didn’t plan it, but I did it, because I
knew
. I knew I was always going to be stuck in the slums.  It’s what girls like me
do. 
I knew that no matter how I tried to change, I was always going to end up like my mom, so I just gave in to Trent.  Sue me, you pompous son of a bitch.  Sue me!”

I think she might kick me in the head this time, so I cover my skull, but instead, one foot just stomps in place on the gravel.  I roll onto my back and look up at her.  Her mascara branches away from her eyes and it’s smeared like fog where she’s wiped it away from her runny nose.  She keeps sobbing as I get to my knees.  I stand up slowly, using the back bumper to do it.

“Get in the car,” I tell her. 

“Don’t you want me to walk home?”

“Yes,” I say, “but I can’t and I’m not going to leave you out here.  Just get in.  I have to go home and ice my nuts.”

***

Who the hell knows what she blabbers about all the way back.  All I know is that working the brake is excruciating. My ball sack aches and listening to her sniffle and sob about
pity
and
fantasies
and
screwing Trent
just makes my head ache too.

I pull into the apartment building and get out the car.  She gets out and follows me as I limp up the steps to my apartment door.  I think she apologizes.  Twice.  The pain and the I-screwed-Trent-and-this-might-not-be-your-baby thing totally numbs my I-give-a-damn mechanism.  I unlock the door and walk in, not bothering to shut it or hold it open.  I just need some ice.

She slides in behind me and closes the door softly.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“You said that already,” I tell her.  I go into the bedroom and my legs are stiff as I change out of my pants and into a pair of sweats.  I go to the kitchen and gather up some ice in a dish towel.  I finally ease down onto my recliner, holding the pouch of ice on my crotch.  Sher perches on the edge of the couch, chewing her bottom lip.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says.  “Do you want me to go?”

“Where, Sher?”  I snap at her.  “Where are you going to go?  Back with the Emo Nightmare?  To the clinic?  It
could
still be mine, right?  I’ve been an idiot!  I told you I’d be here, no matter what, but this?  How long after me did you bang that little freak?”

She startles me when she jumps up.  Some of the ice falls into the chair.

“You know what?  I don’t need this shit.” She stomps into my bedroom and hollers at me as she rustles her gym bag.  “I made a mistake!  You can’t tell me you’ve never had a one night stand…oh! Kind of the same way you did with me!  Oh yeah!  That was okay, though, right?  So I did someone else!  If I was a guy, it’d be no problem!  But you’re going to call me a slut?  God, my mother was so right!”

I watch as she drags her bag into the bathroom.  From the chair, I watch her dump her make-up and hair crap on top of her clothes.  Collecting all her junk doesn’t slow her rant at all.

“My mom warned me!  She warned me and I didn’t fucking listen!  She was sooo right!  This is how it always ends up!  The girl’s fault!  I’ll just get my shit together and get out of here and I’ll deal with it myself!”

She tries to yank the zipper shut on her bag, but it’s too full and something pops.  She shrieks and throws whatever piece broke off across the room.  It tinks against the window and falls, lost in the carpet.

“And, by the way, Landon, fuck you!” she roars as she scoops up her bag and tries to heave the strap over her shoulder.  The trapeze-thingee, holding the strap, strains with the weight of the bag and breaks.  The whole thing dumps at her feet and she screams again.  In a surge of pure will, she wraps her arms around the pile, heaves it to her chest, and staggers past me.

She gets to the door and drops the bag on her foot, with more cursing, when she can’t get her hand on the knob. She pushes her hair out of the way and reaches for the knob again.

I’m already behind her, my hand extended over her shoulder, holding the door shut.  I’m calm again.

“There’s nowhere else for you to go.” I keep my words gentle and slow, hoping they will sink into her head.

And she throws her elbow so hard into my gut that she sends me to the floor, for the second time this evening.  She wrenches open the door and lugs out her bag, as if I’m going to jump up and run after her.

***

I assumed Sher would come to her senses when she realized I was right.  She has nowhere else to go.

Sitting in my chair, I feel smug even with the ice numbing my balls, and expect her to return in the first ten minutes, but she doesn’t come.  I peek out the window when I hear a distant rumble of thunder and see her sitting on the bus bench.  She’ll come back in when it starts to rain for sure.  When the clouds open up, I peek out again and Sher’s still sitting out there in the drizzle.  She doesn’t look back up at my window even once.  An old lady comes along and sits on the bench beside Sher; the woman holds a newspaper over her own head.  Sher just sits, letting the rain soak her through, looking the other way.

This isn’t right.  How did this become my fault?  I didn’t sleep around.  Well.  At least, I didn’t crack her in the balls and ram my elbow into her gut.  I turn away from the front door and go to the kitchen for a drink instead.  It doesn’t matter if I don’t want the drink.  None of this is my fault.  Instead of returning to the window, I drop into my recliner and flash through the TV channels so fast that I couldn’t tell what’s on if I tried.

I figure that once the thunder really rolls in, and the bus still hasn’t come, she’ll give up.  But when the first crack of lightening doesn’t bring her footsteps back up to my door, I check the window again and she is gone.  Pressing my face to the glass, I look up and down the street, but she is nowhere to be seen.  The newspaper lady has vanished too.  The bus has come and gone.

Ten minutes later, I call Sher’s cell phone, to be sure she is on the bus and not wandering around in the storm, but the call goes to voice mail.  My balls throb as I lean over to set my phone back down on the coffee table.  It’s too late for her to head to the clinic, but maybe she’ll go tomorrow morning.  I should just let her go.  Let this whole thing be over.  I drop my head back with a groan.  My nuts might be in a tangle, but my stomach feels way worse.

I get out some paper and write a note that I doubt anyone will ever read.

Dear Baby,

Sometimes making decisions is painful.  I’d like to say that I wish your decisions would always be easy, but that’s not what I would wish for you or me.  I wish that any decisions you have the opportunity to make will always be the ones that are right and best for you.  I want what is best for you… 

I crumple the note and then smooth it out and file it away in the yellow paper folder I generically labeled ‘NOTES’.  My mother’s words come to me. 
It ain’t over ‘til it’s over
.  I slide the folder back onto the top shelf in my closet, under a shoe box. 

I turn on the TV and tell myself I’m not going to sit around and think about Sher all night, but that’s exactly what I do, until I fall asleep.

I wake in my recliner the next morning, to my phone ringing and wet pants.  The melted ice has soaked the towel and me.  The towel drops to the floor as I grab my phone, expecting it to be her.  I brace myself to hear a nurse’s voice, saying Sher needs a ride back from the clinic. 

But it’s Oscar.

“Missing something?” he asks.

“Sher’s at your place?”

“There’s been a sob fest going on in my bedroom all night.”

“I should’ve known she’d go to your place.  What is she saying?”

“I have no clue.  I’m not allowed past the door.  Every time I poke my head in to ask if they need something, I get the fuck-off eyes.  What did you do?”

I sigh, rubbing my eyes.  “Sher told me that the kid might not be mine.”

There’s a long pause before Oscar exhales.

“Are you serious?” he says.

“Wish I wasn’t.” I rub the sleep out of my eyes.  At least my nuts don’t feel like they’ve been pounded with a mallet anymore.

“Did you throw her out?”

“Hell no.  She left.”

“Does she have any idea who’s it is?”

“Either mine or some little goon from her apartment complex.”

Oscar exhales again, with a low whistle.  “Can you get a paternity test this early?”

“No idea.  She hasn’t even been to a doctor yet.”

“I don’t know what to say.  Sorry to hear it, buddy.”

“Hey, I’m sorry my problems landed on your doorstep,” I say.  Oscar chuckles.

“No problem.”

“I’ll come by in a little bit and get her.  If I can walk.”

“What do you mean?  What’s going on with you?”

“Sher clocked me in the grapes last night.  Long story.  Can you just keep her there until I come?”

“You bet,” Oscar says.  “Take your time.  She’s not going anywhere.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

OSCAR LETS ME IN THE FRONT DOOR.  He’s got two mugs of coffee and hands me one.

“Figure you could use some,” he says.  I thank him and take it.

Hale emerges from the hall, wearing a robe and carrying her own cup.  I kind of brace for her to rush at me and claw my eyes out for letting Sher leave in the rain, but when she stops in front of me, her grin is sympathetic and kind.