Full of Grace (22 page)

“Of him?” Gina snorts.  “Already?  Now that I can understand.  My little brother can wear a girl thin.  Have a seat, Sher.”

Sher slides in and I bookend her, in case she thinks of bolting.  She dumps her purse between us, to stop our legs from touching.

“Okay, so don’t make me get out my crystal ball,” Gina says.  “What’s the matter this morning?”

And Sher instantly caves to Gina’s comforting powers and psychic ability.

“You probably know everything, right?  The baby might not be his,” Sher begins and the tears well up as her lips pull down into a miserable frown.  Then, she lets loose with a stream of confessions that could blow Gina’s hair back if my sister weren’t the absolute Queen of Keeping It Cool.  “We were talking about what will happen if the baby isn’t his, but he doesn’t know the answer.  I don’t blame him.  I don’t!  But I never asked him to stick around! I was going to get rid of it.  This was a surprise to me too!  It wasn’t like I was trying to trap him.  I didn’t think we’d be anything but a one-time thing.  I was just looking to dump my virginity because I was lonely and Hale was gone and he was amazing…if you’ve ever seen him in a tux, you know what I mean.  I
knew
we weren’t meant to be together.  He’s…you know…
look at him! 
He felt so guilty and I didn’t want him to feel guilty.  I just wanted one good night, you know?  A good night, once in my life, because all I ever get are Saturday nights with the kids, and I love them, but I never even got to be a teenager.  He’s tried, he’s really tried to do some nice things, and it’s not like that’s his fault—but I tried to fix all of this and he didn’t want me to and now I’m stuck and…” Sher finally takes a breath and bursts into tears.  Other customers are trying not to be obvious as they stare at us, over their hot dogs and plates of fries.

Gina leans over and pulls a wad of napkins from the metal holder.  She reaches across the table and hands them to Sher, who slumps, embarrassed and weeping, in the corner of the booth.  When the waitress comes to the table, I order water for all of us, plus a Coke for Gina. 

Then, I’m useless.

I sit with my hands folded on the table in front of me, convicted, and hoping to God that Gina can help sort this out.  Sher dabs her eyes and tries to stop sobbing.  The gagging snorts have people at other tables glancing over, but I return glares that eventually give us as much privacy as we can have, in the middle of a semi-full restaurant.

Gina reaches over the table and puts her hand over Sher’s.

“Landon’s got a penis, honey,” she explains.  “It puts him at a disadvantage when it comes to sensitivity.”

“What?” I gape.  This is my sister, who’s supposed to be helping me, and on my side.

“It’s true.  You have a penis,”  Gina says.  I lift and drop my hands on the table, helpless.

“Yeah, but I’m sensitive!”

“I’m not saying it’s your fault that you’re limited,” Gina reasons.  “You know this.  I’ve told you before.”

“You are
really
not helping.”  I run my hand down my face.

“Shush,” Gina says. “Just sit there and look pretty while we talk.  Sher, if you have help, do you want to have the baby?”

Blotting off her tears with a fistful of napkins, Sher nods behind the white bloom. “I think so.”

“Then that’s your life.  That’s the thrill,
the living
that you’re after.  The other stuff?  You’re not missing out on anything.  Do you really need to date a bunch of morons?  Isn’t the point of dating to find the right one anyway?  And if you find the right one, couldn’t the memories you make together be better than bumbling around, having adventures alone?”

“I didn’t think about it like that.” Sher sniffles.  Gina sits back on her side of the booth, giving Sher a warm grin.

“Nothing’s ever guaranteed, but you never know.”  Gina moves her gaze, fixing me with a long stare.  “Maybe you two should give it a try.  It might be worth it.”

Gina just throws it on the table like that, right out there, in the open.  Like Sher and I should just jump into marriage, babies, and planning our 50
anniversary party. Gina stares as Sher and I both squirm on our side of the booth.  It’s a damn good thing that the waitress comes back with our food.

“The chili cheese fries are mine, darlin’,” Gina says, giving the waitress an up-and-down glance and flashing the girl a smile.  “Everything else is for the happy couple.”

***

Things are a little weird the rest of the weekend. I think Gina nailed it, but it also put both Sher and me on the spot.  It’s time to make decisions about what we’re going to do next, besides have a baby together. It’s a pile of elephants in the room.  And while I’m aware of the pile that seems to trumpet with every discussion we have, it also seems to be standing on Sher’s giggle button. She absolutely loses control, giggling and turning crimson at anything I say to her.  I’m not really sure why she’s so embarrassed and edgy around me all of a sudden.

By Monday morning, she’s ratcheted up her giggle to a decimal that could shatter glass.  Most of her responses to me delete words altogether and substitute giggles, till she chokes on them.  We brush elbows in the car and her skin raises up in a garden of goose bumps.  Her blush is so frequent, she looks sunburned most of the time.

“Is something wrong?” I finally ask on Monday night.  She just giggles, shaking her head.

On Tuesday, I try a different question.  “Why are you so giggly?”  But all I get is more giggling, to the point that I want to rip her giggler right out.

Wednesday, there is no dinner wafting down the stairs when I come home, but Sher actually meets me at the door with a twitchy smile.  And a bucket full of giggles.

I don’t know how much longer I can handle it.  After I’ve changed out of my work clothes, I decide to get down to it with her.  I ask questions, and wait for the giggling to subside after each, but keep on task.  The smile eventually falls off my lips and I ask with a straight, sober face, “What is going on with you, Sher?  What’s changed?”

“Changed?” she manages to ask between giggles.  She chokes, then goes into spasms of coughs.  I think it almost kills her, but I still wait for a real answer.  But when she recovers, she just giggles again.

“Sher,” I say.  “Would you stop giggling and talk to me?”

She burbles up a few more giggles, but then she goes silent.  It’s a silence I haven’t heard in days, besides when she’s sleeping.

“What’s going on with you?” I ask again.

“There’s something I did,” she says.  She begins to giggle again, but this time her brow collapses half way through and her eyes fill.

Oh no.  This is bad.  I can feel it in the pit of my stomach.  I wait for her to tell me that she’s been screwing Trent in the afternoons, while I’m at work.  That she’s been using intravenous drugs.  That she’s not answering the phone because she can’t stand the sound of my voice anymore.  I wait for the other shoe to drop, right on my gut.

“Tell me,” I finally say.

“I did something with Oscar,” she says.  The skin around my eyes tighten. 
What the hell is she talking about?

“What did you do with Oscar?”

“He helped me.”  The damn giggle.

“Stop,” I growl.  “Tell me.  What did Oscar help you do?” 

“I went to the clinic,” she says.  I stumble backward and sit on the couch.  The blood drops into my feet, except for the stuff that makes my ears pound.  It can’t be true.  My best friend wouldn’t have helped her get rid of what might be my kid.  He just wouldn’t.  But she’s saying he did, and I’m going to heave all over the floor.

Sher brings a Manilla envelope from off the kitchen counter.  Long and wide, business-like, it’s the size of a document.  Sher’s name is written at the top.  She sits down beside me, her thigh running along the edge of mine, and if I wasn’t paralyzed by what she just said, I’d get the hell away from her.  She holds the envelope out to me, reaching across her knee to mine.  She balances it there.

“He helped me pay for the paternity test,” she says, followed with her tight-rope giggle.  “Well, he paid for the whole thing.  I told him it’s only a loan, I’m going to pay him back.  But I told Hale, and she talked to Oscar, and he didn’t want to get into our business, but I told him it’s important.  If this isn’t your baby, you’re off the…” she pauses, sucking in her top lip before she carefully rephrases it.  “You can make a real choice.  You don’t have to raise someone else’s kid, not knowing.”

Well, that explains why Oscar kept dodging my calls.

She presses the envelope at me, jabbing the corner of it into the top of my hand. 

“Take it,” she says.  “I want you to know.”

“Just tell me what it says,” I say, searching her face and looking for clues that will help prepare me for the written answer.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t look by myself,” she says.  Her giggle faints at the end and her eyes droop.  “I’m scared of what it will say.”

“Me too.”  I lift my head.  “Why are you scared?”

Sher presses the envelope against my hand a little harder and I take it this time.  Her eyes fill up again.  So much crying.  Never her fault.  And now that I’ve seen her laugh…when she cries, it ruins things in my heart.

“Because I think I’m falling in love with you. Idiot.”  She grins as one of the tears runs down her cheek.  She rubs it away roughly with the heel of her hand.  “If it’s got to be anyone’s…I want it to be yours so bad.  So we have to know, before this gets any more out of hand than it already is.”

I rub the manila between my fingers.  It’s got a peach-fuzz feel to it.  The answer to everything is right here, in my hands.  There’s nothing between knowing and not knowing, besides a brown paper pocket.

“What if the results say I’m not the father?” I ask her.

“What do you think?” she says with a sad smile.  “Then it’s over.  We go our separate ways.”

“That’s what you’d do?  It’d be that easy for you?”

“Of course it wouldn’t be easy.  It’d be for the best.”

“How is that best?”

“Just open it, Landon.  Please.  I can’t stand it anymore.”

“You’d really leave?”  I ask and she nods.  “You’re saying you’d go get an abortion after all?”

She looks away, rubs the tears off her chin.  “Probably.  It’d be for the best, Landon.  Nobody should have Trent for a dad.  All the kid’s life, it’d be hanging over their head that they have a loser father.  I told you, I am not going to be my mom and I don’t want my kid to have to be me.”

I stand up.  She sniffles.  I walk into the kitchen and fire up the burner on the stove.

Sher rushes in, just as the flames curl the envelope and rise up out of the sink.

“What the hell are you doing?” she shrieks.  I stand in her way, so she can’t turn on the faucet.

“It would be such a mistake, Sher, to deprive the world of another you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

“HE BURNT THE DAMN RESULTS!” Sher howls into her phone.  This wasn’t the way I expected it would go.  I thought I’d be the knight in armor.  I thought she would be swept up in the fact that I’d made up my mind, and she’d be relieved.  Excited.  Elated, even.  Hell, I thought she’d jump into my arms and we’d make love all night long, and maybe have one of the best nights of our lives.

But no.

Instead, Sher’s curled up on my bed, like the last, miserable shrimp at a Christmas party, crying to Hale in the phone.  I lean over and finally pull the phone from her hand.

“Hale,” I say, as calmly as I can,  “can Sher talk to you tomorrow?”

“Sure, if that’s what she…”  Hale says and I hang up on her.  I toss the phone down on my bedside table and sit at the edge of the mattress.  “Hale says she’ll talk to you tomorrow.  You need to talk to me right now.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.  You shouldn’t have burned those,” Sher says.  She sits up, scooting toward the head of the bed as she wipes her nose with her palm.  She’s glaring at me.  “You’re not the only one that needed to know, Landon.  I need to know too!”

I feel like a fool for trying to be heroic.  Now, I’m just a schmuck sitting on a bed with a hysterical girl who wants to kill me.

“I thought you’d want to be with me, no matter what,”  I tell her.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with a baby!” she fires back.  “I have to know who the father is!  You’re always saying you have the right to make a decision—well so do I!  Trent made his!  If this is not your baby, Landon, then it’s all up to me.  Me!  Not you.”

“What if I want it, even if it’s not mine?”

“You don’t get to make that call,” she says. “Nobody gets to choose their father.  If the kid is Trent’s, it won’t matter how many ball games or dance lessons you do with the kid, it’ll still be Trent’s kid, don’t you get that?  And nothing’s going to change the fucked up DNA in Trent’s family.”

“I’ll take that chance,” I tell her.

“But I won’t!” Sher says, the tears streaming.  “Trent’s dad is a crack addict, Landon.  His mom is mentally disturbed.  I’m not making this up.  She’s got serious problems.  Trent’s older brother got sent to the psych ward and his little sister is a pathological liar.  And you’ve met Trent!”

“If he’s so messed up, why did you ever sleep with him?”

“I don’t know,” she howls again, layering her arms on her knees and burying her face.  “I knew he was crazy, but I thought for a minute…I don’t know…that maybe he wouldn’t be crazy
to me.
  That he would use his craziness to protect me against everything else, not use it against me.  I know it was stupid.  It’s not like I thought it through.  I felt like crap and he said something nice and I just said okay. It was over in two minutes and it was awful.  It was just a huge mistake!

“Now I think it’s not fair to bring a baby into the world, if it’s whole being is based on two minutes of stupid, rotten sex with a dumb ass guy.  But it’s not fair either to abort a baby that could have had an awesome dad. And you’re so nice to me, and saying you’ll love it, even if it’s not yours, but it’s not just about how much you would love it, Landon.  I
had
a Trent for a father.  Some people think it doesn’t matter, that abortion is so damn cruel, but living through what some people do to you can be way worse.  I know.  I’ve had nineteen years of worse.”