Girlfriends (Patrick Sanchez) (30 page)

Linda smiled and ignored the question. She didn’t want to say that she really didn’t want either one.

“I know this is unexpected and probably much more than you bargained for,” Rosa said. “If I had known things with Renée were going to go so sour, I would never have gone through with it. But I’m carrying a child now, who I love with all my heart. I know we haven’t known each other very long, but I hope you will give us a chance.”

Linda looked at Rosa. Damn it, she thought. Why did you have to be pregnant? “Rosa, I have to admit, this is a lot to take in. Being honest, I’m not sure how I feel about the whole thing, but you’re not going to get rid of me that easily. Let’s just take it one day at a time and see how it goes,” Linda said just as the doctor called them back to the examining room.

Rosa introduced Linda to her doctor, and they were shown to a large examining room. The doctor asked Rosa to get changed, said he would be back in a few minutes, and closed the door behind him. As they waited for the doctor to come back, Linda looked around her—at the sterility of the environment, at the box of latex gloves on the counter, at Rosa, sitting on the examining table in a paper gown. If someone had told her a few months earlier that she would be accompanying her girlfriend to her first ultrasound, Linda would have told them they were crazy.

The doctor knocked at the door.

“Come in,” Rosa said.

“Are you ready?” the doctor said as he started to maneuver the ultrasound equipment.

“You bet. Much longer and I might burst,” Rosa said. She had had to drink some sort of glucose solution and keep a full bladder for the test.

The doctor shifted Rosa’s gown and squeezed some rather cold gel onto Rosa’s slightly protruding belly. He pressed a few buttons on the machine and started rolling what looked like a telephone receiver over Rosa’s abdomen.

“Oh, my God!” Rosa exclaimed. “There it is.”

Linda thought she saw the baby on the monitor as well. It was wavy and blurry, but she could see a tiny little baby. Her mouth dropped, then curved in a little smile. She stared at the monitor, trying to get a clearer view of the baby, and then looked at Rosa, whose eyes were starting to water. There was no turning back now. Like it or not, Linda was going to be part of this pregnancy.

It’s a Small World After All

A
fter dropping off Mr. Borkourski’s dog, Gina and Shirley began their walk to dinner. That was one of the best parts of living in the Dupont Circle area in the summer. There was a plethora of restaurants with outdoor seating. Gina and Shirley tried to take full advantage of the season and ate out a lot during the summer. Linda and Peter weren’t big on eating outside. Linda didn’t like the heat, and Peter, for reasons no one understood, somehow found eating outside unsanitary. But Gina and Shirley loved to sit outside and have a pitcher of beer or margaritas. Sometimes they barely talked. They just enjoyed their food and people-watched. Some of the restaurants even let Gomez sit on the patio with them.

When they finally reached their destination, Trio’s on 17
^th
Street, they nabbed a table on the patio and didn’t bother looking at the menu. Trio’s was basically a pizza place/ diner—nothing fancy, but it had outdoor seating. It was also fairly cheap, and since Gina usually picked up the check when she and Shirley went to dinner, Gina tried to choose reasonably priced restaurants for their outings. They ordered a pizza and a couple of beers and watched the crowd stroll by.

The stretch of 17
^th
Street where they were having dinner was one of the major hubs of restaurants and bars in D.C., and Trio’s had prime seating along the busy sidewalk to accommodate the sport of people-watching.

“So, how are things on the roommate front?” Gina inquired.

“Well, since you made me kick Sammy out, I haven’t had any luck finding a new one.”

“Why don’t you run an ad in the
City Paper?
I think it’s pretty cheap.”

“No, I don’t think so. I have another idea.”

“Oh?”

“A friend of mine at work mentioned this foster child program to me.”

“What?”

“Yeah. She said if you take in a foster child, you get six hundred dollars a month. Man, what I could do with that.”

“Oh, Shirley, please tell me you’re joking.”

“No. How hard can it be? I have the extra room. The kid can sleep in there. And think about it. I get six hundred dollars a month. How much can a kid eat? I figure I spend a couple hundred on food and clothes and stuff for the kid, and then I can do whatever I want with the rest. You think they’d let me have two or three? How many do you think I can fit in that room?”

“Shirley, you can’t take a kid in for the money. That’s not what it’s about.”

“Oh, please, Gina. I’d be nice to the kid.”

“Shirley, your life is very erratic and unpredictable. You can’t take on a child.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

“Oh, Lord, I hope not,” Gina said, letting it go at that. She would have tried harder to talk Shirley out of it if she thought there was a chance in hell of Shirley actually getting approved to take in a foster child. Although, with the current state of the District’s government, anything was possible.

“So what is this plan you and Peter were talking about when I came in earlier?” Shirley asked, changing the subject.

“This colleague at his job reported him for surfing the Web too much. Her name was Cameron or something like that.”

“What’s wrong with surfing the Web?”

“I’m not sure what the whole story was, but he was visiting sites he shouldn’t have on company time.”

“Like porn sites?”

“Actually, he didn’t say. Anyway, the whole ruckus caused him to lose a promotion he was in line for, so he really has it in for this woman.”

“So, how do you fit into all of this?”

“I ran into an old high school classmate a while back. Her name’s Annie Harrison, and she’s really into computers and graphics and such, so I had this idea . . .”

Before Gina could finish, she caught sight of a short, fat man walking along 17th Street, headed straight for them.

Gina gasped and cleared her throat. “I’m going to run to the bathroom. I’ll be right back,” Gina said, abruptly getting up from the table.

“Okay.”

As Gina lunged for the doorway, she heard Shirley’s voice behind her, talking to the rotund little man.

“Griffin? Is that you? God! It’s been forever,” Shirley called over the patio railing.

“Shirley Perry. Aren’t you looking fine.”

“You know it.”

Gina’s heart pounded wildly as she stood just barely inside the doorway and continued to listen to their conversation. How on earth did Shirley know Griffin?

“How are you?” he asked Shirley.

“I’m hanging in there. You? Still in the business?”

“Oh, yes. You know, you do something for so long, you get pigeonholed into it.”

“Not me. I don’t get pigeonholed into anything.”

“Well, glad to hear it, Shirley. Listen, it was great to see you again. I’m actually in a bit of a hurry. Got to run.”

“Okay. Nice to see you. Keep that chin up.”

As Griffin continued down the sidewalk, Gina came back to the table.

“Who was that you were talking to?” Gina asked, feeling flushed.

“Just some guy I used to work with.”

“Work with?” Gina said sharply, praying to God that Shirley wouldn’t tell her that she used to act in porn movies and slept with Griffin. She certainly wouldn’t put it past Shirley.

“I worked at this sleazy bookstore years ago, and he worked there too.”

“Doing what?”

“Me? I worked the counter and waited on customers. Griffin, well, he was an actor of sorts.”

“An actor?” Gina asked, relieved that Shirley had only worked the counter.

“He shot porn movies actually. They had a studio in the back of the store.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. He used to be really popular in the porn world. He might still be for all I know.”

“Why? I caught a glimpse of him. He’s not very attractive.”

“That’s why he’s perfect. They make porno movies to please men, not women, Gina. Guys love it when they turn on a porno flick and there’s some nasty fat guy getting it on with a hot chick. I guess they figure if someone like Griffin can get the girls, then there’s hope for them.”

“Interesting, I don’t remember you working at a sleazy bookstore?”

“It was years ago, and I didn’t stay very long. After I had been there for a while, they wanted me to start getting Griffin
ready
for his performances, if you know what I mean. You know, make sure everything was
up
and running. I passed on that little duty. Right before I left they got this woman—Brenda I think her name was—to man the counter and be Griffin’s fluffer or poofer or whatever they call it.”

“Is there anything you haven’t done, Shirley?”

“If there is, I’m working on it.”

“So what do people in the porn industry tell others they do for a living?”

“I don’t know. Most of them were pretty open about it—even proud. Although I remember Griffin used to tell his mother he worked for the Public Broadcasting System.”

“PBS?”

“He said he produced documentaries, which wasn’t actually a lie, I guess.”

“He sounds like quite a character. Well, at least you didn’t sleep with him. You didn’t. Did you?” Gina inquired, hoping to sound like she was just asking a casual question.

“Sleep with him? Gina, you saw him. He’s sweet, but come on. Who’d be pathetic enough to sleep with his fat ass?”

“I don’t know, Shirley,” Gina said, slightly shaking her head at the whole situation. Not only did she, in a drunken stupor, screw a porn star, but he ended up being an acquaintance of her mother’s. Oh, well, what was done was done, and Gina just needed to move on. She was just thankful that Griffin had used a condom when she slept with him.

Oh, my God! He did use a condom—didn’t he? Gina thought. She was so drunk that night, and had tried so hard to put the experience out of her mind, she honestly couldn’t remember.

Trying to Look Busy

I
t was nearly noon, and Gina was dead tired and trying to stay focused on her work. She hadn’t slept well at all the night before. She kept up a decent front through dinner with Shirley, but when she got home she began a full-fledged panic session. She sat on the sofa with Gomez curled up next to her, trying to replay that awful night with Griffin. She went over the evening step by step in her head—meeting Griffin at the bar, running into him again in the hallway, sitting with him on the sofa, moving into the bedroom.... As she reviewed the night, she could feel the emotions from that evening creeping up on her—the disgust she felt with Griffin on top of her, just wanting him off her and out of her apartment but not having the guts to say so until it was too late. She shuddered as she remembered crying in the bathroom—how she looked in the bathroom mirror with tears streaming down her face. If her life had ever hit rock bottom, that night was it.

As she sat at her desk, trying to look busy, she again traced the evening with Griffin but, as hard as she tried to remember, she just couldn’t recall if he had used a condom. The thought petrified her. He was an X-rated movie star, for heaven’s sake. Lord knows what kind of diseases he might be carrying.

She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t questioned it before, but she never really worried about things like sexually transmitted diseases in the past. She had always been careful, and subconsciously she must have just assumed they had used protection. Up until the Griffin incident, she could honestly say she had always been careful. Even after she and Peter had been dating for quite a while they still used protection, actually more at Peter’s insistence than hers. Peter always
always always
used condoms.

Gina found it impossible to concentrate on work. She knew she needed to see a doctor and have some tests run just to make sure she was okay. At least she knew she wasn’t pregnant.

It was so frustrating for her. The night with Griffin was a couple of months earlier, and she was drunker that night than she’d been in years. Damn! Why couldn’t she remember?

She couldn’t believe it. How did it happen? She took it seriously when they lectured about reproductive health in high school and college. She read the articles in women’s magazines and was constantly passing them on to Shirley. She even regularly bought Shirley condoms and insisted that she use them. If she was worried about anyone getting a sexually transmitted disease, it was Shirley, not herself.

Gina kept rearranging papers and clicking on her mouse in an effort to look busy while she had only one thing on her mind. She thought about going in the bathroom and sitting in one of the stalls to think. But the last time she went in there, someone hadn’t flushed the toilet after using it, and Gina didn’t feel like running into that again.

Oh, just what I need, Gina thought to herself as she watched Tammy come through the bank entrance with a stroller. Tammy had been out on maternity leave for several weeks and was due to start back in another day or two. As Tammy wheeled her infant through the lobby, Gina’s first instinct was to flee to the back room. She hated when new mothers brought their stupid babies into work to show them off. Gina was about to get up from her desk, when Tammy called to her.

“Gina. Hey. Come see my little angel.”

Gina forced a smile and walked over toward Tammy and the baby.

“What do you think, Gina?” Tammy asked, eyeing her baby, who looked like a wrinkled alien with a big head.

Hmmm . . . add horns and a tail and you’ve got Satan. “Oh, he’s so precious.”

“She’s
a girl,” Tammy said.

“Oh, I’m sorry.
She’s
adorable. You’re so lucky,” Gina said before adding, “Listen, I’ve got to make a phone call. I’m glad you stopped by. It was nice to meet the little one,” Gina fibbed. She had bigger things on her mind than a newborn with drool hanging off his chin—her chin.