Chapter 3 #2
Each possible phone call made me feel itchy to think about.
At first, I thought he might have told me to get rid of it.
It would have been simplest if I did, but I didn’t want to.
After I found out he was basically famous to whatever subset of the world cares about professional hockey in Ohio, I feared he’d call me a liar.
Like I was an opportunistic scammer or something.
This concept killed me the most. In the first scenario, I could write him off as an asshole, but in the scenario where he believed I was a gold-digging baby trapper, this growing fetus that had quickly become so special to me would be seen as a shallow means to an end.
I should’ve called him anyway, just to tell him it was happening and maybe to warn him not to have sex with strangers without a condom.
I did momentarily consider giving the baby up for adoption, since lots of people much more stable than me needed babies and couldn’t have them.
But every time I thought of it, my stomach turned, from more than just the all-day sickness I was experiencing.
I imagined needing to keep tabs on her, friending the parents on Facebook to see posts of my kid growing older, learning to walk, dancing to music for the first time, going through puberty, choosing bad haircuts.
It made me feel desperately sad, and like I was already missing out on her milestones.
I didn’t know what to do, and I kept not knowing for weeks, and then two months, and then at the four-month ultrasound I saw the baby and it had a nose and lips and these little fists and the doctors and nurses all called me Mom and told me she was a girl, and my sister was crying and so was I but I didn’t know why because I’d never really wanted to be a mother before and then suddenly I did. I already was.
I wanted to hold those little hands and count fingers and toes and watch her grow up and do questionable things with her hair, watch the same movies five hundred times, and teach her about dating and loving herself, and I didn’t want to watch all of it through pictures on Facebook.
I wanted to do it and show her and myself and my whole family that I could.
And I knew if I called Barry, it would be to say I was keeping the baby. But I couldn’t expect anything of him because that had been my call, not his.
Before Barry could tell me what he would have said if I had called, Josie was there with our plates, placing two jalapeno cheeseburgers (extra fries) between us and a bottle of ketchup from under her arm. Barry looked at his plate and then mine and said, “Oh.”
“Enjoy,” Josie said with a wink to Barry as she walked away.
I squeezed ketchup all over the fries and started eating, because we may be having the most gut-wrenching conversation possible, but I also hadn’t eaten in hours and was ravenous.
After hesitating for a moment, probably asking himself if he was really going to eat fried food before 7:30 a.m. while on a strict athlete protein diet or whatever, Barry reached for a fry of his own.
“What sort of things have you been craving?” he asked.
This was as good a subject change as any. I supposed he wouldn’t be telling me what he would’ve said if I called (probably because it wouldn’t have been “I am thrilled about this news and I trust your judgment! Let me know how I can help!”), and that was fine.
“Pickled things, jalapenos, pickled jalapenos, red meat but only before the afternoon”—I swore that something happened after sunset that made my body revolt against all meat—“candy, basically all the things I liked before, but now nobody looks at me funny when I eat them for breakfast.”
“Hm,” Barry agreed before picking up the burger and taking a big bite.
I couldn’t help but smile, probably because I was delusional and hormonal, letting myself imagine for a fraction of a second that this is what it would be like if we were actually together and not two strangers connected now by an unborn baby.
“I can sort of see why you didn’t call when you found out,” Barry said after a couple minutes of quiet eating. “But I still don’t know why you didn’t text before that. After you left.”
I thought about lying. I could say I lost his number, but the scrap of paper was in my pocket like a living totem, which I folded and unfolded every time I put my hand inside.
Plus, I used the Harvey Janitorial Instagram to look at his public page every week since finding out his last name, waiting for him to post that he had a girlfriend.
It would’ve been easy to message him there if I lost his number.
I almost texted him when I was waiting at the airport.
I wanted to send every thought I had to him and have him send every thought he had back.
I wanted us to talk every moment of every day, totally consumed with one another, chatting on FaceTime, or a quick phone call while one of us was getting ready for work.
He’d take a trip to Utah, and I’d go visit while we got to know each other better and then one of us would move—me, I hoped, because as I said, New York with Barry was all magic all the time.
I wanted to text him, but every time I considered it, I thought about how sweet he was and how my fantasy was just that.
In actuality, I’d probably break up with him before either of us could even think about moving.
It was what I always did, because part of me still believed I would grow up and get divorced, because that’s what grown-ups did.
That’s what they still do, people get divorced all the time.
It would be easier to avoid it all. He could find someone who was more thoughtful and ready to commit to him like his ex wasn’t, and they would be together forever, happily, blissfully, amen.
“I thought that maybe you liked me,” he admitted, and avoided my eyes while he spoke. His hurt made him look young and vulnerable. It wrecked me.
“I did,” I said, instead of I do. “But my life was a total shit show, and I lived all the way across the country and thought it might be better for everyone”—or, okay, just him—“if I let you remember me as a very cool, funny, beautiful woman you met one night in New York.”
That would be a better memory than this. Now I could never be the fun and mysterious partial stranger he would always wonder about; I was the withholding liar afraid of commitment who was carrying his child.
“You seem to be doing a lot of thinking for me,” he muttered. Josie still watched us from the counter, not even pretending she wasn’t, and now Marcus was too, staring out the kitchen window. I glared at them both until they turned and pretended to work.
“I didn’t know you would get traded to Utah of all places,” I said.
“Yeah, me either.” Barry took another long drink of coffee, this time draining the cup. After the last gulp, though, he started coughing, staring at the bottom of his mug.
“Too much sugar?” I asked.
Barry’s face twisted into some sort of wry amusement before he put the mug on the table and slid it over to me. I picked it up and peered inside only to find “You’re going to be a grandma!” in a loopy scrawl on the bottom.
I heaved a big sigh before turning my mug around so he could see the bubbly font: “Does this mug make me look pregnant?” And he laughed aloud, a mapley sound that surprised us both.
“I think the burger for breakfast made you look more pregnant than the mug,” Barry said.