4. Andrea #2
The whispers started almost immediately. Yesterday it was Cynthia Morrison in the cereal aisle at the grocery store. Two years on the hospital charity board together. She saw me and her whole face rearranged itself.
“Andrea.” Her voice pitched to carry three aisles over. “I’m surprised to see you out.”
“Cynthia. Hi.” My basket held crackers and ginger ale and one sad apple. “How’s the board?”
“The board is fine.” She looked me up and down, slow, letting me feel every inch of it. “We heard about you and that man. So disappointing. Kirk deserved better.”
“There is no man, Cynthia.”
“Of course, dear.” She patted my arm, and her rings were cold. “That’s what I’d say too.”
“Cynthia, listen to me. Whatever Ethel told you-”
“Ethel is devastated. That poor woman.” She was already turning away, already reaching for her phone, already composing the retelling. “Take care of yourself, Andrea. You look unwell.”
I stood in the cereal aisle for three full minutes after she left, gripping the cart handle, breathing through my teeth. The truth sounds like a lie when everyone’s already decided to believe the lie instead.
For the first three days after that, I couldn’t eat. Melissa brought me crackers and ginger ale and small, sad portions of foods that might stay down, and I picked at them while she hovered.
“You have to eat,” she said last night, setting a bowl of soup in front of me for the second time.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry. I said you have to eat.”
“Mel.”
“Andrea.” She pulled her chair around to my side of the table and wrapped both my hands in hers.
“I have watched you survive our mother’s funeral, two layoffs, and a near-divorce.
You ate through all of it. You fight through all of it.
That’s who you are. So pick up the spoon, because there is a very small person in there who did not sign up for a hunger strike. ”
I picked up the spoon.
She watched me eat the whole bowl, refilled it without asking, and then sat with her chin in her hand while I worked through the second one.
“There she is,” she said quietly, when I finished. “There’s my sister.”
The ultrasound photo lives in my pocket now.
It’s creased and soft with handling, the crack in the frame visible in the picture I took with my phone after Kirk dropped it.
Melissa offered to get me a new copy, but I can’t let this one go.
It’s the last thing Kirk and I looked at together, even if the looking ended in devastation.
“Andrea.” Melissa sits on the coffee table in front of me now, blocking my view of the ceiling. “You have a doctor’s appointment in an hour. Shower. Clothes. Car. Let’s go.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“I know. You’re going anyway.”
She pulls me up off the couch with more strength than her slim frame suggests, and for the next forty-five minutes, she manages me the way she’d manage a stubborn piece of furniture: into the shower, into clothes, into the car, into the waiting room of Dr. Halloran’s obstetric practice.
The office is full of pregnant women in various stages of radiance. Happy women with supportive partners, rubbing their bellies and flipping through parenting magazines. I sit in the corner with my arms wrapped around myself and try not to cry.
“Andrea Burke?” The nurse calls my name, and I follow her back to the examination room on autopilot.
Dr. Halloran is kind. She always has been. We picked her specifically because she treated me like a person, not a patient. She takes my vitals, asks the standard questions, and then pauses, studying my face.
“Andrea.” Her voice softens. “Your eyes are red. Have you been crying?”
The question breaks a dam loose in my chest. Before I can stop myself, the whole story spills out. Kirk. The photos. The texts. The accusation. The divorce papers. Ethel’s visit and Clarence at the market and the manufactured evidence that torched my marriage in a single morning.
Dr. Halloran listens without interrupting. When I finish, she hands me a box of tissues.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “This must be incredibly difficult, especially with the pregnancy adding stress.”
“I don’t know what to do.” I’m crying again, which seems to be my default state these days. “He won’t talk to me. He won’t listen. He thinks the baby isn’t his.”
“Is there someone I can call? To help explain-”
“He won’t believe me. He won’t believe anyone.”
“Then let me say one thing to you, and I want you to keep it somewhere safe.” Dr. Halloran pulls her stool closer, and her voice takes on the register she uses for delivering results.
“Charts don’t have feelings. Yours says seven weeks, and it says it with bloodwork and measurements and a heartbeat, and no rumor on earth can amend a chart.
When the day comes that dates matter, and it may, your daughter’s paperwork will testify for you.
Medicine is very boring, Andrea. Boring is on your side. ”
It’s the first time anyone has said daughter out loud. She catches my face.
“Too early to be certain,” she adds, with the smallest smile. “Call it clinical intuition.”
She squeezes my hand. “You need support right now, Andrea. This kind of stress isn’t good for you or the baby. Is there anyone else? Family? Friends?”
I think about my father, retired to Florida since Mom passed, who doesn’t even know yet that I’m pregnant, because how do you open that phone call? Hi Dad, you’re getting a grandchild, also my husband threw me out.
I made that call last night, finally, with Melissa holding my free hand.
It took three tries to get past hello. Dad went so quiet at the word grandchild that I thought the line had dropped, and then my father, seventy-three years old, deacon of a church he attends mostly for the coffee, never so much as jaywalked in his life, said a word about Ethel Graham I have never once heard him use, and then shouted “WHO ARE WE KILLING?” because he refuses to wear his hearing aid, and I shouted back “NO ONE YET, DAD,” and I laughed for the first time in a week, sitting on my sister’s kitchen floor, laughing and crying with the phone on speaker while my father mobilized eleven hundred miles away.
“You come here,” Dad said, before we hung up. “The second you need to. You and the baby. Your room is still your room.”
“I know, Dad.”
“And Andrea. Baby. Listen to me now.” His voice did the thing my mother’s used to do, steel under the sugar. “You did nothing wrong. Whatever that family says. Whatever this town says. You hold your head up. Burkes don’t bow.”
Burkes don’t bow. I think about the void where my support system used to be, and I understand exactly how thoroughly Ethel’s whisper campaign has isolated me here, in Kirk’s city, among Kirk’s people.
But underneath the void, older and deeper, the other net: Burkes don’t bow.
And then I think about Clarence.
Clarence, who was set up just like I was. Clarence, who has no idea he’s been used as a weapon against my marriage.
“Can I make a call?” I ask. “There’s someone who might be able to help.”
Dr. Halloran leaves me alone with the examination room phone. I dial Clarence’s number from the card he pressed into my hand at the market, and wait through three rings before he picks up.
“Hello?”
“Clarence. It’s Andrea. Andrea Burke.”
“Andrea! Hey, I’ve been trying to reach you. Did you change your number? And what is going on? My mother called me yesterday asking if I’d ‘ruined a marriage.’ My MOTHER, Andrea. She used air quotes. Over the phone. I could hear them.”
“I need to tell you what’s happening.” I take a breath. “And I need you to listen all the way through, because it’s going to sound insane.”
“I’m sitting down. Go.”
I tell him everything. The photos. The texts. Kirk’s accusation. The divorce.
“Wait.” His voice sharpens on the word. “Texts. What texts? I never texted you. We exchanged numbers a week and a half ago and you never even saved mine.”
“They came from my number, Clarence. My name. My - the way I write. Whoever made them studied me.”
“Made them. You’re saying your mother-in-law fabricated an entire text thread.”
“Talking about our affair. And our baby.”
“Our WHAT?”
“I’m pregnant. It’s Kirk’s. But the texts say-” My voice gives out. “The texts say otherwise.”
The silence on the line stretches so long I check that the call is still connected.
Then Clarence says the words that change everything.
“Andrea. I’m gay.”
The room tilts. I grab the edge of the examination table.
“What?”
“I’m gay. I’ve been with my boyfriend Daniel for three years.
We’re engaged. Our announcement ran in the Tribune six months ago, with a photo, Andrea, a very good photo, Daniel made us do three outfit changes.
” He isn’t laughing. His voice has gone hard and precise.
“And here’s the part you need to hear. I told your mother-in-law.
When she called to set up the ‘reunion,’ she asked if I was seeing anyone.
I told her about Daniel. I asked if he could come along to the market and she said no, it was a ‘girls’ thing.
’ She got very quiet, and then she said it was fine, she’d ‘figure it out.’”
“She knew.” The words come out of me as air, barely sound. “Before she took a single photo. She knew.”
“She knew any affair story was impossible, and she built it anyway.” A drawer slams on his end of the line. “Andrea, she didn’t just use you. She used me. My name is attached to this. My fiancé’s life is attached to this.”
“Clarence, I’m sorry, I never-”
“Don’t you apologize. Don’t you dare.” His breathing evens out, and when he speaks again, his voice has the flat calm of a man making a list. “Here’s what happens now. Daniel gets home at six. Daniel is very good at problems. You are a problem we are going to solve.”
“You don’t have to-”
“She weaponized my engagement to destroy your marriage. Yes, Andrea. We have to.”
I hang up and sit in the silence of the examination room, one hand pressed to my stomach.
Ethel knew. She knew, and she did it anyway.
And I’m going to make her answer for it.