Bar Down Baby!

Prologue

MAURY SAYS IT’S YOUR BABY!

With the sort of fake-it-till-you-make-it mentality all adults need to survive, I’d really convinced myself that we’d never meet again.

I thought the baby would come, and she would eat and poop and wail and sleep, and then she’d scoot around on her stomach before she’d start crawling, walking, putting together complex sentences, and eventually she would be old enough to understand that a lot of children have two parents, but she only has one.

She’d ask about it after starting kindergarten, maybe, and perhaps I’d pretend that the conception was immaculate.

Or I could say that she was cooked up in a lab, the sperm was donated, that as a barely employed twenty-five-year-old, I got pregnant by choice.

His number was written on a folded-up sticky note that I kept in my jacket pocket, but I wasn’t going to use it.

“Pleeeease text me,” it read, in handwriting that was half-cursive, half-all-caps, with two smiley faces and his cell, but I wouldn’t.

I couldn’t text him, because, well, how embarrassing for me.

Like, yeah, hey, this is Hannah, thanks for showing me around New York City, I still think about the kebabs we got at 2 a.m., I hope you’re well. BTW I am having your baby.

No.

In June, I peed on a stick, then peed on two more (would have peed on more after that, just to be thorough, but they are expensive).

Then I cried in a doctor’s office, went home and cried sitting down in the shower, and decided that I would call him.

I would call this abject stranger and tell him that I was having his baby and say that I already knew I wanted to keep it, and that didn’t mean he had to be in the kid’s life, but I just thought he should know.

I had his number dialed, but then again, maybe I should do it tomorrow, because by that point it was already late in New York. He was probably sleeping.

I did not call him the next day, nor the one after that, nor any of the ones after that, because what was I supposed to say?

It wasn’t really his fault I got pregnant—I said I was on the pill, which I was, but I didn’t realize you had to take it at the exact same hour every day.

I knew they told me to, but really? The exact same one hour every single day?

What sort of person has a schedule so rigid that they can be awake and available to take it at the same moment, seven days a week?

He even said, “Probably we should use a condom, yeah?” but I was living my best, seemingly invincible, life on the vacation of my dreams and I couldn’t control myself for twenty minutes, so now I was with child and his culpability felt low.

It didn’t matter. I would never see him again.

And then I saw him on the fucking TV, big as a god, sweaty and grinning in a Reebok commercial, slinging hockey pucks in a dramatically lit ice rink. I thumped my brother on the shoulder and pointed at the TV.

If his name wasn’t Barry, it wasn’t him. Just a doppelg?nger. It couldn’t be him; hockey players weren’t named Barry.

“Who is that guy?” I asked Jeremy.

It took a single cursory glance up from his phone to identify him: “Barry Wright. Plays for Columbus.”

Fuck.

So then I really couldn’t tell him. Because Barry Wright is a professional hockey player and now if I told him, he would think I was trying to baby trap him, which I was not.

And he probably has fancy professional sports lawyers who could take me for all I’m worth, and the baby too, and no, just no.

I wouldn’t tell him.

Mom said I really needed to ask my mystery man what sort of health conditions run in his family, but I couldn’t think of a way to do this without also telling him that there was a baby and that baby was his, so I didn’t. I wouldn’t.

He would live his life in the big city, doing his sport thing, until, probably five years from now, he’d marry this absolute bombshell of a woman—a model with long blonde hair and perfect skin—who knows how to navigate the subways without issue and doesn’t look like a moist mess in the summer months.

And I would live mine in a much smaller city across the country, and the baby—a girl, I’d just found out—would never have a dad, and I’d work extra hard to make sure she didn’t have a complex about that.

I think I really believed that this was going to happen.