Chapter 3
DOES THIS MUG MAKE ME LOOK PREGNANT?
I barely heard the tinny bell above the door when Barry and I entered the diner, our cheeks bright pink from walking the short distance from the practice facility to the restaurant a couple of blocks away.
Barry insisted on driving us, but I insisted on walking and made him promise no questions until we got there. It was a frigid, quiet walk.
“Morning, Hannah,” Josie said without even turning around from the coffee machine on the back counter.
Barry looked like he thought he ought to look concerned.
“How’d you know it was me?” I asked.
“Didn’t,” she said. “I called the last three people Hannah, too, just hoping.” When she finally did turn around, she did a double take, seeing me standing stiffly next to Barry. “Are you…Barry Wright?”
“I am.” He gave a soft smile. “Just got traded.”
“I saw that. Welcome. Play good, yeah?” Josie said, almost like a warning. I, for one, was astonished that she knew who he was. How many people watched Columbus hockey?
“Will do. Good to meet you.”
Josie’s brows ducked over her eyes, looking between us. She held up two fingers and I nodded.
“Sit wherever you like.” Josie offered Barry a smile.
I led Barry to the farthest booth, my favorite one.
The sun always hit it first and it was so warm through the window.
I’d been coming here a couple times a week since I started cleaning the practice facility, but even more frequently since I found out I was pregnant.
The food was cheap and hot and delicious, plus Josie was a friend from college, and her cousin Marcus in the back was too.
Josie’s mom owned the diner, inherited from her grandma, and maybe it was working for beloved family businesses that bonded us initially.
Marcus asked me on a date a few months before, but kindly rescinded the invitation when I told him I was with child. It was for the best.
Barry settled across from me in the booth, his knees just bumping mine under the table.
I forgot how long his legs were, just ridiculously so, this tower of a man.
I was tall enough, the second tallest in my family after Kate, who could moonlight as a model if she wanted, but Barry was the tallest person I’d ever met.
How tall was the baby going to be? Would she come out tall? Is that how extraordinarily tall people start? Tall from birth?
“How tall are you?” I asked.
“Uh, six-five.”
“Hm.”
“So—”
“No questions until we order,” I said. “Please?”
“Sure,” Barry agreed and looked down at the plastic menu in front of him.
It was Barry’s first day practicing with the team, and he said he’d decided to get there early to get a lay of the land and work out a bit.
Surely wasn’t in his plan to end up in a shoebox of a place downtown, but he said he had an hour before he had to be back.
Hanging from the ceiling were a bunch of little paper turkey decorations strung up with fishing line, which had recently been switched from pumpkins and would soon switch to Christmas trees.
The mugs here were all mismatched, collected and picked up from local estate sales and Goodwills over the years.
Josie usually brought me the “Don’t Talk To Me Until I’ve Had THIS” mug, or the neon green “Ask if this is decaf & I’ll cut you” one.
I thought of the last breakfast Barry and I shared, huddled over eggs at a little table in his brother’s New York apartment before I had to rush back to my hotel and check out.
The AC wasn’t great, so the windows were open and two standing fans rotated across the space, flitting morning air across our skin.
Barry hummed while he cooked, and I said something along the lines of what the hell do you need to have muscles like this for? He’d tipped his head back and laughed.
Hockey. Professional hockey. God, why hadn’t I thought to ask him if he was an athlete? He’d told me he played hockey, but I thought he just meant it was the thing he did as a kid that wasn’t school. The concept hadn’t occurred to me that he’d made a career out of it.
“Same as usual?” Josie asked. Barry and I both cleared our throats, very casual. I hadn’t realized she’d walked over to the table or exactly how long she’d been standing there before speaking.
“Yeah,” I said, and scooted the mug of coffee she poured closer to me.
This one was new, pale pink with “Does this mug make me look pregnant?” on one side and someone’s 2015 due date on the other.
I turned the mug so he couldn’t see the front.
Barry’s looked to be one of the only plain white mugs in the establishment.
Josie turned to Barry, “What would you like?”
“Whatever she’s having is great,” Barry said.
Josie paused at this, as did I. What kind of trust do you have to have in a person to blindly order their usual breakfast order?
Barry didn’t seem to notice the deliberation as he tore what looked like five packets of sugar over his coffee cup.
“And maybe a glass of milk?” Barry asked after another moment.
“Sure thing,” Josie said. I watched her retreat to the kitchen, wishing that the ordering process had taken twice as long as it had, maybe even longer.
I considered telling him he couldn’t ask questions until the food came out, but one man can probably have only so much patience.
I took off my coat because my armpits were wet, but my arms were immediately cold so I put it back on. I repeated this a couple of times before settling on spreading the jacket across my legs like a blanket. Barry waited.
I slid my palms over my arms. “Okay, go ahead.”
Barry took a sip of his coffee, which I thought to be roughly seventy percent sugar, before speaking. “When did you find out?”
“End of June,” I said. “There was a lot of vomiting.”
Barry said nothing, just worked something over in his brain while he watched me across the table. I could hardly meet his eyes.
“June,” he said.
“I missed a period in May, but I didn’t think anything of it because my periods are always irregular, and sometimes I get my birth control in three-month supplies and take new pills right through the off weeks, which I did.
” I took a quick sip of coffee, which burnt my tongue, but just a little.
“I kept getting sick and for a few days I thought it was food poisoning, but my sister told me to go buy a pregnancy test, so I did and I was.”
“June,” he said again.
“Yeah.”
Kate had been lovely and supportive about it all, going to my doctor’s appointments with me and asking the questions that I didn’t know to ask.
She was the Type A among us and had to make sure I was doing pregnancy right, researching the best vitamins for me to take, what lotions I needed to use, what I should and shouldn’t be eating every day.
She even tried to make me an exercise program for the entire pregnancy, but I told her not to bother since I barely exercised before, I wasn’t about to start now.
I did walk with her, though, a couple of miles a couple of days a week.
I could concede that much since I liked walking with her, and it was for the health of the baby after all.
“And you’re sure it’s—she’s—the baby…is mine?”
“Unless you believe in immaculate conception, yeah.” I think this was a joke he would have laughed at under different circumstances. “Definitely yours.”
As a rule, I was not in the habit of sleeping with people I’d just met, and when I met Barry, I’d been six months out of the habit of sleeping with anyone. And I hadn’t since.
“When are you due?”
“February fourth,” I said.
“February,” he echoed.
“Yeah.” I didn’t know how long he could keep just repeating months back to me, but whatever it took for him to process was fine.
“Why didn’t you text me?”
“Because this isn’t your problem,” I said. “I mean it, you don’t have to worry about any of this.”
“Did you make the baby by yourself?” Barry asked.
We’d been talking rather quietly before this point, murmuring to each other mostly, but now he was incredulous and speaking loud enough for someone to overhear.
Josie was one such person, and she looked over from the counter with saucer-eyes, like she was just putting together that Barry Wright was possibly the guy I told her about.
“No, but—”
“And why wouldn’t I want to worry about this?” he demanded.
“Aside from the obvious, it’s my fault I got pregnant.” I dropped my voice to a whisper and leaned closer. “I’m the one who said we shouldn’t use a condom.”
“And I’m the one that said okay!” Barry threw his arms up.
His reluctance to agree to this was baffling.
If the roles were somehow cosmically reversed and I was a successful, handsome, single hockey player, and he was the one pregnant telling me not to worry about it, I would possibly jump on that offer.
Because a baby is a big responsibility, a huge one, a whole life’s worth.
Not one you enter into lightly. And especially not one you blindly offer to jump into with a stranger.
“Okay, don’t get so mad at me, I just…” I looked down at the table. “I didn’t think you’d want to know.”
We were both quiet for a moment until Barry’s hand was on the table in front of me, not touching mine, but a close thing. He could’ve lifted his pinkie and put it over my pointer finger.
“What would you have done?” I asked. “I mean really, what would you have said if I called you and told you?”
Barry had to think about this.
I’d imagined the conversation in so many ways since June, but he was just thinking about it now for the first time. He hadn’t had weeks to picture every disastrous direction the conversation could go.