26. Wednesday
CHAPTER 26
WEDNESDAY
M aggie woke up on the couch for the second time in four days with no immediate memory of having fallen asleep. This morning, though, her whole body was still on the seat cushions, and she was tucked neatly under a throw blanket. It was early enough that her alarm hadn’t gone off yet. The flimsy curtains over the front window were still doing a reasonably good job keeping out the creeping grey of the dawn, which meant it couldn’t be much past five.
She could hear Parton’s heavy breathing coming from the floor next to her. He seemed to have slid the coffee table up against the front wall in the middle of the night. She couldn’t believe that hadn’t woken her up. She must really be exhausted. She gave her eyes a few seconds to discern details from the dog-shaped shadow next to the couch.
Or, shadows, actually.
There was Parton. And there, next to him, was Daniel. He’d taken a throw pillow and gone to sleep on the hard wood floor. With the dog for warmth, apparently. Not that the nights got very cold at Blue Harbor in the middle of July.
But he’d stayed over.
And she was…not panicking. Maybe she was just fresh out of panic.
Stretched out on the thirty-year-old floral sofa, Maggie lay quietly, watching Parton and Daniel, letting the point and counterpoint rhythms of their steady breathing lull her back to sleep.
When she woke to the sound of her alarm, sunshine was streaming through the curtains, and the cottage smelled like freshly-brewed coffee. Maggie sat up cautiously, in case the nausea had returned.
Not too bad.
She found her phone lying conveniently on an end table where she was pretty sure she hadn’t left it and turned off her alarm.
“Morning, sunshine!” Daniel said, looking up from the mug of coffee he was nursing at the kitchen table.
Maggie groaned. “Absolutely not.” She pushed herself up off the couch and waited for the dizzy spell to pass. It never came. Wow, it really was the little things.
“Coffee?” Daniel asked, rising to get another mug from an upper cabinet.
Maggie grumbled an affirmative and headed for the bedroom door. It had been a full twenty-four hours since she’d brushed her teeth.
“I’m gonna take that as a yes,” Becker called after her.
He’d made her coffee. He was testing out horrible nicknames. This couldn’t become a thing. And it wouldn’t. Because waking up with Daniel Becker was definitely not going to become a thing. Coziness be damned.
When she took her seat at the kitchen table, there was a mug of freshly-brewed light roast waiting for her. She took a sip and let it burn away the remaining haze of sleep.
“Thanks,” she said. And Daniel looked like he’d won an award of at least middling prestige. “Sorry I don’t have an extra toothbrush.”
“Oh, I used my finger. Classic camping trick.”
Maggie sat for a moment with the mental image of Daniel Becker sneaking through her empty bedroom and into her bathroom, closing each successive door behind him with care so as not to wake her, uncapping her toothpaste and squeezing it out onto his forefinger like a ten-year-old who’d forgotten to pack his toiletries on an overnight hike. There was nothing endearing about it. Absolutely nothing.
They sat quietly, and Maggie didn’t feel a need to fill the silence. She just let the caffeine take the time it required to drag her all the way back to the land of the living. Some mornings the trip took longer than others, and today there was pretty bad traffic. It wasn’t until her mug was nearly empty that Daniel broke the silence.
“So, you said last night that you don’t want to talk about it. And you can just tell me to drop it, but…can I ask…do you have an appointment already?”
To Maggie’s extreme surprise, she found that she didn’t immediately tell him to drop it. She didn’t exactly want to talk about it, but…she didn’t mind talking about it with Becker. If he wanted to know.
“Yeah. Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Ok.” His tone was matter-of-fact, but underneath it was his signature warmth. Like they were working out the details of next week’s social. “Do you have someone to drive you?”
“They said I can drive myself, actually.”
Daniel looked skeptical but stayed quiet.
“I’ll be fine,” Maggie said, a little defensively. “Although I was thinking about asking Miss Lucille if she’d take me.” She was not thinking about asking Miss Lucille if she’d take her. Or, she hadn’t been until this exact moment. Maybe she should. “I don’t think she’ll mind. She’ll probably see it as her weekly contribution to the fight to fuck the hetero-patriarchy.” Miss Lucille could be delightfully militant about her feminism. She’d done some hard-core protesting in the 70s and 80s. Artists.
“I bet.” Daniel smiled. “Well, if Miss Lucille isn’t available for some reason…” He trailed off, and then interjected as though interrupting himself. “Actually—no. Sorry. That’s not what I mean. I understand if you’d rather ask Miss Lucille. You should do whatever you want, obviously. Though maybe don’t drive yourself? But I—I’d like to take you. If you wouldn’t mind. I’d like to go with you.”
“Oh.” It took Maggie a moment to process what he had said. At no point had it occurred to her to consider whether she’d want Daniel Becker to chauffeur her to an abortion several counties over, whether she’d want Daniel Becker to witness whatever havoc of nausea and cramps and other nonsense the drugs were going to wreak on her already aching body. And then she realized that he didn’t really understand what he was offering. “Oh, no, you—there weren’t any appointments in Asheville. It’s in Winston-Salem.”
“That’s like, what, three hours?” he asked, unconcerned.
“Two and a half, if there’s not traffic.”
“Look, I’m sure Miss Lucille is a lot of fun, and you know I hate to toot my own horn, but I give great road trip. Personalized snack selection, curated playlists, I’m excellent at ‘I Spy’ and the license plate game. I already have a variety of audiobook options if you don’t feel like talking, but you also don’t feel like thinking…”
Maggie downed the last of her coffee and then stared into the stained bottom of her empty cup, considering. He sounded genuine. (Of course he did. This was Daniel Becker.) And it probably was better not to drive herself, all things considered. But Becker?
This trip really had the potential to be a greatest hits compilation of things she preferred to deal with in private. Then again, she’d already cried snotty tears all over his shirt the night before. That was, frankly, a hundred times worse than hypothetically having to ask him to pull the car over so that she could throw up on the side of the highway. Vomit had nothing on tears. Of course, there was no guarantee that there wouldn’t be both…
It was only when Daniel trailed off that she realized he’d been listing audiobook options for what must have been a full minute with no response from her. When she refocused, he was fiddling with his half empty mug. “You, uh, you can think about it,” he said, looking up at her. “Or we can just sit in stony silence. Whatever you’d hate least.”
She smiled wanly.
“Anyway, uh, you know where to find me. I’d love to give you a ride.” There was a beat before he heard the double-entendre in the unfortunate way he’d phrased that final offer. He looked at the ceiling, sighed, leaned his elbows onto the table, and sunk his face into his hands, self-deprecating smile peeking through the gap between his palms.
“I’m just going to show myself out,” he said, half laughing, half wincing.
And that was what decided it. If someone had to witness her dry-heaving through a river of tears on the side of I-40, and it seemed very likely that someone did, Daniel Becker, against all odds, was the option she hated least.
“No I--Sure. Yes. I would appreciate it. If you would drive.”
“Oh.” He seemed genuinely surprised.
“Thank you.”
He smiled, all the way to his warm brown eyes, and Maggie had the wild thought, the reckless, absolutely ludicrous thought, that there was very little she wouldn’t do to get Daniel Becker to smile at her like that.
Then she kneecapped that thought, hog-tied it, weighed it down with some cement blocks, and tossed it in the lake.
Maggie’s appointment was at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, which meant that sometime around 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, she would receive her second state-mandated phone call. It came at 1:47. Maggie was pretty sure that it was the same woman on the other end of the line. The deep vein of sarcasm running beneath her words was certainly a match. Although maybe everyone who made these calls developed that tone as a coping mechanism. The woman read from a script, informing Maggie that (1) medical assistance from federal and/or state programs might be available for prenatal care; (2) the father was liable to assist in support for the child; (3) there were alternatives to abortion; and (4) she was free to withhold or withdraw her consent at any time without impacting her availability for state or federal assistance programs.
If the first call had pissed Maggie off, this one got her as far as genuinely picking through a stack of dishes to select the ugliest plate in the bunch so that she could Hulk smash it on the kitchen floor. It was only the thought of having to clean up all the shards that kept her from going through with it. Instead, she tried to be satisfied with looking up which governor had signed this bill into law and setting up another monthly donation to the abortion fund, this time in his name.
She still wanted to Hulk smash something, though.