10. Plus Sign
ten
Plus Sign
Icame home from work the next day and found her already at the kitchen table. Both hands covered something on the wood, like a man hiding a winning card. She looked up when the door shut. On edge and lit. I had learned that combination. It meant news.
I set my keys down and didn’t sit yet. “What’s under your hands?”
She pulled her hands away slowly. A home pregnancy test. The cheap plastic kind from the drugstore two miles down, the same brand she’d thrown out the last time the chamber clicked empty.
I leaned in. The plus sign was ugly and simple and bigger than the stick around it.
It stared at me the way the diamond had in the driveway: a fact that did not care what I was ready for.
She was glowing. Not performing. The real thing, the same brightness as the first morning she had come home from Steve and still had him on her mouth.
“I’m gonna be a mom,” she said. Then she looked at me, checking, always checking. “And you’re gonna be a dad.”
I couldn’t match her face. Not right away.
My hand went to the back of a chair, gripping the wood until my knuckles ached.
The plus sign was a hot flush of victory in my chest and a cold pit in my stomach, the two sensations twisting into one.
It was Steve’s week in her, and it was the answer to a prayer I’d made in a closet with a green circle under her nail.
I could feel both truths warring in my blood.
She saw the lag and filled it, still smiling. “Okay, so you’re not the father. But you’ll still be a dad, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.” It came out thinner than I wanted.
And I meant it. I was going to stand in a delivery room one day and hide an erection under a hospital gown while she pushed his son into the world.
I had already been that man in my head. Now the calendar had a date, and the date had a plus sign, and the plus sign had his name whether we said it at the grocery store or not.
She stood up. I asked where she was going before I had decided I was allowed to ask.
A little nervous under the excitement, a combination that twisted in my own gut. “I’m gonna call Steve with the news.”
“Stay. Do it here. Speaker.”
She looked at me like I had asked her to undress in a restaurant. “Really? You’re not gonna get pissed? You’re not gonna say anything?”
“Hell no.” I shifted in my slacks, letting her see the effect of the idea.
The thought of her on the phone in our kitchen, a plus sign on the table between us, another man’s claim still inside her.
“I want to hear you tell him. I want to hear the version you give me later. I want to hear you say it’s mine when it isn’t.
” I swallowed. “I need to hear it. The chance only comes once.”
She sat again. Beaming again, the nerves folded into the show. She dialed. I had asked for speaker. She put the phone to her ear anyway, which was its own small cruelty, and I sat across from her, hands flat on the table to keep them from reaching for her while she did it.
“Hey there.” The smile went private, the one she keeps for him. “Can you talk?”
He said something I didn’t get. She said they were still on for next week, that wasn’t why she called. Then, in her normal voice, lining it up like a toast: “Ready?”
She let out a squeal—not cute, but real. “We’re pregnant. We made a baby.”
I watched her listen. Nod. Glow. She told him she was certain.
Zero percent chance it was mine. He had seen the ovulation test. He had seen the thermometer.
He had pumped about fifteen billion swimmers into her that week.
She said the number looking at me, so I would get it even if I didn’t get his voice on the other end of the line.
I sat there and took it like a sacrament I’d begged for.
“I told you I’m a breeder, didn’t I?” she said. She listened, biting her lip. Then: “Uh huh. As many as you want. I like making them with you.”
She calculated March eighth out loud, tapping her fingers on the table as if booking a conference room.
He had to keep the calendar free, to meet their baby right away.
Of course he was the first to know—she would tell me when I got home.
She aimed a smile at me as she said it, a performance inside the performance, and I nodded back. It was my line in the play.
“No, of course not,” she said into the phone, still looking at me.
“He’ll think it’s his. But I’ll feel you every time it moves inside me.
It’ll be like you’re always inside me.” She laughed, low.
“Yeah. I do wish you were inside me all the time. Of course, anytime we can - it’s not like you can damage the cargo, though I’m sure you’ll try.
Yeah. I’m gonna be SO horny now, you better keep up!
” She ran her fingers between her legs just for me as she smiled, “Can’t wait. See you next week.”
That last bit sat in my stomach and stayed after she hung up.
See you next week. The father. The trip.
The closed shop he thought he owned. The kitchen was quiet except for the refrigerator kicking on.
I came around the table and kissed her and tasted the call on her mouth.
She let me. She put my hand on her stomach over the blouse, over nothing you could feel yet, over a plus sign that already had a name, and she held it there until I stopped shaking.
* * *
The pregnancy test didn’t slow her down; it was fuel.
Two nights after the call, she pulled me into bed with a new kind of hunger.
“Say it.” Her voice was a ragged breath, her legs locked around me.
“Say what I am now.” The names came out of me, the ones she wanted now that it was official.
Knocked-up slut. Cheating whore. She came on the words, a shudder that was all about the truth of them.
I came on the knowledge that she had told another man he had done the one thing I don’t get to do, and that her whole life was now the lie I had asked for.
The next week she was lit about seeing her baby daddy.
That’s what she called him now, casual, like a nickname for a coworker she was going to fuck in a hotel.
I dropped her at the airport and came home to the plus sign still sitting on the dresser because neither of us had thrown the stick away.
When she returned two days later, she was wearing a t-shirt I had never seen.
White. Cheap. Black letters stretched across those tits, which were already starting to argue with fabric.
NOT MY HUSBAND’S BABY.
She stopped in the doorway and turned so I could read it twice. She explained, pleased with herself, that it was a gift from Steve. He wanted her to wear it whenever she saw him. She was going to wear it at home too. Did I like it?
My answer wasn’t verbal. I put my hands under the shirt and felt bare skin, no bra, nipples tight from the walk from the car, and I walked her backward down the hall until the backs of her knees hit our bed.
She laughed the whole way. I left the shirt on.
I wanted the letters on my face while I was in her.
She talked while I fucked her, Steve’s baby, Steve’s shirt, Steve still thinking she was his, and I came looking at the words like they were a second wedding vow I had signed without reading.
After, she kept the shirt on to make dinner.
I sat at the table and watched the letters move when she reached for plates.
* * *
A Thursday in the middle of the next month she came home after midnight and dropped her bag like it weighed nothing.
I had waited up. I always waited up now.
She kissed me in the hall, hotel soap and somebody’s cologne, and when I asked she gave me the three-sentence version first, the way she does when she is tired and still wants credit.
Come-and-go. Not Black. She said it before I asked—the same question I always needed, and she always hated to answer.
She sighed, but sat on the edge of the mattress, still in her travel skirt.
“Lounge. Some guy in a suit. He bought me a drink and just put his hand on my thigh.” She looked at me, a little smile playing.
“I let him. Took him up to the room and let him finish inside me. No condom.” She met my eyes.
“The calendar doesn’t matter anymore, right?
” She paused, letting the weight of it settle before adding the final detail.
“I thought about Steve the whole time. Mrs. Johnson taking extra miles, pregnant with his baby.”
I asked why there were suddenly so many more trips. She was already pulling her blouse off. She smiled against my mouth and said she didn’t have to coordinate calendars anymore. She took my hand and put it on her belly, still almost flat, a secret only we could feel.
“It’s not like I can get more pregnant,” she said. Then, almost tender, almost mean: “It’s ironic. Steve didn’t want me screwing anyone else. Not even you. And here we are.”
“He really thought he could stop you from having sex with me?”
She laughed and unhooked her bra. “Yeah. He’d probably freak out if he knew I have two or three other cocks inside me each week.”
“He’s not traveling with you?”
She snorted. “No. I’m purely traveling for random dick.
I’m so fucking horny all the time. This way, I have a hotel room and as much cock as I can score.
Clients, strangers.” She smiled at my look, “Yeah, mostly strangers. I don’t ask their names - we use each other and they go.
” As if reading my thoughts, she said, “You wanted to be second? You’re second. Or third, or fourth.”