“This has got to stop,” said my best friend, Aurora, between bites of yellow butter cake with milk chocolate ganache frosting.
I was eating a low-fat blueberry yogurt and waiting for my graham cracker pecan crust to chill properly. Outside the wind was blowing puffs of snow around like tumbleweed. I thought of tumbleweed, of prairie women, of being somewhere—anywhere—but Foster, Rhode Island, alone and pregnant. I thought of all those Laura Ingalls Wilder books I used to love as a child. I wanted to be that brave and enduring.
“I MEAN,” AURORA was saying, “your neighbors are starting to hide from you. Who needs a different cake every day?”
Now the snow was starting to look like spun sugar. Yesterday I had made a frozen cranberry soufflé with a spun-sugar wreath on top. In fact, it was still sitting out in the snow while I tried to decide what to do with it. As usual, Aurora was right. I was running out of people to give my culinary creations to.
Aurora sighed and wiped some frosting off the rim of her plate with her finger. She had copper hair that fell to her shoulders in perfect ringlets, size six Easy Fit jeans, and just the right amount of freckles. Men did not leave Aurora.
I pointed this out to her.
She licked the frosting from her finger thoughtfully. “Joseph Russo,” she said finally, smugly.
“Who?”
“Eighth grade,” she said. “Took his ID bracelet back in front of the whole school during assembly. It was so humiliating.” She looked panicked for an instant. “Not that you should feel humiliated, Beth,” she said. “You should feel . . . angry.”
I nodded and went to check my crust. It was perfect.
The wind howled, the snow swirled. Somewhere out there Zane was moving about his life without me. I rested my head against the refrigerator, smack in the center of a photograph of my bourbon pecan pie. It had been, I was told, delicious.
NINE MONTHS AFTER we met, eight months after he first said, “I love you,” seven months after we eloped, and six months before our baby was due to be born, Zane left me and went back to his ex-girlfriend, Alice.
“But you don’t love her,” I reminded him as he packed his car. “You love me.”
Zane stopped rearranging boxes long enough to shrug. “I’m having second thoughts, Beth,” he said.
“Second thoughts?” I said. “About us?” My mind was shouting instructions at me: Remind him how the two of you wrote your own wedding vows! Say the line that makes you both cry—“We were born together, and together we shall be forevermore.” Show him the sonogram pictures!
Since I got pregnant, I did everything slower. Think, move, react. So that before I could say anything, Zane was telling me, “Second thoughts about Alice. Not us.”
“Alice?” I said, aware that I was repeating everything he said.
Alice was a piano teacher. Everything about her was long—fingers, hair, even her face. “Horsey,” Aurora used to say. “She looks horsey.” Then Aurora would whinny. I used to think Alice was a funny name, the name of someone’s old maiden aunt. But in the autumn air, coming out of Zane’s mouth like that, it sounded sexy.
“This,” Zane said, looking sadly around him, at me in my new maternity jeans and our old rented farmhouse and our pumpkin patch bursting with fat bright-orange pumpkins, “it all happened too fast.” He was cradling the television set. “I’m sorry,” he said.
It was October, one of those glorious autumn days that make a person glad to be alive—blue sky, leaves on fire with color, cornstalks and jack-o’-lanterns on doorsteps. Just the day before, Zane and I had walked through the woods that stretched behind our land, had thrown ourselves down on the fallen pine needles and gazed up at the setting sun. Zane had rested his hand on my stomach. Now, standing on our doorstep, hugging myself, I wondered if even then he knew he was leaving.
I watched him close the trunk, check for his car keys, then move toward the driver’s seat. I had watched him do these small tasks countless times, mornings as we both went off to work and weekend afternoons when he left to run errands. But all those times I knew he would be back.
He got in the car and adjusted the rearview mirror.
“Zane!” I called. I willed my legs to run after him, but they remained frozen in place.
He rolled down the passenger window and leaned toward it.
Having his attention like that, I couldn’t think of anything to say. But as he began to put the car in gear, I yelled, “Together we shall be forevermore! Remember?”
But it was too late. He was already driving away.