“Because you’re pregnant?”
“Duh,” Ruby said. “What do you think?” She moved closer to Rachel, so close that their knees practically touched. “Where do you live?”
“San Francisco,” Rachel said.
“Wow!” Ruby said. “That’s incredible. Ben would die if he was here. No kidding. Did you ever hear of Jack Kerouac?”
“I have,” Rachel said, obviously touched by the girl’s naivete.
“You have?” Ruby said, grinning. “That is so excellent.”
“Everyone’s heard of Jack Kerouac,” Olivia said sharply.
But Ruby ignored her. “Ben,” she told Rachel, “he’s the one. You know.” She blushed and giggled in her adolescent way, then rolled her eyes.
For the first time, her dramatics annoyed, rather than touched, Olivia.
“He was my boyfriend,” Ruby continued. “Until this morning.”
Rachel frowned even more. “He abandoned you?”
“Basically,” Ruby said. “Yeah. I mean, I’m the one who actually has to have the baby, you know? And then give it away after all these months of talking to it and stuff. It can hear and everything. So I try to tell it things. Ben read it ‘Howl.’ The whole poem. He put his lips right to my stomach and recited the whole thing. But he thinks I’m being so cavalier about it. That’s the word he used. I looked it up to be sure I understood. Do you know what the dictionary said? It said ‘haughty’! It said ‘carefree’! It said ‘offhanded,’ like I could give up a baby—our baby, no less—all carefree, like nothing mattered.”
Olivia tried to stand between the two of them, but she couldn’t quite wedge her way in.
“No one’s saying that, Ruby,” Olivia said, trying to force eye contact with Rachel. They were the adults here, weren’t they? Especially Rachel, someone so responsible that she gave up money and time to go to Central America and operate on children with some sort of severe facial deformity; she and David had seen a PBS special on doctors who do that, and he’d told her that Rachel was there, right then.
Rachel didn’t give any signal to Olivia at all. Clearly, they weren’t on the same wavelength.
“A baby isn’t something you discard cavalierly,” Rachel said in a voice so soothing that Olivia wanted to scream. “And I know you wouldn’t do that.”
Ruby was nodding with too much enthusiasm. “Olivia just made it sound so simple, you know? And her husband died and she’s all alone.”
“Wait one minute,” Olivia said.
“Olivia,” Rachel said, her voice still all smooth and buttery. “Can I talk to you alone?”
Ruby got to her feet. “That’s cool,” she said. “I’m going to bed anyway. I can’t believe I ever used to stay up all night. I mean, ever since this happened, I like fall asleep at nine o’clock. I never even see Melrose Place anymore. I’m totally out of the loop.”
Olivia thought of that A&W, those stoned teenagers with their pasty faces and tangled hair.
“Not a bad loop to be out of,” she muttered. How had she ended up the outsider here?
Ruby started to walk away, but she twirled around like a ballerina to face Olivia and Rachel again. She laughed. “Oh, yes,” she said with mock seriousness, “I’m a wayward teen. A bad seed.” She was almost graceful when she skipped away.
Olivia sighed and rolled her eyes. “Kids,” she said, aware that she was mimicking Ruby’s exaggerated motions. Olivia sat up straighter, cleared her throat, and tried again. “Seriously,” she said, “you can’t imagine what it has been like since …” The words stuck again and Olivia tried to force them out.
But Rachel didn’t give her a chance.
“I remember the night David called to tell me he’d gotten married,” Rachel said. “I was still reeling from the breakup. Instead of this gorgeous hat, he runs off with the milliner.”
“It was one of those things,” Olivia said. She could see him in the doorway of her small shop, through the steam from the hats she was blocking.
“I was still at the hospital, and when I heard his voice, I thought something was terribly wrong. Why would he track me down at work? Why not leave a message for me at home? So I immediately imagined that he had some fatal disease.” She added quickly, “Not that I had any reason to suspect that, but it seemed so large, him calling me there after all those months. I suppose a small part of me thought he wanted to come back.”
Olivia considered the word: large. That was how her heart had felt when they were first falling in love, as if her ribs, her chest, her body were all too small to contain this thing. That was how her life with David had felt, full and large. That was how losing him felt still.