Maybe you’ve changed.
Why don’t you come a little closer and find out. He showed his teeth and grinned.
She slid across the seat toward him and he put his arm over her shoulders and kissed her cheek and she set her open hand on his thigh, and they rode as they had ridden in the summer when they had driven out in the country north of Holt before stopping at the old homestead house under the green trees in the evening, and they were still riding that way when they drove into Denver at dusk in the midst of city traffic.
After that she didn’t know what to do with herself. She had made a sudden turn. She was seventeen and carrying a baby and she was alone most of every day in an apartment in Denver while Dwayne, this boy she had met last summer and wasn’t sure she knew at all, went to work at the Gates plant. His apartment was two rooms and a bathroom, and she had it completely cleaned and swept in the first morning. And his cupboards rearranged on the second morning, and the laundry done, the single set of sheets he owned and his dirty jeans and work shirts, all done in the first three mornings, and the only person she had met so far was a woman in the laundry room in the basement who stared at her the whole time, smoking and not speaking to her even once so that she thought the woman must be mute or maybe angry at her for some reason. In the first few days in Denver she did what she could, washed the clothes and cleaned the apartment and had something cooked for supper in the evening, and on the first Saturday afternoon when he got off work she went out with him to a shopping mall and he bought her a few things, a couple of shirts and a pair of pants, to make up for what she had left in Holt. But there wasn’t enough for her to do, and she was more alone than she had ever been.
That first night when they had arrived at the apartment they had gotten out of the car in the parking lot with its rows of dark cars and he had led her up the stairs and down a tiled hallway to the door and unlocked it. You’re home, he said. This is it. It was two rooms. She looked around. And in a little while he took her into the bedroom and they had never been in bed together before, not an actual bed, and he undressed her and looked at her stomach, the round smooth full rise of it, and he noted the blue veins showing on her breasts, and her breasts swollen and harder now, and her nipples larger and darker too. He shaped his hand over the hard ball of her stomach. Is it moving yet? he said.
It’s been moving for two months.
He held his hand there, waiting, as if he expected it to move now, for him, then he bent and kissed her navel. He rose and took his clothes off and got back in bed where she was and kissed her and stetched out beside her, looking at her.
You still love me?
I might, she said.
You might. What does that mean?
It means it’s been a long time. You left me.
But I missed you. I told you that already. He began to kiss her face and to caress her.
I don’t know if you should do this, she said.
Why not?
Because. The baby.
Well, people still do this after she has a baby in her, he said.
But you have to be careful.
I’m always careful.
No, you’re not. Not always.
When wasn’t I?
I’m pregnant, aren’t I?
He looked in her face. That was a accident. I didn’t mean to do that.
It still happened.
You could of done something yourself too, you know, he said. It wasn’t just up to me.
I know. I’ve thought about that a lot.
He looked into her face, her dark eyes. You seem different some way now. You’ve changed.
I’m pregnant, she said. I am different.
It’s more than that, he said. But you’re not sorry, are you?
About the baby?
Yeah.
No, she said. I’m not sorry about the baby.