“You got our entire attention,” I said.
“Not mine,” Clevis said. “I got to bleed my lizard.” He stood up and went to the bathroom. Then he came back and opened another beer. “So what’s your joke?” he said.
“Promise you’ll laugh?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Because I think it’s funny anyway.” She wasn’t looking at us; she was watching her finger follow a scratch in the tabletop, as if that interested her. “It’s just that one of you gets to be a daddy pretty soon, and I don’t know whose name to pick.” Then she did look at us. “Don’t you think that’s funny?”
“Hell,” Clevis said. “You never could tell jokes.”
“Just a minute,” I said. “You’re telling us you’re pregnant?”
She nodded. Then she kind of laughed, her eyes shining at us with gin and what must have also been fear. “I mean I don’t know which one of you got me like this.”
“We could always draw straws,” Clevis said.
“And I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She was still smiling at us, but there were tears flowing down her cheeks now into her mouth, and she couldn’t wipe them away fast enough to keep up with them.
“What are you crying about?” Clevis said. “Hell, girl, you just bought the farm.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not? I can’t afford no kid. You and him hash it out.”
“But you promised me.”
“I never promised you nothing.”
Her mouth was still open in that awful smile. “You promised me you would laugh.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well: ha ha.”
“Leave her alone,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“I said leave her alone.”
“Now that’s funny—coming from you. That’s real funny.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sure. You send me over to Sterling or some goddamn place else so you and her can jump in bed as soon as I’m gone, and now you tell me to leave her alone.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t it? Well, don’t tell me about it. I couldn’t stand no more jokes tonight. I’m wore out.”
He got up then and started to walk back to the bedroom.
“Cleve,” Twyla said. “Honey, wait.”
“What for?”
“Don’t you want me to come with you?”
“Nah,” he said. “You can sleep with lover boy tonight. That shouldn’t be no surprise to anybody.”
Then he left the kitchen. We could hear him in the back bedroom stomping on the floor and after that the rattle of the bed when he lay down heavy to sleep. I sat with Twyla for a while, not talking; it was too late for talk; I wouldn’t have known the right words anyway. Finally I went to bed myself, leaving her sitting there with her red cheeks, like those of a healthy child, shining wet under the light. She had been an unselfish, uncomplicated girl, but now, six or seven years later, with my interference she had become something different. It was not only that she was pregnant without knowing for sure whose baby it was or that she didn’t know how to ask one of us to claim it—it was more that she had become a woman staring unfocused at a grease spot above a kitchen sink out here in the country in the small hours of a Wednesday night.
She was still here the next morning when I got up. She was asleep with her head twisted uncomfortably on the kitchen table, her shoulders slumped forward. I started some black coffee on the stove and went outside to see how the day looked. Clean, with high clouds gathering in the west, the day appeared acceptable. But the pickup was gone. I went back into the house. Twyla was awake. She looked as if during the night she had been disassembled and put back together with flour glue. Her face was all pasty.
“Did Clevis take the pickup?” I said.
“What?”
“Where did Clevis go?”
“Portland, Oregon.”
“What do you mean Portland, Oregon? Here, drink some coffee.” I poured coffee into a cup for her. “Drink it hot,” I said.
“He said because it was a long ways off,” Twyla said. “He said he wanted to see the water.”