Vanessa sighed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I haven’t seen him or talked to him. I might not have to decide just yet.”
Of course, things did have a way of working out, and Tank came walking through the door that night. He looked over at Vanessa, but he thought better of approaching her. He sat at a table while Dipstick, who he had come in with, went to grab them a bucket of beers.
Vanessa tried to keep herself busy so she wouldn’t have to think about the baby and the fact that she was pretty sure she hated Tank now, even if he was the father, and for most of the night she managed pretty well.
Her luck ran out, however, shortly after two in the morning. The bar was mostly dead, and she was crouched behind the bar, counting bottles of liquor. When she straightened up, she found she was face to face with Tank, who was sitting on one of the rickety barstools.
“Talk to me,” he said. He was almost pleading; his eyes looked softer than she had ever seen them.
“I think I need to,” she said with a sigh, setting the pad of paper she was using to take inventory on the bar top. She took a deep breath, and then it all came spilling out. “I’m pregnant.”
Tank’s eyes widened. “Is it mine?” he asked.
Anger flared within Vanessa. “Yes, it’s yours. I’m not a cheating asshole, remember?”
Tank sighed. “I was just asking. I mean, I don’t know what you do all the time. So what? You want money?”
Vanessa was furious. This conversation wasn’t going anywhere near how she had hoped. She snapped at the man who had so recently been her boyfriend.
“I don’t want anything from you,” she said, and then she turned her back on him.
Once again he gave her space, not coming to the Devil Dog. Susan became someone to lean on, and as the days turned to weeks and then months, she was the one who went with her to her doctor appointments, the one who was with her when she found out she was having a boy. By then Vanessa had a bit of a stomach, and her emotions changed as often as the breeze. As Susan drove her back home, she cried, fat, silent tears rolling down her cheeks. The older woman hugged her and then drove off, and Vanessa went in.
A buzz at her door woke her from an afternoon nap—someone down on the street wanting to come up. There were only two apartments up the stairs, hers over the hardware store and one across the hall that sat over a diner. An old man lived there, and sometimes he forgot his key, so that was who Vanessa assumed it was. She went to the small panel beside her door and pressed the button. Down the hall and the stairs, the door buzzed, and she heard someone pull it open. She was in the kitchen, filling a glass with water at the sink, when she heard a knock on her door. She opened it and found herself face to face with Tank.
“I can be a better man,” he said to her.
“I don’t need you to be anything,” she snapped.
“I want to be something. I want to be a father.”
“You think I’ll take you back?” Vanessa asked.
“No. I don’t need to be with you to be a father. I want to be a father. I love that baby. And I love you too; I realized that, but that’s not why I’m here. My dad…he left. I might have turned out differently if he had stayed, not been arrested five times, not spent a year of my life in jail when I was nineteen. Things could have been different. I love my club, and I love my bike, but I love this kid more. Girl or boy, I don’t know, but I want to be a dad.”
“It’s a boy,” Vanessa said softly.
Tank clapped his hands together and smiled. “Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“I have to go shopping. Do you want to go?”
Vanessa smiled, but she shook her head after a moment. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay. I’ll see you later, though, all right? Things are going to be different, all right?”
Vanessa nodded, smiling despite herself. His obvious joy at having a boy was almost infectious. She shut the door as he turned to leave.
Tank showed up again that night, carrying in bags of toys.
“I got him a baseball glove, and a bat,” Tank said as Vanessa watched him dump everything out on her couch.
“He’s going to need diapers before he needs a baseball bat,” she said, not unkindly.
“I know, I know,” Tank said. “Let me have baseball, though, all right?”
“Okay. How did you get all that stuff here on your bike?”
“I didn’t ride the bike; I borrowed Dipstick’s jeep.”
Vanessa gasped, half-jokingly, half seriously. “You didn’t ride your bike?”
“I told you, I can change,” Tank said, and they laughed.
The next few weeks were wonderful. Tank took an active role in the baby’s life, such as it was while it was still in her stomach.