Sylvie and Emeline looked up from their feet, surprised.
“I’m sorry,” Julia said. “But this is ridiculous. You should obviously give the baby up for adoption. Why should you ruin your life because of a mistake?”
Cecelia stood, and when she did, she straightened her posture and the pregnancy was visible for the first time. How long had she been walking slumped over, with carefully arranged clothes? She was wearing a lavender button-down shirt, and the hard mound of her belly pushed the fabric outward. “You and Sylvie see us as children,” she said. “Mama thinks everyone is on the verge of catastrophe at all times. I’m neither of those things. I never wanted to go to college. I’ll study and make art on my own, with my baby. This is my life, and my choice. I’ll never be a burden on anyone.” Five foot two, shoulders back, she growled the last sentence.
Emeline said, “Mrs. Ceccione said Cecelia could move into Frank’s room and that she would help with the baby, if we cooked dinner and did chores. I’ll start college in the fall, of course, but I’ll work too. And I have a fair amount of money from babysitting that will help us buy what we need.”
Julia stared. “You’re going to move two doors down?”
“I can’t stay home,” Cecelia said. “Mama made that clear. And I’m sorry you feel like I unseated you, Julia. I know how much you like to be first.”
Cecelia said this kindly, and even though Julia’s hands were ice and she was mad at this truth in front of her—this mess—she nodded acceptance. She willed herself to stand up and hug her sister, but her cold body refused to move.
Sylvie cleared her throat and looked at Julia. “Mama asked us to tell you not to come to dinner tonight. She said she’ll receive you when her mourning period is over.”
“I’d like to leave now,” Cecelia said, “but I need to pee. Can I use your bathroom?”
When she’d left the room, Julia, Sylvie, and Emeline looked at one another. Sylvie’s face was worried, and Emeline had a mournful line between her eyebrows.
“Daddy?” Julia said.
“He’s not talking. Mama says she’s not talking, but she never shuts up. Daddy’s coming home later than usual.” This meant drunker than usual.
“They look old,” Emeline said. “They don’t want Cecelia to move out, but Mama told her that if she made this decision and didn’t go to college, she had to.”
Why? Julia thought, when her baby sister came back into the room and when her sisters filed out of the apartment. Why ruin everything? Why would you do this to us? Julia had tried so hard to do everything right, and she had. She felt overheated now and pushed open the window. She stared at the memory of Cecelia standing in the middle of her beautiful, perfect apartment in her purple shirt. She wished that they had told her the news somewhere else. Anywhere else. Julia went outside at one point and walked around the path that framed the quad. There was a bench on the far side, which she sat on until she needed to return to motion.
When William came home that evening, she said, “I think we should have a baby.”
He stopped where he was, his crutches pushed ahead of him for the step he’d been about to take. He looked like a tree propped up with wooden stakes. William was using the crutches only at home, when his leg was exhausted and sore. “Now?” He audibly swallowed. “I thought…we need to get on our feet first. Julia, I haven’t even started graduate school.”
“You got the teaching-assistant job for the fall. You’re wonderful.”
She was building something in her head. An answer to the mess, a way to fix everything, to put her family back to rights. Julia would save as much as she could from William’s small salary and give that money to Cecelia, or Mrs. Ceccione, to make sure her sister had what she needed and was okay. The independence Cecelia had shown that afternoon felt like a flag planted into sandy ground. It was an announcement, a wish, from the pregnant girl; it wasn’t who she was. She didn’t have the strength she was pretending to have, and living down the block from Rose’s tsunami of grief and judgment was going to throw Cecelia against the rocks. So more money would help. And Julia would get pregnant as soon as possible, because as a newly married woman, her pregnancy would be celebrated. It would be undeniably accepted. Julia would put her pregnant belly beside Cecelia’s. Rose and Charlie would embrace both their grandchildren, because they would come as a set. Everyone would be back together again, and there would be enough love to go around. Julia had a sun-soaked image of two babies sitting on a blanket; one of them was hers, but she wasn’t sure which one.
“You haven’t even asked about my first day,” William said. “Did something happen?” He paused and pulled his crutches back to his sides. He was now an upright tree. “You seem…agitated?”
Julia smiled at the questioning uplift to his voice. He was full of questions, and she loved him. She was full of answers. She walked closer and pressed herself against him. She reached up and undid the top button on the white shirt she’d given him for his birthday. Then the button below that. She ran her finger across the soft white T-shirt underneath. “Are you hungry?” she said, in a voice no louder than a whisper.
He shook his head.
She tugged on his shirt, and he lowered to her. This will work, she thought, distracted, as his lips covered hers and she led him in a slow, swaying, backward walk to the couch.
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY, JULIA took the bus from Northwestern to Pilsen. She didn’t want to go, but it was impossible to hear that news and not appear before her mother. Julia wouldn’t have been able to put into words why, exactly, but she needed to show her mother the respect of her presence.
She found Rose sweating in the garden, bent over the herbs. Heat was rising from the soil in waves; summer in Chicago was punishing. Julia knew from experience that tending to the herbs demanded the most rigor and attention to detail. Rose insisted that whoever was working in that part of the garden use a magnifying glass and tweezers. Tiny bugs needed to be spotted and removed, and a special spindly weed that had a proclivity for climbing up the herbs and strangling them needed to be caught early.
“She’s not here,” Rose said. “If you’re here to see her.”
“I came to see you.”
This seemed to surprise Rose, and she stopped in the middle of yanking out a clump of young crabgrass. She put her hands on her thighs, and Julia was able to see her mother’s face for the first time. Rose looked wrecked, as if she’d been in a car crash. All the familiar pieces were there, but wrong and somehow broken.
“I had to draw a line,” Rose said.
Julia found it difficult to bear her mother’s distressed face, so she looked up at the hot, low sky. She searched her mind for the right thing to say, words that would make her mother feel better. Before she’d found them, Rose said, “I only asked one thing of you girls.”
“That we go to college.”
Rose glared. “No. I asked you not to mess up like I did. Was that too much to ask?”
Julia shook her head, even though she couldn’t recall her mother ever making that specific request. Rose had repeated, over and over: You have to go to college. She’d never actually told them not to get pregnant before marriage. That expectation was unspoken, but it turned out to have the highest stakes.