“I knew he’d come back sometime.” Sylvia had never felt that sad and wonderful last time feeling with Don. She had wanted to lock the door of her feelings on Don, let him live the life he wanted with whomever he chose, but not with her. Sylvia found hating Don easy, but the prospect of never seeing him again never quite settled into finality in her mind.
Don let it go. He wouldn’t pressure Sylvia. She so seldom seemed happy he would back down and let her enjoy the moment. Sylvia tried not to look at Don’s face. He was ugly close up, as were most men. In his embrace, Sylvia knew Don was following a script he’d learned from another woman. Sylvia knew that men need direction from the woman they choose. It makes them feel cared for and safe. She leaned into Don’s naked chest and tried to pretend that was all there was to it. She was the most stable part of Don’s world. Always had been. He would stray, but didn’t he always come back? Didn’t he end up wanting her? But feeling his body move from the care he’d taken from that child hurt her more than she’d anticipated. Sylvia remembered when Jonnie was born, a fat, bald-headed baby with the mystery father.
Don’s leg caressed Sylvia’s thigh, half expecting to see a spot like a tobacco stain, but quickly took in the whole of the woman he was next to. Bodies are often the same, often interchangeable. Don had seen many women’s thighs and underarms, drooping behinds, secret crevices and folds—and though some were longer or fatter or darker or younger, all blurred into one body, one body he’d spent the last forty years screwing in the dark spaces all over town.
Don shifted Sylvia’s weight to the other foot, moved her, however awkwardly into a tiny square in the space between her disheveled bed and the wall. Sylvia was not going to cry. What was there to cry about? She should have never stopped crying years ago, if she was going to cry. As quickly as the feeling came, she felt an old hardness building, the dike that kept Don away from the best part of herself, a part she held for him, a gift really, but he would never have it, not all of it.
Don realized he’d made a mistake though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He felt the stiffness return to Sylvia, the closed-off place he hated in her that would one day brick up against him.
“Come on baby,” he said. “We don’t have to mess around with that. I just want to be here with you.”
Sylvia swiped the clothes from the bed, leaned to the footboard, and untangled the complicated sheets. She should divorce this man. The same reasons she told him again and again to leave and don’t come back were the reasons she should make it legal, go ahead and sign the papers. But not today. Today she pumped gas across from the now closed movie theater where white people had lined up around the block to see Coal Miner’s Daughter in 1980. She and Don had passed by them in their car twice. Neither of them had ever seen people lined up for a movie, and out of all of the people in line not a single one of them was black. She remembered how sick she’d felt to be driving by, not included in the celebration once again.
Besides no one had noticed her today. Not the girl at the Bi-Lo supermarket, who didn’t pause as she looked around her to the next customer, not the teenage boys, all baseball caps and oversized shirts loud-talking outside of Lana’s hair salon, not the old man at the gas station on the other side of the pump, watching the numbers roll on the display like he was hoping against all hope that seven would not follow six, just this once, and none of the passing people in the mountain town, not another soul, besides this man, had thought to remember that Sylvia Ross was even alive.
“How long are you staying, Don?”
Don reached his fingers to the clasp of her bra, popped it open like a combination lock. “How long you need me?”
14
Ava secreted the expensive digital pregnancy test into her purse and walked the few steps into the bathroom at the bank. She couldn’t imagine how many tests she’d bought over the years from drugstores and from the depressing dollar stores that had popped up all over the county. Good news! you can still shop, poor, poor people. But a dollar times a hundred, a thousand (who knew at this point?) was a staggering number. There might be a section of floating trash in the ocean with mounds and mounds, millions of used pregnancy tests. One day in the far future, they might coalesce, fuse together (the tectonics of it unknown to the lay observer) into a pee-smelling island. Ava thought not for the first time that she was losing her mind. She held the pee stick to her side and waited. How much of her life had she dolloped out in three-minute intervals she couldn’t say. Maybe in heaven you get back all the time you lost hoping, the gift for not giving into great despair. Ava willed herself not to look at the pregnancy test. She looked.
On the walk back to her office Ava glanced up at Jenny, who smiled back at her. Ava nodded. People meant well. She would say something nice to Jenny today. Ava entered her office and sat down at her computer, she glanced back again to her purse and at the nasty pregnancy test she’d hastily put inside.
Everyone, BFP! BFP! Big Fat POSITIVE, POSITIVE. I just took another look at the glorious smiley face on the readout to make sure I wasn’t imagining it! I couldn’t even wait the three minutes, but I didn’t have to. I’m going to call the doctor as soon as I finish writing all of you. Now if we make it past the 7-week mark you will hear my screams. My first two were gone early. People call it losing a pregnancy, but it felt like they were taken from me. I wasn’t expecting to feel ripped out. I know you know what I’m talking about. I told myself every time that I was done. But here I am! And you know what? I am going to enjoy it this time. Maybe life is about these small moments maybe that’s all some of us get. But I’m going to be hopeful. Hope with me! Is that dumb? It’s probably dumb. At 7 weeks the books say the baby will probably survive. A good heartbeat at 7 weeks—I need it! Pray. Pray. Ava2WW
15