“You deserve so much better, Izzy,” he said, and she didn’t even believe him for one second. She didn’t deserve a fucking thing, she believed, but she would take what she could have. She reached for him and held him loosely in her arms.
What was the worst that would happen to him, rich and connected? Probation, probably, certainly not jail. Maybe another stint in a very expensive mental health facility, one where he got to wear his own clothes and have trips into town. How could he not hold it together for her? She could take anything if he had not mentioned the baby. Of course he was unfit; of course he didn’t want it. She wished he was able to keep those doubts to himself and soldier on. She felt her life disentangling from him, all the tendrils being tweezered apart, leaving bruises that she knew would never heal.
“I’m a mess,” he said, and she kissed him and then stood up, reached into her purse for the rest of the money from her graduation card, and walked back into the station to pay for the gas.
She would pay the man behind the counter, pump the gas, and then drive Hal back to the park, to her own truck. She would kiss him, and, as he drove away to wait for his own singular fate, she would sit on that park bench and she would play with the graduation cap and she would freak out in private, so hard and so long, until she had emptied everything inside her except the one thing that mattered, the only thing she wanted anymore. Let one person tell her she couldn’t have it and she would claw them into submission. Let one more person tell her what she could and could not have, and she would smile, nod, and, without apology, do whatever the hell she wanted.
chapter two
Izzy stood over a hog that was split nearly in two, its skin so reddish-brown that it looked like the finest leather. Wearing thick rubber gloves, she reached into the pig and pulled the meat from its bones, her hands shaking, some bits of pork somehow getting into the inside of her gloves, steaming against her skin. It took every bit of strength she had to fight the nausea, the morning sickness that swirled inside her. The smell of smoked meat, she had determined, ruined her now, and it angered her that weakness crept into her body and kept her from doing one of the few things she was so good at.
She wasn’t showing yet; she was tall, five feet nine inches, and skinny, and she hoped she could hold on to the familiar dimensions of her body for as long as possible. Still, even if nothing showed on her frame, something fierce was assembling itself inside her. The morning sickness spilled over into the afternoons most days, and she found a constant, buzzing irritation spiking her interactions with her father, not even close to recognizing her new state. She believed, in the most secret parts of her mind, that she could hide the pregnancy from everyone for the entire duration, simply appear one day holding a baby that people assumed she conjured up with a magic spell. Now, however, another wave of nausea washing over her, her gloved hands slippery with pig fat and juices, she realized how stupid she could be sometimes.