“Looks good,” Mr. Tannehill said to her, not smiling, but his soft tone was kind enough to show his appreciation. He once said that, aside from him and Mr. Sammy, who ran the black-owned barbecue restaurant in Coalfield and worked exclusively with ribs and chicken, that Izzy was the best barbecue person in town. She once mentioned that the two of them should do a barbecue competition, head over to Memphis in May and show them how it was done. “Too much stress for me,” he said. “I don’t like competition. I like to cook the pig the way it’s supposed to be cooked and not worry about anything else. You get to be my age, Izzy, you just want peace and quiet.” Izzy sometimes felt aged beyond her years, and it made her feel inauthentic and silly, but she could understand Mr. Tannehill’s desire for solitude, to simply be allowed to do what you loved without interference.
And now, once again, she wanted to throw up. She ran out of the kitchen, into the bathroom, and dry-heaved herself rigid. She listened to make sure that no one had heard or was coming to check on her. She sat on the closed lid of the toilet and rested her head in her hands, so tired already, the uphill climb of each day since the pregnancy.
She had not heard from Hal since the night of graduation. All she had to go on were the imperfect rumors in town, but she was willing to settle for these as long as they had the slightest hint of truth. The police, apparently, had paid him a visit that same night, thanks to the wallet he’d left in the theater. It seemed either he had the charges dismissed or he was given probation, more people were saying probation. Her name was never mentioned and she was both relieved and slightly surprised by this fact; it was strange how, in such a small town, everyone seemed to know your business and yet Izzy had been carrying on an affair with her art teacher and was pregnant with his child and not a single person was the wiser. It was a testament to her cautiousness or her simple invisibility.
Hal was now spending the rest of the summer in the Northeast; his parents had sent him away to a facility to recuperate once again. She waited for a letter from him, a phone call, but none came. Either he was so dulled with medicine that he had forgotten about her or, more likely, he was ashamed of everything, the fight, the pregnancy, the affair, and he was trying to make her, the constant reminder of his bad decisions, disappear. She wanted to hear his voice, to have some reassurance that he cared for her. And, though it was crass and she did not want to think about it too much, she would have appreciated some gesture on his part, even if it was merely financial, that would help her get through this pregnancy, to show that he understood his complicit role in her current predicament. Was it so awful to hope that, having been impregnated by the wealthiest bachelor in town, Izzy could at least have the luxury of not going elbow deep in pig carcasses all summer? But there was only silence where there was once Hal, and so she focused on the baby, thinking about it all the time, hoping that it would not make itself known before she was ready to reveal it.
The next day Izzy woke up to hear her father in the kitchen, banging around for something to eat that would soak up the alcohol from the night before. She looked at her clock and saw that it was six o’clock in the morning; she pulled the covers over her head and wallowed in her misery. A few minutes later, her father walked into the room, eating a Pop-Tart, shaking her exposed foot to wake her.
“Dad, please. I need sleep,” she said.
“When did you get home?” he asked.
“Late.”
“I didn’t even notice you come in,” he replied. He had been passed out in his easy chair, the TV volume eight clicks too loud, when she crept into the house. Ever since her mother died, her father had slept on the couch, in the easy chair, or sometimes on the front porch when it was warm enough. The bedroom had turned into his closet, a place he entered only to change clothes.
“Well, you got something in the mail,” he said, tossing a letter onto the bed. “Return address is some city in Massachusetts. Who you know in Massachusetts?”
Izzy quickly propped herself up in the bed, staring at the envelope. There was no name on the return address, but she knew it was Hal. The morning sickness turned into a solid chunk of stone, a temporary relief.
“It’s just a friend. She’s at a camp up there,” Izzy said. Her father, true to form, asked no further questions. With her father out of her room, Izzy still held the secret of her pregnancy within her.