Cowboys Are My Weakness

by Pam Houston

  Chuck took the news about the baby pretty well. He started coming home earlier from the club, and he and Casey would sit outside in the morning and play Yahtzee, and for about two months I was jealous of their happiness. Then Chuck landed a spot with a band that had a gig in Las Vegas and he was gone five days a week, and even though he insisted that it wouldn’t last long and that it wasn’t related to the baby, I thought it was pretty bad timing and probably not just a coincidence.

  I put off telling Richard about Casey’s baby, because I knew if I did he’d think I wanted one too, and even though I’d tell him that couldn’t be further from the truth he’d believe it anyway. Finally, the three of us had dinner and Casey told him herself and he smiled and acted happy, but then he shot me a look that said it would never work out in a million years. Richard pretended to think that Casey was ill-bred and irresponsible, but I know part of him wished he could be poor and pregnant and unconcerned like she was, and that was the part I loved the most about him, if you boiled it right down.

  Chuck was in Las Vegas every Wednesday through Monday, and I know Casey thought pretty hard about what she called the “a” word while he was gone, and even though I wanted to give Chuck the benefit of the doubt, I thought it might be the best thing she could do.

  “Even Richard believes in abortion,” I told her.

  “All that means is that he got somebody pregnant that he didn’t want to marry,” she said.

  “That must have been Stephanie,” I said. “The one before Karen. We went to her house once. She still has pictures of him all over her walls. It’s been almost seven years.”

  “Be careful, Millie,” she said.

  There was a Lamaze class on Thursday nights and I offered to fill in for Chuck until the Las Vegas deal was over, but Casey wasn’t interested in going.

  “I’m reading all about it,” she said, as if she were an avid reader, as if I’d ever known her to finish a book.

  “Have you heard from Chuck?” I asked. It was Tuesday morning. He should have been home. I watched her head bob back and forth.

  “You know what I can’t figure out?” she said.

  “Hmm.”

  “I can’t figure out those women who find out they’re pregnant and they just slip into motherhood like they’ve been waiting for it their whole lives. Their voice starts changing, and they start knitting like they were born doing it. How does that happen? Why didn’t it happen to me?”

  “Maybe it takes a few months,” I said. “Maybe the idea will grow on you.”

  “Millie,” she said, “in five months a doctor is going to hand me a baby and I’m going to have to bring it home. I guess when it’s right here in front of me I’ll know what to do, but sometimes I look down at my stomach and I feel it move and I think my God it’s some kind of alien or something.”

  “Do you think it’s going to hurt a lot?” I said.

  She shrugged. “What’s a little pain. It’s not like it goes on forever.”

  “They say it’s like really bad cramps,” I said.

  “Then how bad could it be?”

  Pretty bad, I thought, but next to Casey I’m a weakling, and who knew how bad the pain would have to be to get to her. She didn’t have any insurance, and at first she wanted to have the baby at home, but the doctor wanted her in the hospital and she finally said that money and babies weren’t worth killing yourself over, and gave in.

  “One thing about it,” I said, “is when it’s all over you’ll have something that’s really yours, something that has to love you more than anyone else. You’ll have something that won’t ever leave you, or at least not really leave you, at least not for eighteen years.”

  “But what if I don’t love it?” she said.

  Casey and I were celebrating the first night of her sixth month when Richard came by without calling. He said he wanted to go for a drive and talk about our future, and even though his visits to Karen had increased to two nights a week, and even though she was calling now two or three times a day, I took it as a good sign.

  He didn’t talk the whole way out to the lake, but when we got close to the place where you turn off the highway he held my hand and I could feel his muscles, tight all the way to the back of his neck.

  The lake was calm and it reflected headlights from the interstate halfway to Nevada. If I squinted I could make out the silhouette of the turrets that crowned the palace they used to call the Saltair. Inside the dark building the water was higher than the second floor.

  “So.” His voice made me jump. “What do you think our potential is in the long-long run?” It sounded like stocks.

  “In the long-long run,” I said, “I think our potential is good.” His free hand drummed the dashboard.

  “Do you think I can satisfy you, sexually and otherwise, for a long time?”

  I said, “I think you can satisfy me for a long time.” The veins around his temples looked like they would burst.

  “Does it bother you,” he said, “that I’m a little older than you?”

  “Not in the least,” I said.

  He drew in a breath. “Do you want to have children?”

  I didn’t know the answer.

  “I think so,” I said, “someday. Do you?”

  “I never thought so,” he said. “But now I do. The only question is . . .”

  “With who?” I said.

  “I know that sounds awful,” he said, “but I had to know how you felt.”

  Never cry in front of him, Casey said, but I did, entirely too often.

  “Now that I know how you feel I can get things settled with Karen, and then you and I will go on a trip.”

  For a minute the idea of a trip cheered me up, but then I started to think about how we never had a conversation about our future that didn’t have Karen’s name in it. I started to think about how disgusted Casey would be with me if she heard what he’d said, and I even started to think about getting out of the car. But all that was out there was salt water and highway, so I waited for him to stop thinking long enough to drive me home.

  It was the beginning of Casey’s seventh month and everything about her was changing, her jawline especially, and her eyes.

  “So how’s Richard?” she said. “I haven’t seen him lately.”

  “I haven’t either,” I said, and it was true. He’d been seeing more of Karen than ever, and even though I tried to be grown-up about it I always wound up crying and acting like the child he thought I was. He said sometimes I was even harder to deal with than she was, and that he needed some time alone to figure things out, but time alone always turned out to mean time with Karen, and things wouldn’t ever get figured out until he decided to leave them alone.

  Casey told me to tell him to get it straight with Karen and call me when he was finished, and I did. But he said he couldn’t stand to be without me for that long and I said how long and he said it wouldn’t be much longer at all. He was spending three nights a week with each of us; the seventh night swung back and forth.

  “How long are you gonna do this?” Casey said.

  “This week is Karen’s fortieth birthday,” I said. “He thinks she might go over the edge.”

  “What about you?”

  “He says I need to be strong and patient and mature. He says if I can be all of those things he’ll get it worked out much faster.”

  “Dump him, Millie.” Casey rolled her hands over and over her belly. Chuck had been gone for three weeks straight. I didn’t ask her if he’d called, but if he had she would have told me.

  “He says we’re going to go to Santa Fe together,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Santa Fe. As soon as it’s all worked out, that’s where we’re going to go.”

  “Oh, Millie.”

  “He’s not sleeping with her,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I count his condoms.”

  She smiled.

  “Before he leaves, and then again when he comes back.”

>   “I bet that makes you feel pretty good about yourself,” she said, and then when she saw that I’d started to cry again she said, “Seriously, Millie, maybe you ought to see a doctor.”

  I always thought I’d be able to handle the situation with Karen better if she weren’t such a mystery, so I asked Richard if I could meet her.

  He said, “I hope you’re joking,” and I thought that was the end of it till one Sunday evening when the doorbell rang.

  We’d been in the tub together and Richard’s bathrobe was closest to me, so without even thinking I threw it around me and answered the door.

  Our eyes met and widened and held for a long minute, and she must have been as surprised as I was to see her hair, her eyes, her mouth, her build, her stance on a stranger wearing the bathrobe she must have worn, still dripping from the bathtub where she must have bathed. Except for the ten years she had on me, we were identical.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She looked hard at my face and then headed for her car. Her tires shrieked. I shut the door.

  “Who was it?” Richard was behind me.

  “I think it was Karen.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Did it look like Karen?”

  “I don’t know what Karen looks like,” I said. “It looked like me.”

  He was putting on his coat. He was looking for his keys.

  “Don’t go now,” I said.

  “I’ll be back.”

  “Dinner’s almost ready.”

  “You go ahead and eat.”

  “I don’t yell at you,” I said.

  “But you cry.” And it was true. I was crying then.

  “This is my night,” I said.

  He shut the door on my hand.

  Casey said, “Is there some good reason you allow yourself to be treated like that?”

  Chuck had finally sent word that he wasn’t coming home. It was one of those postcards the hotel maid leaves in the room. On the front were pictures of a red casino, a red dining room, a red lounge.

  “There must be some reason,” I said.

  We were sitting on the back porch, because it had the best view of the lake and the mountains behind it. Whenever I looked from that angle, I could imagine what the valley must have looked like ten thousand years ago when the lake was as big as three states back east and only the tops of the mountains poked through.

  “Maybe it’s the challenge,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Then you tell me why.”

  The lake was translucent in the sunset, as if lighted from below. I imagined the capital dome sinking below the surface, the high-rises going under, the mountains shrinking down into the water.

  “Do you know what he told me once?” I said. “He said if somebody was trying to kill me he’d shoot them. He said he’d shoot them even if I was only injured, if it was serious, I mean.”

  “Why did he say that?”

  “We were arguing about gun control.”

  “He doesn’t believe in gun control?”

  “And do you know what else?” I said. “He said even if I was already dead and he knew who did it, he’d kill them. Even if I was already dead.”

  Casey shook her head.

  “I think in Texan that means ‘I love you,’ ” I said. “Don’t you?” She rolled her eyes. “I said that if somebody was trying to hurt him I’d do anything in my power to stop them, but I didn’t know if I could actually shoot somebody, I didn’t know if I could shoot a gun at all.”

  Casey smiled at me out of her new jawline. “He’s crazy not to love you,” she said.

  The sun fell behind some low clouds near the horizon and the lake turned dark and dull. I heard Casey groan and shift in her chair. For eight full months she had defied her condition, but in the last month she’d given in to her weariness. It was hard to see her without her strength, and harder still to realize that even at her weakest she was stronger than I’d ever be, but what was hardest, even then, was to face the truth of what she’d just said.

  “Aw, Millie,” she said when she looked at my face, “over a guy?” She put her arm around me and I leaned against her. Through her sweatshirt, through her skin, I could feel movement, restless and strained, a pressure that felt to me greater than anything a stomach could bear. “At least cry over something that matters.”

  That night Richard called and asked me to come over. When I got there he was packing. He was going with Karen to Santa Fe.

  “I want you to understand that I’ve almost got it solved,” he said. “Soon it will all be over. Then we can concentrate on us.”

  I went into his bathroom and locked the door. There were ten condoms in the medicine chest, five in his shaving kit, an unopened box under the sink. I opened the door. He was bent over his suitcase.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I said.

  “I need you to be strong for two more weeks.”

  “You said you’d take me.” His suitcase clicked shut. The phone started to ring.

  “You don’t own me,” he said, and in that instant I could hear the echo of him saying just those words to Karen, and to Stephanie, and to whoever came before, to every woman he’d had since he was twenty, or sixteen, or twelve. And I thought about Karen, and how Stephanie looks like us too, and I imagined five or six of us all lined up and smiling just like a family portrait to hear his forty-year refrain, the simplest answer in his clear-cut life. And I thought beyond us to all the other women who had heard those words out of other men’s mouths: women with sculptured faces, with designer clothes, with graduate degrees. Women who could have any man. Women who upon hearing those words realized with something like absolute sorrow what gulf they would have to cross to be with that man. Women who started to cry, who slapped faces, who walked away. Then all the other women were gone. The phone was still ringing. I followed Richard to the garage.

  “What if I ever had a real problem?” I said.

  First he said, “I’d be there for you.” Then he said, “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What if my house burned down? What if my mother died? What if I got pregnant?”

  He put down his suitcase. “Are you?” he said.

  I looked into his perfect eyes. There was only one answer that would keep him from going to Santa Fe.

  “Not to the best of my knowledge,” I said.

  “Well, if you were,” he said, “then we’d get married and have a family.” He threw his suitcase in the trunk, closed the car door, and drove away.

  I got in my car and drove straight to the lake and across what was left of the parking lot. I put my front tires in the water. I wondered how deep the water got between me and the island, and I wondered if my car would float, and I wondered what people thought about right before they decided not to live anymore, and then I thought about the perfect tightness of Casey’s stomach. The wind rose out of the west and I could hear tiny waves lapping around my tires. I backed the car up a few feet, crawled into the backseat, and went to sleep.

  I woke up in the middle of a lightning storm. By the look of the light it was midafternoon. There were two-foot waves all across the lake, and I could feel them splash against the underside of the car. I started it up and got back on the highway. When I pulled into my driveway, Casey’s car was gone.

  By the time I got to room 427 I was afraid to knock on the door. I went back to the lobby and bought a white calla lily for Casey because it looked both sexy and pure, and I bought the biggest stuffed animal in the gift store, a moose with red ribbon in his horns. I bought magazines for Casey and some candy in case she was hungry, and then I was out of money, and I had to go back upstairs. I stood in front of her door for ten minutes before a nurse came by and asked if she could help me.

  “Do you know if she’s awake?” I said. “I thought she might be sleeping.”

  “Go on in,” the nurse said. “She’s trying to feed her baby.”r />
  Against the steel-gray curtains, against the steel-gray afternoon, against the metallic machines that kept track of her, Casey was warm and amber and serene. She smiled at me and my lily and my moose and my magazines. She held out her hand. Under her other arm was the baby.

  “Look at his fingers” was the first thing she said. I had to unwrap the blanket to see them. I had to lift the small pink arm, unfold it from itself. His fingers were almost as long as his forearm. When he grabbed my thumb, they wrapped all the way around.

  There was a big white clip on his belly button.

  “Do you think that would make a noise if someone tried to take him out of the hospital?” Casey said. “Do you think that’s what it’s for?”

  I shrugged, and realized I hadn’t said anything.

  “Hold him, Millie,” she said.

  I lifted him out of the nest her arm had made. He didn’t open his eyes, but it was clear he wanted to stay. I rocked him and walked towards the window. The gray was getting darker. The wind was picking up.

  “Did it hurt bad?”

  “More than you could ever imagine,” she said. “More than you could ever prepare yourself for. It’s not like cramps, Millie. It’s nothing like cramps.”

  I steadied myself on the windowsill.

  “He ripped me open, coming out. They had to sew me up.”

  For a second I was afraid I might faint and drop the baby. Casey’s eyes showed nothing but peace.

  “Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone having two kids,” she said, “anyone being willing to go through this more than once. I can’t believe my mother did this. My mother did this four times.”