JEPTHA DROVE LIKE a maniac home from the store, Cody snoozing in the seat beside him, his knees up around his shoulders in the Camaro’s deep bucket seats. At a stoplight on 11W, Jeptha double-checked that the ring box was still in his shirt pocket and then pulled out his phone and saw it was already getting on five o’clock. He wanted Lucy to know he was there, ready for their date, not about to mess this one up. He wanted everything to be perfect so that she had no reason to say no—other than the fact it was him doing the asking.
He looked over at Cody, a small snore flaring his perfectly round nostrils with each breath. It was like watching a sow sleep. Jeptha sighed. He hated to do it, but he didn’t have a choice. When the light turned, he pushed the gas and drove a few miles on down the road.
Finally, right before the turnoff for Lucy’s house and a mile or two from the turn-off for Cody’s road, he nudged his friend. “Hey, man. Wake up.”
“Hmm? What? Huh? Oh, shit. Did I fall asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Why we stopped on the side of the road?”
“You gotta get out.”
“Here?”
“I need to go pick up Lucy. I can’t drop you off.”
“Are you fucking kidding me, man? I go with you to pick out a ring for your pregnant not-girlfriend, and you kick me out of the car on the side of the highway?”
“I don’t got a choice.”
“I’m not getting out.”
“Well, you ain’t coming with me, and I ain’t driving you home.”
“Aw, man, come on.”
“Call Marla. She’ll get you.”
“She’s shopping with her mama and the kids all afternoon. They ain’t gonna be home ’til seven.”
“Well, they say as walking is good for you,” Jeptha said, eyeing the strip of fat escaping from the bottom of Cody’s shirt.
Cody tugged his shirt down. “I hate walking.”
“Cody. When have I ever asked for anything?”
“You borrowed my truck two weeks ago. And two weeks before that. And my ladder and jack a few months before that, which you still ain’t returned.”
Jeptha rested his head on the steering wheel. “Something big?”
Cody was silent, his arms crossed over his belly. He sighed. “This is that important to you?”
“Cody, I’m set to ask Lucy to marry me. Tonight.”
Cody growled and rolled his eyes. “Fine. I’ll walk. You better hope she says yes, though, because I don’t plan on forgiving you for a while.”
Jeptha nodded. He would agree to anything if it would get Cody out of his car so he could make that left turn toward Lucy’s house. He could feel his whole body aching in her direction.
“I mean it, not for a long while. If you need a shoulder to cry on, or someone to drink with, you better hit up ol’ Delnor at Judy’s. I ain’t it. And you can’t borrow my truck no more neither.”
“I owe you. Big.”
“And don’t think I am gonna talk to you tomorrow. I don’t care whether she says yes or no. You are on your own.”
“I get it. I’m sorry, man. But I got to do this,” Jeptha said. He paused for a minute, staring at Cody, waiting for him to move toward the door. Finally, he reached across his friend’s belly and opened the handle for him. “Like I said, I owe you.”
Cody stared at the open door and back at his friend, his mouth set in a thin line, shaking his head back and forth slowly like this was the most disappointing thing he’d ever witnessed in his whole life.
“You gotta go,” Jeptha said.
Cody heaved himself out of the car, shuffling his pants up and his shirt down once he was standing. He put his hands on the roof of the car and leaned down so Jeptha could see him.
“You’re cold, man. Ice cold,” he said. He stared at Jeptha for a minute, then smiled and hit the top of the car. “Aw, hell. Go on. Good luck, asshole.” He slammed the door.
Jeptha drove off, his car tires thudding over the grass and gravel on one side, leaving Cody in a cloud of dust. In his rearview mirror, he saw Cody scratch his belly and hitch his pants up one more time. As Jeptha drove over the hill, Cody kicked the ground and started walking home. As his friend disappeared from view, Jeptha’s stomach tightened, fear filling his body at the prospect of what he was about to do. For about ten seconds, he considered turning the car around, heading to Judy’s and getting shit-ass drunk. But the moment passed. He bit his lip, touched the ring box in his pocket, and turned onto Maple Avenue.
10
LUCY THOUGHT WORKING THE rest of her shift would lessen some of her anger at LouEllen. She hoped her body would be so tired that she’d be too worn out to hash it out with her tonight. But, no, she was still spitting mad as she stomped through the parking lot, slammed her door behind her, and pushed the gas pedal to the floor. How dare LouEllen assume this baby was hers—or at least part hers? How dare she go around telling people in town that they were having a baby? Far as Lucy could tell, no one else but her was throwing up forty times a day, gaining ten pounds, or generally feeling like shit. Lucy had wanted LouEllen to help, to be a part of her life, but she envisioned that help as a kindly grandparent willing and able to babysit. Not some kind of co-parent who, knowing LouEllen, would make all the decisions before even telling Lucy.
Lucy slammed the wheel to the left just before her street. She came to a quick stop in front of the house and stared up at it. Angry as she was, it was a bad idea to run in there primed to fight. She and LouEllen got along as well as they did because they didn’t fight. For the first few years, Lucy had been so lost without her parents that she’d leaned on LouEllen exclusively. She was the best-behaved teenager anyone had ever seen. Not because she cared about her behavior, but because she was so sad and so confused and so angry about their deaths that she couldn’t muster the energy to misbehave. Then, once the clouds had lifted, it was easier to go along with LouEllen. Lucy had mostly been happy with the arrangement. She disagreed when she really meant it, but for the most part, her life with LouEllen had an easy, workable, livable rhythm. If it was one that was mostly driven by LouEllen, Lucy didn’t mind. Or hadn’t minded. Until now.
She took three deep breaths in the car, remembering how her mom used to make her do that when she was little and needed help calming herself down. If she could get to her room and rest for a little while before she had to get ready for this stupid date, she’d feel better. She could get up in the morning and have an adult conversation about the baby and what role she wanted LouEllen to play. There was no need for a fight—just a calm, rational conversation between two adults. Decision made, Lucy thought of a nap, and her pace quickened up the walk to the house, like a cow smelling the hay in the barn. She was so close to her bed, so close to being able to avoid the drama of a fight. Six feet from her door, her shoulders drooped in relief. Then LouEllen stepped out of the kitchen. Lucy’s stomach grew hot at the sight of her.
“You’re home!” she said to Lucy.
“I’m wiped. I’ve got to lay down for a few minutes,” Lucy said, trying and failing to keep the anger out of her voice.
“I know, I know. But let me show you one thing first,” LouEllen said, grabbing Lucy by the elbow and pulling her down the hall. “I know I said I was just going to pick up a few things, but I got started, and everything was so cute. And I’d already done the paint, so I said, ‘Let me finish this for her so she doesn’t have to think about it.’”
“Done the paint? Finish what?” Lucy said. She had no idea what LouEllen was talking about.
“Ta-da!” LouEllen said, as she flung open the door to the back room.
The crib was in there, alongside a changing table with a yellow changing pad stocked full of diapers and wipes, a bookshelf full of board books, a comfy nursing chair, several tiny outfits and sleepers folded neatly in baskets on the shelves of the changing table, and what looked like more than a dozen stuffed animals. The room was perfect: it had everything a baby would need, like something
out of a magazine.
Lucy hated it.
“What do you think?” LouEllen asked.
Lucy burst into sobs. It was everything she didn’t want in terms of style: pale yellow; wallpaper trim in those pastel safari animals that looked like no lion or giraffe she’d ever seen; a rug that had matching animals running around its border. But far worse than the style choices was the fact that she had wanted to do this herself—pick a wall paint, put together the bookshelves, swearing as she did so, and pick out pillows for the chair, laughing when things didn’t quite match, all while entertaining smudged-edged visions of her and the baby using these things. She was so tired, so worn out, and so angry as she thought of all the hovering LouEllen would do, all the love in which she would smother Lucy and her baby. Lucy knew it was ungrateful: complaining about too much love, about a perfect baby’s room, what was wrong with her? But love done LouEllen’s way could be torture. Lucy had been fine being waterboarded by love when it was just her. But now she had someone else to worry about, and she’d be damned if she’d let LouEllen take it all away from her.
“You love it,” LouEllen said. “I knew you would. I wanted to do this one thing for you, so you didn’t have to worry. But you better stop crying, or I’ll start. And we know I can’t stop.” She patted Lucy on the shoulder.
“Don’t,” Lucy said, jerking away. “Don’t touch me.”
“What?” LouEllen asked.
“Just stop. Stop all of it. Stop this room, stop acting like this is your baby, stop telling me what to do,” Lucy said. She tried to keep her voice even, tried to remember that she had wanted to do this in a nice, calm way, but she was losing the battle.
“What on earth are you talking about?” LouEllen said. Her voice lost some of its liquid sweetness and took on a harder edge.
“This! All this!” Lucy said, waving her arms around the room.
“The room? You don’t like it?”
“This has nothing to do with the goddamn room. Which, incidentally, I hate.” A sense of power flooded over Lucy when she saw how LouEllen’s face sunk at that. “It has to do with the fact that none of this is yours.” She pointed at her stomach. “This isn’t your baby. It isn’t your life. It’s mine. And it’s messed up all to hell right now, but I’m not gonna let you take it away from me.”
“I’m not trying to take it away from you. I’m trying to help.”
“You took this away from me,” Lucy said, waving her arms around the room again. “All this. This was the one fun thing I had in front of me. The throwing up, the getting bigger, the stress, the figuring out how I’m going to raise this kid on my own…. None of that is fun.”
“Why do you keep saying on your own? From the first moment this happened, you’ve been walking around like you are by yourself. Like you suddenly found yourself pregnant in the middle of Timbuktu. But here you are, still here, still living in this house with ME, the lady who has been taking care of you for six years now.”
“You know what? You did take care of me when I was a kid. That’s true. But now, I take care of myself. I live here, but I have a job, and I take care of my stuff. I’d pay rent if you’d let me, but you won’t cash the checks. And all that’s fine. But you are acting like this baby is going to be yours, or at least part yours. Like you are going to be a second mom to it.”
“I’m not behaving like I’m going to be a second mom,” LouEllen said, rolling her eyes.
“Oh, really? Then why did Delnor have to stop and think for a minute about whether you and I were a couple?”
“A couple? From Delnor? If that wasn’t so utterly ridiculous, I’d commend him for being so damn progressive.”
“You were so insistent about how this was our baby that he thought that meant you were going to raise the baby, take it from me, and maybe I’d see y’all sometimes. Like it’d be your kid, not mine.”
“Lucy, it’s Delnor Gilliam. He’s a drunk. Are you seriously picking a fight with me ’cause of something he said?”
“It’s not just that, LouEllen. I know you. I know you get excited. You go overboard. You smother people. And it’s mostly smothering them in love, but that’s my job with this baby. And I don’t know if you can hold yourself back.”
“Do you honestly think that a baby can get too much love?” LouEllen said, shaking her head at Lucy, her eyes wet with the start of tears.
“Too much love, no. But I can definitely get too much of you—too much attention, too much making decisions that I should be making, too much doing things for me when I want to do them for myself,” Lucy said.
“You can’t do it all by yourself. You can’t raise this kid all on your own.”
“Who says I can’t?”
“You will need help. And what are you going to do? Ask Jeptha?”
“Leave him out of this.”
“Why? He’s the whole damn reason you are in this mess.”
“I don’t know why you hate him so much,” Lucy said.
“I don’t know why you don’t,” LouEllen shot back. “He got you pregnant. He’s a drunk. A lowlife who is never going to be anything, and yet, you keep giving him chances.”
“He’s this baby’s father.”
“You’d be better off thinking of him as a sperm donor.”
“Jesus Christ, LouEllen!” Lucy said, slamming a teddy bear to the ground. “What is wrong with you?”
“Calm down, Lucy.”
“This is what I’m talking about. You telling me what to do. Do you honestly think that I’m going to exclude Jeptha from this baby’s life because of his past? The answer is no. Do you honestly think that you telling me different will change my mind? Yes, you do. You will think that about everything. The color of paint in this room. The kind of car seat. The baby’s doctor. What formula I buy. What friends he should have. What sports he should play. And on and on and on and on. I’m already sick of it, and I don’t even have a baby yet.”
Lucy, her chest heaving, stared at LouEllen, who held her gaze. The older woman’s face was impossible to read. It was one of the only times that Lucy hadn’t been able to tell exactly what she was thinking before she opened her mouth.
“I had no idea you hated me this much,” LouEllen said.
“Dammit, LouEllen. I don’t hate you. I just don’t want you as a partner in this baby’s life.”
Lucy watched as a dust mote floated down to the floor, illuminated in a shaft of light sneaking in through the side of the blackout shades LouEllen had installed. Lucy waited for LouEllen to speak. Instead, just her nostrils flared.
Finally, LouEllen flung open the door of the closet. Hauling out a large cardboard box, she began slamming stuffed animals into it.
“Don’t want a partner, huh? Don’t want me? Well, you know what? I’m not so sure I want you. In fact, I think I’ll pack up all this baby stuff for you, get it all nice and assembled so you can take it with you, wherever the hell it is you think you are going to go. I don’t want to hold you back. Or make you do anything you don’t want to do. And believe me, I’d love not to be woken up six times a night by a screaming baby. If I’d have wanted that all these years, I would have had one myself.”
LouEllen flew around the room, throwing animals, diapers, and clothes into the box with an uncanny accuracy. Lucy bit back tears, hoping that keeping them inside would keep the sheer and utter panic from overtaking her.
“Oh, but wait,” LouEllen said, stopping suddenly, a tub of Desitin in one hand and a stuffed alligator in the other. She stared hard at Lucy. “I remember why I didn’t have a baby now. I got you in the middle of the night, in the middle of your life. A kid I had to raise, from a friend I often couldn’t stand. A kid too old to be parented and too young to be on her own. But lucky me! It seems like you are the perfect age to be on your own now! I don’t need to worry about you, I guess.”
“Are you kicking me out?” Lucy asked, her voice barely above a whisper. This fight had spiraled out of control. And yet, looking at LouEllen pa
cking up her stuff, she felt a sense of utter fear combined with sweet relief.
“I …” LouEllen stopped. Her arm, poised to throw yet another stuffed animal into the box at maximum speed, relaxed until she was hugging the bear to her chest. “I—”
The front bell rang.
LouEllen looked at Lucy, a question in her eyes. But almost instantly Lucy saw her eyes narrow, followed by her lips clamping down into a tight grimace and her nostrils flaring. It could only be Jeptha at the door.
“It’s Jeptha, isn’t it?” LouEllen asked.
“I’m guessing. He’s early.”
“Of course he is,” LouEllen said. “The one time in his whole damn life. I’ll get the door. You go get changed.”
Lucy had forgotten she was still in her work clothes. She hated to leave Jeptha to the mercy of an angry LouEllen, but more deeply, she wanted to get him and herself out of that house before either she or LouEllen jumped off a cliff too high for them to come back from.
Lucy strained to listen to the conversation as she brushed her hair and threw on whatever clothes still fit. LouEllen’s voice took on that syrupy sweet drawl she used when she was being fake. Poor Jeptha’s voice was so soft that Lucy could barely hear him. But as she put her hair up into a ponytail, she heard them walk down the hall. She heard LouEllen throw open the door with a flourish. She heard Jeptha breathe in sharply.
“Hey,” she said to Jeptha as she came up behind him.
“Hey,” he said, turning to her. His eyes were wide, his face drawn and ashen.
Lucy looked over at the room. The box of animals was gone, the space somehow miraculously returned to its pastel glory. She looked up at LouEllen, who stared back with a wide smile and a self-satisfied gleam in her eye.
11
JEPTHA HAD NEVER BEEN so glad to leave a house than at that moment. LouEllen smirked once more in his direction as he held the front door open for Lucy. The door closed an inch behind him with more force than was strictly necessary. He broke out in a cold sweat all over again. He helped Lucy into the car and hoped she wouldn’t notice.
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