All the Difference

by Leah Ferguson

  “Dear, dumb husband.” Jenny patted Dan’s arm. “I don’t think the attendant was handing you a dish so you could stuff your face.”

  Dan looked from Jenny to Molly.

  “He wanted a tip, Dan,” said Molly. “He was asking for money.”

  “Oh, damn it,” said Dan, scraping some bacon and scallops from his plate onto a napkin. “That’s why he got so salty when I left. I gotta go give this back to him.”

  Before Dan had a chance to go, Scott strolled up, a half-empty glass in one hand and what looked like a refill of scotch in the other.

  “Great party, right?” He gestured broadly to the rest of the room, sloshing a little of the liquor onto Molly’s good boots. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her parents watching them.

  “Molly, aren’t you so glad now that my folks convinced us to have this thing?” Scott lowered his voice into a loud whisper. “And you’d be so proud of me! I haven’t mentioned one word about the baby,” he said, rubbing her belly, “to anyone!”

  “The what?” Jenny and Dan stared at Molly, mouths open.

  “Oh, shit,” Scott said. He swayed a little on his feet. “Sorry, Mol.”

  They’d attracted the attention of a couple of second cousins who were standing at the bar nearby.

  “You’re pregnant?” Jenny’s voice was low, almost a hiss. Molly had never seen her friend’s eyes so wide. “The whole time we’ve been talking about babies, and you haven’t said a word?”

  “She didn’t want to tell you,” Scott said, his voice louder than the rest of theirs. Molly realized he was trying to smooth over his mistake. “’Cause she didn’t want you to get upset that she was going to be hatching her egg before you had a chance to lay yours.”

  Well, Molly thought, that didn’t work. Dan, for a brief moment, looked like he might punch Scott in the nose.

  “Scott! What are you doing?” Molly whispered, brushing his hand away from her stomach. She glanced at Jenny, who was standing still in front of them, her face ashen. “How much have you had to drink?”

  “Oh, hey, baby, let’s relax about it, okay?” Scott’s expression was earnest. “It’s the twenty-first century. People don’t care.” He gestured to Jenny and Dan before looking at Molly again. “So you’re already knocked up! What are you really worried about? The seal is broken! That ship has sailed! We should be proud of ourselves. Ya know what I mean?” He held his hand up for a high five, and when Molly just glared at him, he turned to Jenny, then Dan, with his outstretched palm. Both stood in silence, drinks in hand, and looked at him.

  Molly felt a sudden flood of embarrassment rush through her, starting at her swollen feet in their stained boots and welling up in her body until it washed over her face. She closed her eyes, as if the scene would go away if she couldn’t see it.

  “Scott, just stop,” Molly said. She could feel the heat simmering across her face. “Jenny, I wanted to tell you, every day since I found out.” She looked from Jenny to Dan. “I just didn’t know how.”

  She saw her friends share a glance of understanding. Jenny would’ve done the same thing, she knew. Molly started to speak, but Scott was still talking, the consonants of his words starting to lose their edges.

  “Dude, I think I’m wasted.” He smacked Dan on the arm with the back of his hand and turned to the women. “Though, you want to talk about wasted, you shoulda seen Dan that night the boys all went to Finnigan’s Wake to celebrate me sealing the proposal deal with you. How many shots did you do, Dan? Five? Six?” He elbowed Jenny’s husband and laughed.

  Dan blushed and glanced sidelong at his wife. Jenny looked like she was ready to head to that bridge she’d talked about.

  Scott leaned toward her. “You should be proud of your man, Jenny. He acts like such a goody two-shoes, but he can really throw it back.”

  Dan was rocking back and forth on his heels. Molly saw him look toward the restroom as if he couldn’t wait to get that plate back to the attendant. Maybe he’d give a tip along with the dish this time, she thought.

  Scott was still talking.

  “Yeah, Dan, and how many drinks did you buy for that chick you were talking to all night? I saw you disappear, you know.” Scott clapped his hand on the shoulder of an uncomfortable-looking Dan and took a gulp of his scotch. Jenny turned to her husband. The color of her face had shifted from pale to crimson.

  “Hey,” she said. “I tried calling you a hundred times that night. What is Scott saying?”

  “Jenny, he’s drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Dan said.

  “Yeah, I’d hope so. But you never told me why you didn’t return my texts. Is this why? Because you were with some other girl?”

  Jenny had once said that the worst decision her mother had ever made wasn’t in marrying her father—it was in staying with him. Molly held her breath and waited for Dan to speak.

  “Jenny, it’s not how it sounds—” Dan protested. “I think the liquor’s making Scott a little rammy. We’ve all had a rough night.”

  His worried eyes were now glaring at Scott.

  “Then what happened, Dan? When you left with her? What happened?” Jenny’s spoke in hushed, urgent tones. She was shaking and didn’t seem to notice that she’d attracted some attention in the room. “Wait—you told me you spent the night at Scott’s. Did you not, then? Where were you?” Jenny’s voice got shrill. “What is going on here?”

  Molly swallowed hard.

  “Jenny, I—” Dan began.

  Jenny was starting to cry. “I waited up for you all night, freaking out because you hadn’t called me. We never do that to each other. I checked the city police’s website to make sure there weren’t any accidents or shootings or kidnappings. You don’t even know all the stuff I was thinking could’ve happened to you. I called your freaking sister to see if she’d heard from you. Your sister! I HATE your sister!”

  “Whooaaa.” Scott’s eyes widened and he clamped his mouth shut. He looked from Jenny to Dan and back again, arms limp at his sides, holding the empty glasses. Molly stood stock-still, almost afraid to move lest someone tell her that what was happening was actually real. Jenny and Dan were the most rock-solid couple she knew. It had to have been a misunderstanding.

  Jenny didn’t acknowledge the tears spilling down her cheeks by wiping them away, and instead stuck her chin up in the air and blinked hard.

  Scott spoke. “I . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” His voice cracked.

  Dan glared at him and moved toward his wife. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and she took a step backward.

  “Jenny, come on. You know me well enough by now—”

  “Dan, apparently I don’t know anything anymore. Not when everything is turned upside down.”

  She glanced at Molly. Molly dropped her gaze to the floor.

  “I can’t do this. Not one more thing.” Jenny shook her head. The tears fell uninhibited now. “You, Dan,” Jenny said. Her voice was a whisper. “You, too?”

  Dan didn’t have a chance to respond before Jenny strode out of the room, leaving them staring after her in a stunned silence. He took off after her in a jog, and Molly stood beside the space they’d left, watching one more piece of the puzzle fall away.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  March

  No

  “So, I guess that’s that, then?” Molly’s father took a sip from his coffee and placed the mug back on the coaster.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s that. For now, anyway,” Molly said. She swallowed a mouthful of her decaf, wincing as the hot coffee scalded her tongue, and ran her fingers around the lip of the mauve-colored mug. It was the same cup she used whenever she visited her parents. In fact, Molly realized, it was the same cup she’d used every day at home since she’d been a teenager. Molly stared at the mug. She never had been good at dealing with change.

  Her mother
stood at the kitchen sink, fingertips braced on the edge of the counter. She was looking out the window, her thin frame silhouetted against the slanting late-winter light shining through the clear panes. Her cotton button-front shirt was rolled at the sleeves up to her elbows, a carryover from the days she’d spent sitting at the table, hunched over the papers she graded with a calculator and red pen. She was a small woman, but years of managing twenty-five high school students at a time had created a determined fire inside of Emily, a way of focusing her attention that Molly found both enviable and intimidating.

  Emily turned around. “Well, Molly.” She rubbed her hands together, their dry skin making a rasping sound like sandpaper that’s been worked over too many times. “This isn’t quite the order that we had wanted you to do things, is it?”

  Molly’s mother met her eyes, holding them until Molly grew uncomfortable and looked away. Her father remained quiet, but his gaze never left his daughter, either. Molly knew they were both trying to see through her somber demeanor, wanting to get past their own disappointment to the root of what was hurting her the most. There were good parents who were fixers, Molly knew. But better parents nudged their children in the right direction and let them do the rest.

  Molly could hear Fleetwood Mac playing from the stereo in the living room. “Bleed To Love Her” was one of her dad’s favorites.

  “No, Mom, it isn’t.” She didn’t shift her gaze from her mug.

  Emily bit her lower lip, then turned to her husband. Jack didn’t take his eyes off of Molly’s face. For a moment, the air in the kitchen was still.

  “Are you keeping the baby?” Jack asked. The question, like most of Jack’s, was to the point.

  “Yes, yes,” Molly said. “Anything else wasn’t an option, you know that.” Whether it was perfect timing or not, Molly had always seen herself as a mother. As it happened, so did the universe.

  “And what is Scott’s role in this? Besides the obvious, I mean?” Emily asked. Molly cringed. Emily had tilted her head to look at her daughter, her gray-blue eyes steady and dry.

  “Scott appears to have washed his hands of the whole deal, Mom, because I haven’t heard a word from him since I told him about the baby. I hurt him pretty badly, so it’s either that or he’s in denial.” Molly shook her head. “I don’t know. And at this point, I can’t worry about him. I’m on my own, baby or no baby.”

  Jack cleared his throat. He was a burly grizzly bear of a man, with a full gray beard and large hands. He had a penchant for faded jeans and flannel shirts, and always seemed to carry the vague scent of pipe tobacco about him, even though he didn’t smoke. It was hard to ignore him when he was in a room, even if he remained silent, but on the rare occasion he spoke up, people stopped to listen. Molly looked up to meet his eyes now and swallowed, hard.

  “Well, Molly, Scott’s a rat bastard if he’s not going to support this baby. That’s obvious.”

  “Way to help, Pop.”

  “Let me finish.” Jack leaned forward to tuck a finger under Molly’s chin, just like he used to do when she was a little girl. “But that doesn’t mean the child’s not going to be taken care of. You know that.”

  Molly nodded, but her mouth felt dry.

  “It’ll work out, Molly. It always does.”

  Jack sat back in his chair and thumped both of his hands on the tabletop with a definitive whack.

  “Well, then, Emily,” he said, and his mouth broke into a smile that exposed his small snaggletooth. “I’d say it looks like we have a grandchild to get ready for.” Jack picked up his coffee and gave Molly a wink over the lip of the mug. Molly allowed herself to relax just a bit.

  Emily shook her head as if she’d snapped out of a trance. She, too, broke into a smile, though hers was more hesitant, forced. She tucked her hair, which hung in a sweeping gray line to her shoulders, behind one ear.

  “Why, then, I suppose we do!” She began moving around the kitchen, hands busy, smoothing dish towels on their bars and straightening the ceramic flour jars on the countertop.

  “Do you know the sex of the baby yet?” She asked the question over her shoulder.

  “No, Mom.” Molly felt her chin jut up. “I want it to be a surprise.”

  Emily threw a wet dish towel onto the linoleum countertop with a slap.

  “A surprise! Haven’t we had enough of those for a little while?” Her mother forced out a low, scraping chuckle that ended with a cough.

  Jack gave Emily a sharp look. She shrugged and kept moving, now clearing the pie dishes from the table.

  “Oh, all right. So we don’t know if it’s going to be a boy or girl. But you do realize that people are going to give you a lot of yellow and green clothes, Molly.”

  Molly nodded.

  “I just hope you’re ready for that baby to be dressed like a sick duck.”

  Jack stood up and patted his daughter on the shoulder. “I think I’m going to go work in my shop for a little while, dear.” Molly’s father owned a hardware store and often did some carpentry on the side. He started to walk out of the kitchen, then stopped, his hand still on Molly’s shoulder. He leaned back to look at her.

  “This baby is going to be loved, kiddo. Don’t mind your mother’s huffing and puffing.” He chuckled as Emily swatted him on the rear with the dish towel. He dropped a quick kiss onto the top of Molly’s head before walking out to the garage.

  Molly closed her eyes. She could hear her mother chattering away, but she didn’t catch Emily’s words. She breathed a silent sigh of relief—it was over, that step was finished, it was time to move on—and opened her eyes to answer her mother’s repeated question.

  “I don’t know for sure, Mom, but I think Jenny will probably throw me a shower. Do you want me to give you her number?”

  Molly dug into her bag for her smartphone. From the living room, she could hear the dejected, driving bass line as the next song on the mix began, and she recognized “I’m So Afraid.” She turned her attention toward her mother.

  A few weeks later, Molly stood in the fitting room of a maternity store on Walnut Street, turning left and right to judge how her slight bulge of a stomach looked under a new tunic shirt. She squinted at her profile in the mirror, the bottom half of which was obscured by sticky-looking handprints on the glass. The walls of the plain white cubicle were built too close together for anybody with a belly poking out over her pants. An odor of old apple juice and spoiled milk hung in the air like smoke after a fire. She squirted some sanitizer onto her hands from the large bottle she kept in her bag and rubbed them together, assessing the pregnant body she saw in her reflection. Her hips were already wider. Her small breasts had started to bulge over the top of her bra cups like the chocolate cupcakes she brought home from Brown Betty each weekend. Her pregnancy was moving forward like a bus pulling away from the curb, speeding up before she could reach its door.

  Molly took off the bright pink shirt and reached for another in a larger size. She wished Jenny were there with her, giggling over the elastic waistbands and intimidating nursing bras with all their snaps and strange flaps. Jenny had been very quiet since Molly told her the news. She and Dan had just had a huge fight—strange for them, under any circumstances—which Molly didn’t know about when she’d decided to share the news of her pregnancy. Molly cringed at the memory of Jenny’s tears, her silent nod of acceptance as she sat on the stool across the kitchen island from Molly. They were very careful with each other now, more tentative in their conversations than they’d ever been. Molly needed her friend just as much as she knew Jenny needed her. But it should be Jenny here trying on the maternity clothes, not Molly, and they both knew it.

  Neither friend said it, of course, but the knowledge sat there, big and raw and ugly. That it wasn’t right that Molly was starting to feel excited, that she was the one who got to be curious to meet the person growing inside her. That Molly should be
amazed by the way her body was shifting, or be the one to wander into her kitchen at two in the morning because she craved marshmallows in peanut butter. It was supposed to be Jenny. Molly couldn’t keep the guilt from working its way into her consciousness, like the buzz from the sugar she’d get after the late-night binges. Jenny should be the one trying on the too-big maternity top: Jenny, with her good husband, and her financial planning, and all of their hopeful trying. Not the single woman with a workload too big and a wallet too small to carry. Jenny had had some sort of breakdown after that day in her kitchen, fleeing her life with Dan for her parents’ house in the suburbs. She hadn’t been back to the city since.

  There’s a happiness to be found in bad timing, Molly thought, if only we can allow ourselves to lose control just a little. It’s hard, too hard, to do that, though, and, like Jenny, Molly was afraid. But she also knew, just as she’d known she was going to raise this baby herself, that sometimes—just sometimes—being in over your head gives you a chance to learn how to swim.

  Molly just wished she weren’t so scared.

  She looked at herself in the mirror again, her belly like a deflated beach ball under her shirt. She twisted the tunic over her head with so much force a stitch popped, then pulled on her own shirt, avoiding her reflection. Monica probably would have insisted she be here, too, she and Jenny jockeying for space in the dressing room with her. Molly would’ve had a pile of complete outfits set aside and purchased already. There would have been designer jeans, and dresses for every trimester, and a complete lingerie collection of underwear and tights, already packaged in shopping bags, ready to make their appearances on Center City sidewalks and Chestnut Hill cafés. The occasion would have been a celebration. Molly sat down for a moment in her too-tight bikini briefs. She clutched the discarded shirt and told herself not to cry.

  “Everything going all right in there?” Molly heard the salesgirl’s chipper voice hop around the corners of the dressing stall curtain. She yanked on her jeans and grabbed her small pile of items to be purchased, hefted her bag onto her shoulder, and sidled out of the room, struggling for a moment with the curtain as it wrapped over her protruding middle.