As La Vista Turns

by Kris Ripper

  “You don’t say.” His voice was so deadpan that I was forced to elbow him.

  “It’s not funny.”

  “No. Actually, no, I agree. There is fucking nothing funny about being in love. It’s exhausting, and complicated, and requires constant discussion and vigilance. Seriously, I don’t know why anyone enjoys this.” He sipped. “Except for the part that I don’t ever want to live without him. Though even that just makes me afraid he’ll die, or get sick of me, or I’ll screw it up. Pretty much every part of this is deplorable, so I don’t blame you for being in denial.”

  I thumped my head against his shoulder. “Was that your idea of a motivational speech?”

  “Pretty much. Run like hell, Zane. Because you can’t go back once you tell her.”

  “Oh my god.” He smelled good. Clean and warm. And a little like the farmhouse. Or maybe after living here for a while the farmhouse took on people’s scents. If I stood in the middle of the kitchen, maybe I could smell all of them: the baby-skin scent of James, Obie’s vigorous windblown aroma, and of course Dred, whom I could sense everywhere around me, as if she disturbed all the energy in the house. If I paid very close attention, I could follow the path all the way back to her.

  I groaned. “I’m so fucked.”

  He awkwardly patted my arm. “Yeah. Well. If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure—”

  Sudden footsteps on the stairs cut off his words.

  Dred eyed both of us suspiciously. “There better be enough coffee for me.”

  Emerson waved toward the machine. “Do we look reckless enough to drink all the coffee?”

  “I don’t know yet. You look something.” She grabbed her usual mug and shoved me out of the way. Only not. More shoved against me. Until our sides were pressed together from knees to shoulders.

  I tried to control my breathing so it wouldn’t seem like I was, you know, hyperventilating. Or turned on. Or anything crazy like that.

  “Weird you guys stopped talking the second I came down here.”

  Emerson grunted. “You kill all the good conversations, Mildred. I’ve always said that. Anyway, you think pancakes today?”

  “Do you mean real pancakes? Or those fucking French things you made last time you said pancakes?”

  “Crepes. I only called them pancakes once! It was a fucking mistake.”

  They bantered, but the only thing I really paid attention to was the way that Mildred turned around and pressed against my side again.

  She really did smell good.

  I hadn’t seen Dred’s quilt blocks in a while. There were five now, and she said there would eventually be twelve, which sounded overwhelming to me. We’d cleared off the kitchen table so she could spread them out again. She and Obie were studying the blocks and playing with their positions when Aunt Florence showed up.

  “You decided to applique some of them,” she mused, touring around the nonbench sides of the table.

  “I’m not sure mixing will work—”

  Aunt Florence shook her head. “You’ll make it work. I can already see it.”

  Dred didn’t say anything.

  “I brought you another scrap.”

  James tugged on my hand until I let him have it. He contentedly piled his collection of frozen mango pieces into my palm, then took them out.

  “That mango’s cold,” I told him.

  He grinned wide and held his arms out to me.

  Back in quilt land, Dred and Aunt Florence were facing off. I couldn’t tell if Dred was mad or just shocked. She was definitely something.

  “You saw Dad?”

  “Of course I saw your father. I allow him to take me to lunch once a week, which I think is generous.” Florence smiled, and man, I wouldn’t cross Aunt Florence for anything. She might have spent over a decade doing the Lord’s work, but she hadn’t internalized Jesus like some people did, as if the Christian God was simply love personified. Aunt Florence had clearly read the whole Bible, and she didn’t mind a touch of ruthless with her religion.

  “But . . .” Dred frowned. “He gave you this? Auntie, this is his robe.”

  “Of course he didn’t. And yes. It is. The same robe he’s had since shortly before Christmas 1979. I remember because I’m the one who bought it for him.”

  Obie and I looked at each other. His eyes were wide. Mine were definitely communicating a world of Whoa, what now?

  “You did not. Auntie, I don’t even want to know why you bought Dad a bathrobe.”

  Florence made a disgusted sound in her throat. “Please, Mildred, do not enlighten me as to whatever reasons you think it might be so.” She touched the heap of fabric on the table, not smiling, but looking fond all the same. “Your parents were never as slick as they thought they were. After the fourth time your father sneaked out of the house before he thought I was awake, I bought him a bathrobe and pointedly hung it in the bathroom.”

  “Wait—you were okay with them spending the night together before they were married?”

  Aunt Florence’s gaze took in me, playing with James on the floor, then drifted back to Dred. “Even back then I did have some appreciation for the practical over the ideal, Mildred.”

  “But . . . I can’t believe you forgave them. After catching them all kinds of sinning.”

  This time Aunt Florence’s gaze was heavy on my skin. I looked away, but I couldn’t miss the weight of her words. “Oh, Jesus is the one who forgives; the least I can do is offer a second chance to the people I love. Lord knows I’m a worldly sinner, too.” She patted the heap of fabric. “Now, not all of this will be useful, but it did occur to me that you will need a border, and that this might serve.”

  “A border,” Dred repeated. She shook herself. “But, Auntie—I can’t steal Daddy’s bathrobe and put it into a quilt.”

  “My dear girl, you didn’t steal anything. This is a gift. I gave it once to him, and now I’m giving it to you.”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t know—”

  Florence cupped Dred’s cheek in her hand, pale, translucent skin with spiderweb veins against the deep brown of Dred’s. “Some people have enormous trouble letting go of the past. Isn’t it kind of us to help them with that? Now, I’ll leave it to you and Obadiah to determine whether you have enough, and how it looks. If it doesn’t work, of course, it doesn’t work. It’s certainly faded in places. You may not be able to find appropriately long stretches where the color is consistent.”

  Obie finally unfroze and reached out to spread the robe over the table. “I love cotton. This held up pretty well, Aunt Florence.”

  “It wasn’t cheap.”

  His eyes found mine again, but neither of us commented on that one.

  “I see what you mean. It’s gone from black to gray in places. Inconsistently. But I don’t think that necessarily makes it a bad choice for the border.” He nudged Dred. “You were going to make the border dark anyway, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah.” She placed three of her blocks over the top of the robe and folded in the edges. “If we find the right order, the fading will just look like part of the design. You think?”

  “Yeah. Put the darkest blocks against the lightest parts of the border.”

  They kept talking, and shifting things, and searching for the best stretches of the robe. Aunt Florence took a step back, watching them.

  Then, slowly, she turned to me. And smiled. “Why don’t we take James for a walk, Zane? I keep meaning to ask—is that short for something?”

  I gulped. “Uh. Suzanne. But no one calls me that unless they’re mad at me.”

  “Then I’ll be an exception to the rule. Come, let’s get James in something a little warmer.”

  I looked over at the table, trying to communicate with my eyes that someone needed to save me and, like, right now, but Dred and Obie were bent over doing fabric things. And Emerson was upstairs.

  No one was going to save me from taking a walk with Aunt Florence.

  “Er. Yeah. Okay. C’mon, James.”
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  And so Aunt Florence, James, and I took a walk around the neighborhood on a Saturday. For fun. James looked around in a state of perpetual fascination, Aunt Florence told stories about all the people who’d lived in the area back when she was a kid, and I didn’t even have to pretend to be interested.

  Every now and then I thought about her, and Dred’s folks, in their early twenties, living in the farmhouse before it had a huge garden in the back, before the neighborhood looked more tired than alive. Florence, lying in bed, listening to Dred’s dad sneak out and rolling her eyes at the pretense.

  When we got back to the house, Dred was laughing at something Obie had said, and any trace of denial still lingering in my psyche disappeared.

  I was stupidly, completely, entirely in love.

  Aunt Florence took James from me and patted my shoulder. “We should take walks together more often, Suzanne.”

  Oh my god. (Sorry, Aunt Florence.)

  Usually I temped on the tenth day after inseminating.

  That was a lie. Usually I swore I’d temp on day ten. But I really started on day nine. Once on day eight. But only once.

  If you spend enough time in the TTC message boards, you hear a lot of stuff. Like there’s always someone who tested pregnant on day eight, and there’s always someone else who didn’t test pregnant until day twenty-five. There are always people who just know when they’ve conceived. And there are always people who just know every damn month. I was usually in that camp.

  I’d hoped that trying this new thing with fresh sperm would switch things up enough to spare me the constant obsession. So I’d made a rule: no testing until fourteen days after insemination. Since my luteal phase is almost never fourteen days long, the likelihood was high that I’d get my period before then and end up not testing at all.

  There was a rule.

  Rules are always so much easier to keep in the five minutes after you make them. After that it’s all uphill.

  The only way I managed to keep myself from testing was by spending the night at Dred’s and not bringing any pregnancy tests with me. I’d never tested during the day. People did, but I was into the rules, and the rules stated that hormone levels would be most concentrated in the first pee of the day, so that’s what I used. If I missed it, I missed it.

  So I missed it. On purpose. By staying at the farmhouse instead of my place. It was all very logical and rational.

  I was increasingly aware of every gradation in her breathing, every soft hair on her arm, every nuance in her expression when she unwrapped the silk scarf from her hair in the morning and looked at it in her mirror.

  I tried to hide the fact that I was watching her, that I was hungry for the curves of her body, the tones and cadences of her voice. I loved the way she scooped James into her arms and cradled him against her hip. I loved the way she held the paring knife when she was prepping vegetables for dinner.

  It wasn’t as easy as knowing I was in love with her and telling her, and living happily ever after. There were too many good arguments against telling her. Starting with: I didn’t want to hurt her again. Ending with: I really, really didn’t want to hurt her again.

  Or maybe I was afraid of what it would mean, to tell her she had this power over me. That I was sometimes transfixed by the way her hands ran over her sewing machine. Dred had inherited a lot from Aunt Florence; she could be equally ruthless. Did I really want to open myself up to that?

  Whatever it was, for the moment I was happy to spend all night cuddling in her bed, and all day more or less pretending we were just close friends.

  I didn’t test on day ten. I barely breathed all day, waiting to get my period. I didn’t.

  I didn’t test on day eleven. I pressed my eyes to Dred’s arm and took deep breaths until the very real desire to drive all the way to my apartment to pee passed. She brushed her fingers through my hair and didn’t speak.

  I didn’t get my period.

  Twelve days after inseminating, I woke up convinced I was bleeding. I carried the specific, heavy sense of dread to the bathroom. I didn’t give a shit about wasting the opportunity to test because I knew, absolutely, that I was about to get my period and it was over.

  I wasn’t bleeding. Every time I went to the bathroom all day, I knew this was the moment, this was the end of the cycle, the beginning of the next one.

  It wasn’t.

  The thirteenth day was a Wednesday. Steph told me if I went to the bathroom any more frequently she was going to call for an emergency visit to my midwife because I sure as hell had a urinary tract infection.

  I tried to only go once an hour after that. And I still didn’t get my period.

  We were in the final preparations stage of the wake. I collected Keith, Alisha, and Ed from QYP, and we went over to Club Fred’s for an early sweep at cleaning before business picked up, which was Fredi’s only concession to my pleas to let us clean.

  I hadn’t meant to say anything, maybe because it was bad luck or maybe because my friends were probably sick of hearing about how I might or might not be pregnant—again.

  But I couldn’t help it. And Tom asked, with bright eyes, what day it was.

  “Thirteen. Um.”

  He blinked. I’d told them I wasn’t testing soon, but that I usually got my period eleven or twelve days out.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said quickly.

  Alisha, suddenly at my side, clapped her hands.

  “No,” I snapped. “Stop it. We’re not clapping. We’re not doing anything. Except cleaning.”

  Tom surrendered the three small buckets of soapy water and rags that he’d made for us. “Okay. Yeah. Okay, so, anyway, Fredi said if you break anything, she’s going to ban you for life. But don’t worry, I have veto power.”

  “Good to know.”

  By the time I turned around Alisha had, of course, spread my not-news to Ed and Keith. The three of them deliberately avoided looking at me for about a minute.

  Then:

  “So how does it work?” Keith asked. “I mean, like, theoretically. Never having had a uterus, or eggs, or whatever.”

  Ed shrugged. “I actually do have all those things and I still don’t get it. Like . . . when do you find out?”

  Tomorrow morning. Twelve hours from now. Unless I get up really early.

  “I’ll test tomorrow.”

  “And it’ll say you’re pregnant or you aren’t?”

  “It will measure the concentration of human growth hormone in my pee. If there isn’t anything, it’ll come back negative, which doesn’t mean I’m not pregnant, necessarily, it only means there isn’t enough hormone to test positive.”

  “Well, what if there is enough? What does that mean?”

  I couldn’t think about it. Thirteen cycles. I’d never had that moment.

  Alisha shoved both the boys. “Get to work, slackers. Let’s try to be done before Fredi comes in and wants to babysit us touching all her precious things.”

  They turned away and I mouthed, Thank you. She kissed my cheek and handed me a bucket.

  That night I was jittery and restless, unable to relax.

  “Z.” Dred’s voice was thick with sleep. “Don’t think I won’t kick your ass out. There’s a couch in the workroom.”

  “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Instead of kicking me out, she pulled me until my head was on her chest. And oh god, proximity to Dred’s breasts, yeah, that was a really good distraction.

  She giggled. “Are you burrowing into my ample bosom right now?”

  Dred giggling. With her breasts against my cheek. Oh god.

  “Incorrigible, Z. No funny business.”

  I sighed. “But—but I need a distraction—”

  She giggled again. “You are not using my boobs as a distraction.”

  “Awww.”

  Distraction aside, it was soothing, being pressed against her like that. Feeling her breaths. Feeling her arms around me.

  “I just got scared,” I whisp
ered.

  “Yeah.”

  “What if—” No. I couldn’t say it. Jinx.

  “Shh. No what-ifs.”

  “But I just got so, so scared.”

  One of her hands rubbed the back of my neck, and in that moment it was the most sensuous thing I’d ever felt. I breathed into it, pressed into it, tried to feel the warmth of her hand all the way down into my bones.

  “A lot of this shit is scary.” Her voice was low and not totally stable. “A lot of it’s fucking terrifying.”

  “I’ve never been scared like this before. I mean, you know, I thought I’d been scared before, but this is— I don’t know what this is.”

  “It’s different when you realize what it means.” The fingers at my neck tightened for a breath. “But it makes things easier. When I used to get scared I’d let it stop me. I’d let it paralyze me, if it was bad. When we first started the business I stopped eating. Even though we still had income, it didn’t matter. Suddenly there was this outside thing that I’d decided to do, and I had to do it all the time. No day off.” She huffed a laugh into my hair. “And that was nothing compared to parenting.”

  “You and Emerson should go into business listening to people’s deepest fears and confirming that they’re justified. It’s the opposite of soothing.”

  Another soft laugh. “Yeah. Assholes get off on that sort of thing. Anyway, I guess I was saying that parenting is so much worse, but it’s also so much more simple in a different way. I have to just . . . do it. Whatever it is. Get out of bed. Occasionally shower. Go take pictures of another stupid winter wedding, where everyone’s in big coats because it’s freezing-ass cold. No matter how scared I am, I make sure James eats. No matter how scared I am, I pick him up when he’s crying. I’m still terrified, but he focuses me.”

  I pressed my face to her, not teasing this time. Crying a little. I wanted that so much, and I was so damn petrified of it.

  “It’s okay. I know it’s fucking scary, but no matter what happens in the morning, it’s okay, Z.”