by Kelly Myers
She dropped the spoon into the pot and raised her hand to her forehead. Her face had gone white.
“I cannot believe I raised a whore,” she said. Her eyes flew open. “Who’s the father?” she asked.
I swallowed and stared at the wall behind her.
“I don’t want to tell you that, he’s out of the picture,” I said. “I’m going to do this by myself.”
My mother scoffed. She twisted her mouth into a cruel and bitter smile. I had only seen her like this right after my father left, when she was furious at the whole world.
“Oh, you think it’s easy?” she asked. “After everything you saw me go through, you think it’s simple to be a single mother?”
“No, I know it will be challenging,” I said.
“It will be hell,” she hissed. “It is hell to raise a child all on your own.”
I was stunned into silence. I had always suspected my mother resented how she had been stuck with me as a burden, but she had never been so blunt.
“I have loved you every day of your life,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard. And it was my greatest hope that you would never end up a single mother like me.”
She crossed the kitchen and sat down with her wrinkled hands folded in front of her. The energy had suddenly drained from her body.
I stood there quivering, afraid to speak because if I did I knew I would cry.
“Now tell me this instant,” she said. “Who is the father? He has to be made to pay for this.”
“No,” I said.
I wouldn’t tell her a thing. If she knew it was William, she would want me to try and get all the child support money I could. I wouldn’t do that to William.
I also knew she would call me a whore again if she knew I had slept with someone that much older. For a brief moment, I imagined what William would do if he heard her call me that name. He would seethe with that silent anger of his. He would never forgive her.
He cared about me, in his own way. And I had ruined everything because I was too stupid to ask for a condom.
“Olivia, don’t be an idiot about this,” my mother said. “I need to know who did this to you.”
I stared straight ahead as a lump started to rise in my throat. I was going to cry. Like a child. That was fine. I would cry my cry and then get out of here. My mother could either support me or not. I had my own place, and I had a steady job at the farm. I didn’t make much money, but I could definitely pick up a waitressing job in town for the winter. My house was small, but not too small for a baby.
I was going to get through this. All on my own. And I would never treat my child the way my mother was treating me now.
She had stood up and was pacing about the kitchen.
“It’s one of Richard’s friends, isn’t it?” she asked. “He told me he was setting you up on dates, and I knew it was a bad idea. I knew you weren’t ready to handle yourself around men.”
“Mom, Richard had nothing to do with this,” I said.
I prickled a little at her mention of my half-brother. I knew she talked to him every now and then, always to discuss me and how I was throwing my life away.
“Don’t lie to me,” she snapped.
She grabbed her phone from the counter.
“I’m calling Richard right now,” she said.
I shrugged and stared down at my lap. Well, she would tell Richard and that was one less difficult conversation for me. He definitely didn’t know about me and William, so he wouldn’t be able to give my mother any information.
I got up and walked out of the room, just as I heard my mother start to shriek into the phone.
“Richard, your sister is pregnant,” she said. “I need to know who the father is. Who did you set her up with?”
I could imagine Richard’s response. He would be scandalized and disgusted, and his first reaction would be that he certainly wasn’t gonna pay for this catastrophe. But he would also be clueless. He had set me up with Nate, but I had informed him the date had been subpar. Nate had also probably told him I was frigid or something. Men like Nate always had pleasant excuses for why girls wouldn’t sleep with them.
It was possible Nate had told him William had shown up, but even then, I doubted Richard would put the pieces together.
That was the one blessing with our age gap: people would never pair us together.
With the sounds of my mother’s ranting in the background, I climbed the stairs to my bedroom.
My mother didn’t have a bad life. She had a good if uninspiring job as a secretary at an accounting firm. She owned a small but nice house, courtesy of my father’s alimony payments.
She was so unhappy because of how she looked at her life. The minute my father had walked out the door, she had decided that the world was against her.
I wouldn’t be that way. This situation was not ideal, but I could think positively about it. I had always wanted kids, and now I was going to have one. That was a positive thought.
My mother’s voice raised to a particularly strident level as she shrieked downstairs: “What do you mean you just don’t know?”
I flopped back onto my bed and pulled a pillow over my head.
Think positively. I would have a child. It would be part William. Maybe it would even look like him a little.
My lip trembled as my strength faded away. I started sobbing on my bed.
I was going to love this child. I was. I was going to give it a good life. I was going to be a good mother.
But just then, I was too caught up in everything I had lost.
I had lost William. Never again would he look at me with heat and desire in his eyes. Never again would he hold me in his arms all night.
I was never going to wake up ensconced in his warmth again. We were never going to travel together. He had told me stories about Paris and Venice and Moscow and Peru. He had even said he would take me to all those places one day. It had been a pipe dream, but now I knew it definitely would never happen.
I cried for the loss of that dream. I wasn’t crying over the baby, I was crying over the end of something that had been beautiful and too brief.
I should have seen this coming though. Hadn’t I known from the beginning that William and I would never work? That was why I had fled early that morning after my first time. I had known my heart was in danger.
I’d forgotten though. The force of my attraction for William had driven my concerns to the back of my mind. I had been delusional. I had dared to think that maybe, just maybe, we would get a happy ending. He would marry me. I would wear white, and he would smile while I walked down the aisle. We would split our time between the city and the country. We would raise adorable children who we would love.
It had been a stupid and hopeless illusion.
And I just needed to cry for a bit to mourn the end of my dream. I would celebrate the start of this new life later, when I was in less pain.
Downstairs, my mother had fallen silent. She must have finally been convinced that Richard was as much in the dark as she.
At least I could count on her Christianity. She wouldn’t try and get me to get an abortion. She might push for adoption, but not a termination.
I wasn’t against abortion in general. But it wasn’t the choice for me.
What kind of person would I be if I spent my whole life longing for children and planning to have kids and then I rejected that when I had a chance?
No, this was my baby, and I was keeping it.
I curled up on my side and buried my face even deeper into my pillows.
I just needed to cry for a little longer.
Chapter Eighteen
William
I arrived at the farm just before lunchtime. I had taken care of a few things in the office and then headed out. I had given Olivia a full twenty-four hours. Now she needed to talk to me.
I stepped out of the car and glanced around. I had swung by her house just in case she was there, but it had been empty. Her car
was gone too.
I stepped into the barn. Once again, Bridget was at the table, this time wearing a straw hat. I knew her name now, since Olivia had described her in detail and told me many stories.
“Oh, hello,” Bridget said. “Looking for Olivia again?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Is she in the fields?”
Bridget crossed her legs and gave me a sassy smile.
“You’re not just a ‘family friend,’ are you?” she asked.
I allowed myself a grin. Bridget had charisma, that was for sure.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Well, that girl’s been happier than I’ve ever seen her this past month,” Bridget said. “So, good for you two.”
It was nice for someone to know about us and not judge. I could tell Bridget was pretty free-thinking, but still, it was comforting to know that not everyone would look at our age gap and make nasty comments.
“She’s not here though,” Bridget said. “Went to visit her mom.”
I frowned in confusion. Was there some sort of family issue? I felt like Olivia would have told me about that.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll give her a call then.”
Bridget gave me a little wave as I walked back to my car.
I sat for a while thinking. I didn’t want to resort to this, but there seemed no other option. I could wait at Olivia’s place until she returned from her mother’s, but some instinct deep inside me told me not to hesitate. This was not a time to wait. This was a time for action. Olivia needed me.
I sighed and scrolled through my contacts until I hit Richard.
There was no way I could call him and ask where Olivia was without raising questions. If he didn’t guess in the moment that we were involved, he would eventually.
I decided that wasn’t a bad thing. I wanted to go public with Olivia anyway, damn the consequences. The whispers would be annoying, but I didn’t care anymore. We were going to be together. I was determined. We would have to face Richard’s judgment either way.
Richard picked up after a few rings.
“William, hi,” he said.
“Hi, Richard,” I said. “I need to know Olivia’s mother’s address.”
There was dead silence on the line.
“Richard?” I asked.
I had figured it would best to just ask for the address straight-up instead of beating around the bush.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Richard said.
My veins turned to ice. I had no idea what Richard was talking about, but his voice was lethal. I had never heard him sound so cold and deadly.
“You’re a sick fuck, you know,” he said.
I started to really panic. What was going on? And what had happened to Olivia? Maybe Richard had found out she was involved with an older man and had forced her to withdraw. For all I knew, her mother could be getting ready to send her off to a nunnery. It was unlikely, but I was so in the dark, I was grasping at straws.
“Richard, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Just tell me where Olivia is.”
He let out a bark of laughter.
“Oh, I am going to make sure you pay for this for the rest of your life,” Richard hissed. “I bet you didn’t think of that while you were knocking up my little sister.”
Everything went still. Richard was still ranting on the other end of the line, but his words faded.
Olivia was pregnant. With my child. I could barely register what that meant, I was so in shock.
What I did know was that she was alone somewhere grappling with this news, with no one but Richard and her mother to comfort her in the face of a terrifying change.
I also knew that she had not told me. For whatever reason, Olivia thought I would not respond well to this news. That hurt me more than a knife to the gut.
Even if I didn’t want to be with her for the rest of my life, even if Olivia was not the most special person in the world to me, I would have still taken responsibility for this. I was the one who didn’t use protection. I was the one who was so desperate to have her that I rushed into it without stopping to discuss birth control. That was on me.
Olivia should have known that I would never shirk my duties. Any child of mine was not going to want for anything. She had to know that. For some reason, she just didn’t want me to be a part of it.
My heart sank. Probably because she didn’t think I would want it. She doubted my commitment. She didn’t know how much I loved her. And how much I would love any child we shared. She had no clue that I had already envisioned a future for us. And once I had started to daydream about it, I knew that I had to have it.
I just had to convince her that we could have that future. She needed to know that I was all in.
And in order to convince her, I had to find her.
I leaned my head against the steering wheel and thought. I could call her, but she probably wouldn’t pick up. And if she did pick up, this was not a conversation I wanted to have over the phone.
No, I needed to see her face when I asked her why she was trying to push me away.
I had to find her mother’s address. I contemplated the chances of success if I just drove toward the New York border. No, that would never work. What would I do, just look for houses that looked like where Olivia had grown up?
Then I had an idea.
I picked up my phone again and called the office.
“Deborah, hi,” I said.
“Hi, William,” she answered.
“Do you still have the files from interns in years’ past? I need the contact information for the interns for the past few summers,” I said.
“Of course,” Deborah said. “I’ll email over the files for the past four years, will that do?”
“Yes, thank you so much,”
Within five minutes, I had the email. I sent a silent prayer of thanks up for Deborah, the best assistant a man could hope for.
Sure enough, Olivia had used what appeared to be her mother’s home address for her internship. It was about twenty minutes away, in a small town over the border in upstate New York.
I was just twenty minutes away from solving this dilemma.
I was just twenty minutes away from stepping into a whole new life.
Chapter Nineteen
Olivia
I decided to count to ten. I had been crying for at least half an hour in my childhood bedroom, but I was going to stop. In ten seconds.
My mother had not come up or uttered a word to me. She was probably downstairs seething. Or plotting how to force me to reveal the father’s identity. Or praying.
I couldn’t be around her. I couldn’t be tucked away in this room, with the books I had loved in middle school on the shelves, and my American Girl Doll still propped on my desk. I had to be a responsible adult.
It was strange. I had spent my whole adult life waiting for some responsible guy to take my virginity, and I had found him. But that discovery had only started a chain of events that was forcing me to be the responsible one. Which, I figured, was good. It was time I learned to be my own hero.
It just would have been nice to have that knight in shining armour as well. Not to rescue me, per se, but to help me out sometimes. A fresh stream of tears slipped down my cheeks.
Ok, ten more seconds of this. Ten more seconds, and then I was going to pull myself together.
I started to tell myself what the next steps were. It was something I did when I was having trouble waking up in the morning. I would whisper my plan of action. I would describe in detail what I was going to do with my day in an effort to motivate myself to get started.
I was going to wipe away the tears. I was going to walk to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. I was going to drink a glass of water as well. It’s important to stay hydrated when pregnant, right? And I should probably think about eating healthier.
After I went to the bathroom, I was going to walk downstairs with the composure of a queen. I was going t
o calmly inform my mother that I would be leaving, and she was welcome to call me later if she could treat me with respect. No, I wouldn’t have the guts to say that. I would just tell her I was leaving.
Then I would get into my car and drive home. On the way, I would stop at the grocery store and buy...whatever it was that pregnant women were supposed to eat. Carbs? Vegetables, surely. I would look it up on my phone once I got to the store.
Then I was going to return to my house and make a budget plan. A really detailed one on an Excel spreadsheet. I was good at Excel.
After that, I would set an appointment with my gynecologist. That might be a bit weird. The last time I had visited her, I was a virgin with zero need for birth control, or so I had assured her.
God, I’ve been stupid. Well, there wasn’t time to regret the past. I would book the appointment.
That was as far as my plan extended, but I decided those were good steps. I could add onto it later, when I wasn’t curled up in my mother’s house.
At some point, I would have to tell William. An email was still the best option. I would be able to say everything I needed to say without having to see his reaction. And without him interrupting to argue. He wasn’t going to be thrilled about me not letting him support me, but he would see it was the best way. It would be too painful to have him around but not with me.
And I was certain he didn’t want this. That had been his hesitation from the start. He didn’t want to get stuck with me. He cared for me, I knew that, but he didn’t want to be tethered to me for the rest of his life. He enjoyed his lifestyle far too much. And that lifestyle did not allow for a baby.
I couldn’t hold it against him. I had been complicit in our relationship. I had known exactly what I was getting into. I would have been a hypocrite to blame him for anything. He had always been upfront with me. He never once lied to me about his feelings or made any verbal commitments. I was glad for that small blessing at least. He had never given me any reason for false hope. I had been the one to give myself false hope. That was on me and my silly tendency to dream.