Young Wives (45 page)

And, for some reason, Jada began to laugh. At first, she laughed from her throat, and then it moved down to her chest and finally to her belly. Then Michelle began to giggle, and lastly Angie joined in. The sound bounced off the empty walls and ceiling, sounding odd and disorienting, as if they were in a fun house. All three of them laughed until Jada managed to wipe her eyes and shake her head. “Wrong. I think Frank is the worst.”

For a moment Mich stopped laughing, and Jada was afraid she was going to begin defending the bastard again. “You may be right,” Michelle said. Then she, in turn, looked at Angie. “Although we had some good years. So did you, Jada. Angie here just got good
months
.” It was true, and so sad and ridiculous that they all began laughing again.

“I didn’t even have good months, but I
thought
they were good months. Does that count?” Angie asked.

“Well, they say it’s the thought that counts,” Jada said. The three of them stopped laughing then and just sat there together on the floor. Jada knew it was a risk, but she felt compelled to say something she’d been afraid to and looked right at Angie—or rather, at her belly. “How many months?” she asked.

“Three and a half months,” Angie admitted. “At least I think so.” They were silent again, all three of them.

“I had an abortion,” Michelle said. “I was pregnant by Frank in high school. I couldn’t go that way.”

Jada blinked. Michelle had never told her that. Not a word in seven years. “When I was pregnant the third time, with Sherrilee, I was going to go to the doctor. To terminate. I knew how bad the marriage was by then, and you know how tight money’s been.”

Jada couldn’t believe she was telling this to anybody, much less to two white girls. But she thought,
I’m closer to them than I have been to most people
. Who would have thought that she would talk about this to middle-class girls who had never known an afternoon of suffering or had to face a really tough financial decision.
Gender brings us together more than race separates us
, Jada thought.
Maybe women should just line up with women and forget the rest
.

“I was afraid the bank would terminate
me
. I needed the job. But in the end, I realized I wanted the baby. I love my baby, but I certainly wouldn’t want somebody else to raise her.” She looked at Angie. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

“I think I want to call a clinic, but I’m afraid to make the call. And I’m afraid to go.” Angie looked away. “But I’m more afraid not to.” Angie put her head on her knees.

“We’ll help you,” Michelle said.

“Hell, we’ll go with you,” Jada said.

“It doesn’t hurt.” Michelle paused. “Well, not your body anyway.”

A pregnant pause

When Angela woke up, she realized something was very wrong. There was a dull ache at the side of her head and for a moment she couldn’t think. She hadn’t been drinking, and it wasn’t a normal headache. She felt around with her tongue and then sat up so abruptly she got dizzy. Something in her mouth was aching. Oh, perfect. As if she needed one more thing.

While she drank her morning coffee, she threw back a couple of Tylenol, but they didn’t make a dent in the pain. She didn’t have a dentist here and couldn’t imagine what was wrong. Angela had only had a couple of fillings in her whole life. She had to call her mother to tell her that she wouldn’t be in for a little while and to get the name of a reliable dentist in the neighborhood.

She had to beg to get the appointment and she could only beg because the pain was getting much worse. By the time she parked her car and made her way into the dentist’s office, the left side of her head felt as if it might erupt with each step she took. She was seated in the dental chair in minutes and the technician laid the lead apron over her to do an x-ray. “Are you pregnant?” the technician asked.

Did it show that much? Angela wondered, and realized it was a standard question before x-rays were taken. When she said she was, the technician shook her head. “The doctor doesn’t like to work on pregnant women,” she said.

“But I’m in pain,” Angela told her.

“I’ll talk to him. He’ll be in to see you.”

Angela waited, her jaw throbbing. One more thing to worry about. Would Novocain affect the baby? Why was this happening now?

The dentist had nothing but bad news: Angie had an impacted wisdom tooth and it should be pulled, but her pregnancy complicated matters. He would make an appointment for the surgeon to see her. In the meantime he suggested she not take too many Tylenol because of the pregnancy. “But it’s killing me,” Angie said.

“The flare-up will come and go and the discomfort will vary,” the dentist told her.

If he was feeling it, it would have been pain, she thought. “Your pregnancy complicates everything,” he said.

“You have no idea,” Angie told him, and left the office clutching the appointment card for the oral surgeon.

It wasn’t as if the work went away just because she was miserable, Angie thought, looking at the stacks of files and pile of messages on her desk. Just because she had blown it on Jada’s case, just because she had an appointment for an abortion for the following day, didn’t mean that Angie was allowed to take a break from all the misery that had backed up or newly come in, needing attention.

Angie had told her mother nothing—well, nothing about her condition and how she was going to handle it. It was not that she was ashamed of choosing to abort, nor did she think that her mother would judge her. It just seemed the kind of thing Angie would rather confess to after it was over. Sometimes her mother’s presence was comforting, other times it was overpowering. This time it was the latter. It just gave Angie one more thing to feel guilty about.

She finished interviewing a client about her late mother’s estate property, which appeared to have been stolen by her stepfather. Next up was another estate client. Angela had been told the woman was waiting when Michael knocked and walked into her office.

“How goes it?” he asked. She only had the energy to shrug. He sat down in the chair across from her. “Losing a big one is hard,” he said. He was so understanding that he sometimes seemed annoying. Angie just nodded. “How’s the new apartment working out?” he asked. “Settling in?”

God! She thought of Jada’s boxes scattered around and her complete lack of interest in painting or furnishing the place. “Pretty good,” she said. “I’m doing it in kind of early squatter’s rights.”

She wasn’t going to tell Michael that a client was living there now. After all, she already knew how he felt about “getting too involved” with clients. He did a good job, a dedicated job, but he was essentially uninvolved. What if she told him that a client was taking her for “a procedure” tomorrow? Angie sighed and looked down at her bitten thumbnail. Men were different from women. They could separate people from jobs and not feel for them. Work was only work.

Michael immediately disproved her theory. “I wondered if you’d like to go out for dinner with me tomorrow night?” he asked.

Angie looked up at him and actually blinked to clear her vision, as if that would alter what she had heard. Had he asked her out for a date? For tomorrow? “I’m busy,” she said. “I won’t be in tomorrow at all.”

“Well, how about Thursday or Friday?” he asked, and then she was sure that he was actually asking her out. He was so pleasant-looking, and his brown eyes were so warm. She really liked him and she liked working with him. She liked talking with him. But what was he doing?

“I don’t date married men,” she coolly.

“I’m not married,” Michael said. “If I were, I wouldn’t ask you out.”

Angie took a deep breath. She didn’t need this right now. “Michael, you have two kids and you’re married. I know you keep your private life private, but we do know the basics. Everybody here knows that,” she said in a flat voice, the kind you would use talking to a not-very-bright eleven-year-old who was trying your patience. These men! They were crazy. Was this what had happened with Lisa and Reid?

“Angie, I have two kids and I have been divorced for six months, separated for over a year and a half,” Michael explained, his voice as controlled as hers. “And if everyone doesn’t know it, it’s because I didn’t choose to tell them.”

Angie stared across the desk at him. Michael had gone through a divorce and separation in the last two years in
this
office and nobody knew? Bill, with his love of gossip and slight crush on Michael, didn’t know it? Laura, the control freak, didn’t know it? Angie’s own mother, the Jewish yenta busybody, didn’t know? How was it possible? It just proved how big the gap between men and women were, Angie thought. No woman could go through that kind of life change without talking to her coworkers.

Meanwhile, Michael watched her and then smiled. “To be technical,” he said, “if I’m not mistaken,
you’re
actually the married one.”

Yeah, and the pregnant one
, Angie thought. For a moment she almost laughed, though the laugh would have been a bitter one. This was amazing. For the first time in more than four years, since she started dating Reid, she had been asked out for a date—for the same evening she was having a D&C. What was wrong with this picture? God couldn’t be a woman. This wasn’t a woman’s kind of joke.

It was horrible to think about, but Angie was really thirsty. She wanted to believe that she would have a more noble reaction, a more spiritual crisis, sitting between her two friends, waiting to be called in to have her uterus scraped. But Angie could only think of her thirst. Thank goodness her tooth wasn’t throbbing. She’d been told not to eat or drink anything since midnight, and had come in early this morning with Michelle and Jada. Although all she wanted was for this to be over quickly, she had already spent close to an hour filling in forms, and then more than another hour sitting here with a roomful of sad-eyed teenaged girls.

“Are you okay?” Michelle asked for the third or fourth time, and reached over to give Angie’s hand a squeeze.

“Not exactly,” Angie said, trying to smile. She couldn’t manage it. Michelle let go of Angie’s hand and leaned over to the table in front of them. She’d already straightened out the magazines, arranging them in neat piles. Now she began sorting them by date.

An older woman was sitting in the corner quietly crying. Michelle, finished with the magazines, had already gone over to her, talked to her in a low and comforting voice, and returned outraged. “She wanted the baby,” Michelle told Angie and Jada. “The amnio came back and there’s something
really
wrong. She doesn’t even want to abort, but it won’t go to term. She’s already started to bleed. And she’s tried for years to have a child.”

“This is horrible,” Jada said. “You would think these clinic people would have a little more savvy. Mich, would you stop straightening up?”

“Oh. Sure. Sorry,” Michelle apologized.

“I can’t believe they’d let her sit here with all these high school girls,” Jada said. “Don’t they have
any
sensitivity at all? Don’t they know some women have been trying to have the child?”

Angie put her head down and looked at her own belly. Reid was a lying, immature fool, but this baby was hers, too, conceived in love. She wasn’t like the teenagers in the waiting room and she didn’t want to be like the older woman. She
wanted
a child, she wanted to be a mother. Being around Jada and Michelle and their children had brought that home to her. And if it took years to meet another man she could love—or if she never did—she knew she could want and love this child, and take care of it. She was responsible. She’d lost her marriage, and she’d lost her first big trial, but she didn’t have to lose this.

Angie lifted her head and looked around the room. They were a bunch of frightened little girls, aside from the broken-hearted woman who was losing the baby she wanted. But Angie wasn’t a little girl. She might not be married, and she might not be settled, but she suddenly realized that she wanted this baby. It didn’t make sense, and she certainly didn’t want a connection to Reid, but she
had
loved him and the baby she was carrying was her baby, too. It wouldn’t be convenient, or easy, or practical, but she wanted the baby. She had a job, and family, and good friends who could help her, and if they didn’t, she could—she
would
—help herself.

She stood up. “Let’s go home,” she said.

Michelle looked up at her. “Are you all right?” Michelle asked.

Jada didn’t say a word. She just stood up and put her arm around Angie. “I think she’s going to be just fine,” Jada said. She looked at Angie. “You mean this?” she asked. Angie nodded.

Michelle stood up, too. “You’re going to have the baby?” she asked in a low voice. Angie nodded. “Oh my God,” Michelle said. “Oh my God,” she repeated, her voice full of joy. “Well, I can give you all the baby stuff you need. I saved everything. And I can sit for you.”

“Maybe we can discuss these arrangements someplace else,” Jada said dryly. “Someplace more appropriate.” She looked at Angie again. “You’re sure you’re not just doing this out of guilt?” she asked. “Nothing to be guilty about, except not caring for a child you bring into the world.”

Angie shook her head. She’d been afraid to consider her life with a child, but suddenly she couldn’t bear to not have this one. It was a good thing she could take from her marriage, instead of only the heartbreak of her time with Reid. And she knew she could be a good mother. Day care, money, baby-sitters—all of the rest of it would sort itself out.

“Let’s go,” Angie said, and she picked up her bag while her friends gathered their coats and escorted her past the receptionist to the door. Just as they got there, a woman in a white jacket appeared from the inner sanctum and called, “Romazzano?” Angie didn’t answer. She just walked out and let one of the others close the door behind her.

Containing something accidental and something on purpose

Jada was going to be late for work. She had managed to find everything she needed to get there, despite the fact that her clothes, her underpants, her shoes, her cosmetics, and her deodorant were all in boxes stacked one upon the other. The only thing she hadn’t been able to find was her pantyhose, and that was why she was now frantic, ready to dump stuff all over the floor or steal a pair of No Nonsense from Angie.