Take My Hand(18)

In nursing school, I took comfort in my books. For the first two years, I didn’t date, and no one expressed any interest. I was not sure why no one asked me out. I knew a lot of them preferred light-skinned women, and I was on the darker side. I had my daddy’s nose, and that was what you might call an acquired taste. But I had some prized attributes as well. Heavyset with a cushiony tube around my middle, I had an attractive face—straight teeth, skin smooth enough not to require makeup—and big, pretty legs.

Three close friends of mine lived in my dorm, but by our third year they all had boyfriends and no time for me. That was right around the time Ty started visiting his fraternity brothers at Tuskegee on weekends. I danced with him at a party one night, and he kissed me in the darkness. It was the most natural kiss I’d ever had. Even though our relationship had been marked by sibling-like squabbles, when we finally did turn that corner into romance, it was easy. Maybe it was because we knew each other so well. He was a part of me and always had been. By spring semester of my senior year, I was pregnant.

“What do you think about Alicia?” I said suddenly.

“Why you ask me that?”

“Just wondering.”

“I see why you like her,” he said. “She’s got a good heart.”

“Yeah, she’s cool.” I had been the one to break things off with Ty, so I knew it shouldn’t matter to me what he thought about Alicia.

“Civil, we need to talk.”

“About what?”

He leaned against the counter. “You know about what.”

“What’s there to talk about?” I folded my arms across my chest.

He unhooked my hand and pulled me to him. “Have you told anybody?”

“Have you?”

“No.”

“Good, cause there’s nothing to tell.”

“That’s not true and you know it.”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now.” I pulled away and yanked open the drawer. The silverware clattered.

“Alright, alright, suit yourself.” He backed off but was still looking at me seriously. “You know you can talk to me about other stuff, too.”

“Yeah, like what?”

“Like Alicia told me how shaken up you were about giving a shot to those kids.”

“She told you that?” For someone agonizing over keeping her mama’s secret, Alicia sure did have a big mouth.

“Yeah, those drugs y’all using, Civil, they’re not safe.”

“You mean the Depo-Provera?”

“Yes. We don’t know enough about that drug. It could be harming all your patients, let alone those little girls.”

“What do you of all people know about birth control? You never acted like you knew anything about it.” Every time I looked into Ty’s face I wondered if our baby would have resembled him, if it would have been a boy or a girl, if he would have made a good father.

“That’s not fair and you know it. Besides, I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t.”

“Listen, I found out that Depo hasn’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration,” he said.

“That’s not true,” I said defensively.

“It is true.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked it up and read about it.”

“You don’t read.”

“You don’t know what I do.” He took the forks from me and set them down on the counter. “Civil, I’m not that little boy who used to tie your shoelaces together. I’m a man.”

“I know that.”

“Well, then stop talking to me like that.”

Ty just didn’t understand. I wanted so badly to reach for him, to hold him, but I couldn’t bring myself to cross that bridge. The hurt was still too fresh.

“Alicia already told you the teenage pregnancy rate in Montgomery. We can’t turn our backs on this problem and pretend it doesn’t exist.” I shook the spoon, the pudding landing in the bowl like a cloud. I could tell the pudding had been in the refrigerator overnight because the cookies had softened.

Ty scooted a clean bowl toward me. “Think about it, Civ. What if those drugs are doing more harm than good?”

I couldn’t believe Alicia hadn’t mentioned to me they were looking into this. If she and Ty had talked about Depo not being safe, then weeks had passed by without her so much as bringing it up. I tried to hide my embarrassment that I did not know it had not been approved by the government. That was news to me.

“There’s nothing that says it’s harmful. Some of the patients at the clinic have been getting shots for years. If there had been side effects, we would have known about it.” I remembered that Erica had told me she bled every day. It was normal, according to the materials, to experience some irregular bleeding. But bleeding every day? Was it heavy? Was she cramping, too? I hadn’t even asked. As her nurse, I should have asked more questions.

“You don’t know the long-term effects,” he said.

“It’s not that complicated a drug. It just suppresses ovulation so that—”

“Since when are you a pharmaceutical expert?”

“Depo-Provera is not that complicated, Ty.” I spooned extra pudding into all five bowls so we wouldn’t have to come back into the kitchen for seconds. Then I followed him through the swinging door.