The People We Keep(94)

“April doesn’t like pancakes. Hey, honey.” Robert kisses my cheek when I walk in the room. “I need a favor. That Celtic band canceled.”

Tightness creeps up from my belly and into my throat. I burst into tears and run to the bathroom.

I hear Robert talk, but I can’t hear what he says. Ethan’s response is clear. “She’s pregnant, you dope.” I don’t know how he knows. It wasn’t even something I let myself think.

Robert opens the bathroom door without knocking. He sits on the side of the tub next to me. His eyes are full and shiny. He hugs me, kisses my head. “She’s going to be beautiful,” he says.





— Chapter 54 —


Ethan has job offers to teach at Oberlin, DePaul, and Ithaca, but he swears he’s right where he wants to be. He loves the baby too much. He loves me too much and I need him, so he can’t possibly go. He says he needs to be needed. It’s this heartbreaking thing, because we all know it would be best for him to take one of those jobs, and then the thought of being here without him is too hard to even think about. It’s so selfish for me to need him the way I do, but I can’t help it.

Ethan ran into Ivan last week. At the grocery store. He hid in the stock room and they thought he was shoplifting. Even though he didn’t have anything on him, they couldn’t get creative and think of any other reason a person would ever be hiding in a stock room all sweaty and shaking. It’s not like he had a grapefruit shoved down his pants. Robert had to go get him from the store security office and vouch for him, whatever that means.

If anyone ever deserved a fresh start, it’s Ethan. I wish we could all go with him. Me, Robert, and the baby. But Robert can’t leave the bar and restaurant and I can’t leave Robert, and Ethan doesn’t want to break up our weird, wonderful little family. If I were a better person and a better friend, I would tell him to go. I think about how I would do it. Plan it out in my head. I would sit him down and make him coffee and have cookies from that place he likes on Biltmore and tell him we’d call and visit and write and send so many pictures. I would tell him there will be new people for him to love. But I can’t. I know it’s wrong that I want to keep him. But I do.





— Chapter 55 —


Robert books a doctor’s appointment for me. There’s talk of a wedding. Of health insurance. Of things that leave me gasping for air if I think about them too much. But this first appointment he’s just paying for. We want to hear the heartbeat without having to wait for all the paperwork.

I heard once that before you drown, you get euphoric. That’s what this feels like. Happy drowning. I have a family now. I have a home. I am terrified.

Robert waits outside the exam room while I undress and put on that paper gown and drape like the nurse told me to. It’s funny how there’s sex-naked and doctor’s-office-naked and they’re not at all the same thing.

When Robert comes back in, it’s awkward. He holds my hand and makes a very concentrated effort to look at my face and not at the paper I’m wrapped in like a cut of beef from the meat market.

“So,” Dr. Katim says, looking at her clipboard when she walks into the room, “April and Robert. Looks like we’re having a baby!”

She’s young. Like medical student young. She has perfect straight hair and black-framed glasses that I think maybe she’s only wearing to make her look smart. Women like her are too perfect for glasses.

I don’t like the way she says we. We’re having a baby. There are already enough people on this baby’s team. And it’s not like she’ll be changing diapers.

“Have you confirmed that you’re pregnant?” she asks, flipping through my forms.

“Yeah,” I say, and Robert smiles. Ethan bought every kind of pee stick the drugstore had. He and Robert stood outside the bathroom cheering every time I slipped another positive one through the huge gap under the door. They were all positive.

She pulls my gown up and the drape down. “So, how far along are we?”

“About a month?” I say.

She grabs a calendar off the desk and shows it to us. Robert points to the day. The bar. Our first time. “I think it had to be then,” he says.

“When was your last period?” she asks, and I turn beet red.

I never keep track. “I don’t know,” I say, and feel like an idiot. I look far off and pretend I’m counting out days, but I can’t remember anything. I shake my head.

“Okay,” she says, “well, we’ll take a look and see what your baby can tell us today.” She grabs a bottle that looks like the kind you put ketchup or mustard in, but it’s white, not red or yellow. She holds it over my belly, smacks the bottom of it, and squirts cold blue jelly all over. It’s gross. I don’t like the way that being pregnant seems to make everything about you fair game—your pee, your belly, your period.

“It might be too early for a heartbeat. Don’t worry if we don’t hear one,” she says.

She holds this flat wand thing against my stomach. It doesn’t hurt, but when she presses harder and pushes it around, it makes me queasy.

Then we hear it. The heartbeat. Loud, thumping static. Alien communications. Like our baby is saying hello to us. And then I’m crying. Robert is too. Like that thumping is the most beautiful sound we’ve ever heard.