The Rest of the Story(41)

So here I was, in the partner position, breathing and reassuring and watching incredibly disturbing birth videos that I could not forget despite really, really trying. If all went well, the Sergeant would be home by the end of July, in time for the birth itself, if not the last few classes. I didn’t know him at all, but I was still pretty sure he’d be better at it than I was.

Until then, though, it was my job to tote the nursing pillow, water bottle, and pad that Trinity used to jot down notes. She was so big it was all she could do just to drive us there and walk in, and that day, she’d decided maybe she couldn’t even manage that.

“You drive,” she’d said as we’d come out to Mimi’s Toyota, parked by the Calvander’s office. “It’s just too hard for me these days.”

I hesitated. “I can’t.”

Already at the passenger door, she glanced over at me. “You don’t have a license?”

Lie, I told myself. But out loud I said, “No, I do.”

“Great,” she said, starting to ease herself into the seat. It was a multiphase process: backing in her rear end first, then a pivot to a sitting position, followed by pulling in her legs. When she finished and I still hadn’t moved, she said, “What’s the problem?”

“I don’t like to drive,” I said, or rather blurted. “It makes me nervous.”

“Nervous?” she repeated. “This is North Lake. We’ll be lucky if we even pass another car.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’ve never liked it, and then I backed into a car in the parking deck—”

“That happens to everyone,” she replied, shifting to get both feet more in the center of her floor mat. “Rite of passage. Now get in, we’re going to be late.”

She shut her door. I stayed where I was. A moment later, she rolled down the window. “Are you serious about this?”

“I don’t like driving,” I said again.

“Well, I don’t like that my fiancé isn’t here for birthing class, but I’m doing it anyway,” she replied. “You have your license on you?”

“Yeah.”

“Then come on.” She tossed the keys into the driver’s seat. “If I can get in the goddamn car at my size, you can do this.”

I wasn’t sure what it was about Trinity, exactly, that caused me to find myself doing things I normally thought impossible. Maybe that it wasn’t her faith in me as much as her frustration. She just had no time for my neurosis, which made me wonder if maybe that was an option for me, as well.

I walked over and pulled open the driver’s-side door. “I’m going to be nervous.”

“Great. You’ll drive carefully. Let’s go.”

She pulled out her phone as I picked up the keys, and then I slid behind the wheel. It felt weird, and I wished I was in her seat, where the view was familiar. I was trying to figure out another way to get her to switch with me when she took a pointed view at the clock on the console.

It’s North Lake, I thought. We’ll be lucky if we even see another car. I put the key in and turned it.

She was partially right. After we turned out of Calvander’s—a Payne, I looked left, right, then left again, and would have done another round of this if she hadn’t sighed, loudly—we were the only ones on the road for a good ten minutes. Then, though, we came up on construction and a row of cars backed up as a bored flagman held up a sign that said STOP. With people suddenly ahead of and behind me, I felt my palms begin to sweat against the wheel.

“The thing is,” Trinity, who’d spent the entire trip so far detailing various grudges she had with the army, her pregnant body, and the world in general, was saying, “this isn’t the way I would have done this, given the chance. No one wants to be knocked up before the wedding, you know?”

I nodded, realizing I was clenching my teeth. The flag guy, bored, was looking at his phone.

“But it is what it is, and I am,” she continued, rubbing a hand over her stomach. “And honestly, I just want the Sergeant here when the baby comes. Even if he shows up literally the night before my water breaks. It’s one thing to be pregnant alone. I don’t want to start my life as a parent that way, too.”

Breathe, I told myself, as someone beeped behind us. It didn’t work, so I went for another way to distract myself. “So how did you guys meet?”

At this, she smiled. It was a rare thing, as I’d noticed soon after meeting her, and happened mostly when the subject turned to her fiancé. “He and one of his buddies rented a room last summer for his twenty-first birthday. But really, it all started with toast.”

I glanced in the rearview just in time to see the guy behind me shake a fist at the flagman. I said, “Toast?”

“Yep.” She sat back, now with both hands on her belly. “The morning after they checked in, he was outside the unit when I went to work at the office. I had my two slices with butter, and they were burnt, because our toaster then was a fire hazard. He made a joke about it and we started talking. Been together ever since.”

“That’s cute,” I said, because even in my anxious state, I had to admit it was.

“I know, right?” she replied. “We got engaged in the fall, and I found out about this one”— she patted her stomach—“a month later, about the same time he got his deployment orders. Right before he left, he bought me the toaster. It’s a good thing, too, because I was so sick the first trimester, and bread was all I could eat.”