The Kindest Lie(10)
Xavier had no way of knowing what she’d say next, but he recoiled on instinct. Maybe it had been the way she’d avoided his eyes when she said her ex’s name. Or maybe it was just the sting of hearing another man’s name on his wife’s tongue before a confession.
“I got pregnant.”
A noise came from him that reminded her of that burst of air from a deflating balloon. She went on anyway. “I didn’t want to have an abortion. You know I was raised in the church and Mama wouldn’t have let me even if I’d wanted to.”
Xavier laughed as if she’d just told the funniest joke he’d ever heard. The sound he made tapered off in a little titter and then he cleared his throat. “I can’t be hearing you right.”
“I’m sorry.”
The expression on his face clouded and he shook his head slightly as if to clear the fog. “You have a kid.” It was a statement, not a question, as though he needed to say the words himself to believe them.
“Yes.”
“And you never said a word all these years? What the hell, Ruth?”
“I’m sorry, Xavier. I was scared to tell you and I’m scared now. So, let me finish before I lose my nerve.” She rolled a napkin ring between her fingers. “I had a baby boy. Then I gave him up. I couldn’t keep him. My freshman orientation was a few weeks after he was born. I left town and I tried to put all of it behind me. Have been trying to ever since.”
He stood, shoulders curved, his head shaking, mouth open. “How could you keep something like this from me? After a year of dating and then four years of marriage, you never found a convenient time to tell me you had a son?” He paced in front of the stove, his voice getting louder.
The ham and all the leftover sides sat cold and congealing at the center of the table, and Ruth kept her eyes on the thin layer of grease forming on top of the corn. When she finally looked up at Xavier, she recognized the hurt in his eyes. Anger would have been preferable. He looked at her like he didn’t know her. All she had to offer him now was more of the truth.
“I didn’t grow up like you did,” she said.
“No, don’t give me that. You’re not going to use the size of my family’s bank account to excuse your lies all these years.”
Ruth gestured to the granite countertops, steel cabinets, and floating shelves. “Every day I walk around this house like I belong here. But inside, I’m that poor pregnant Black girl from Ganton, Indiana. I didn’t want your family to think less of me. I didn’t want you to think less of me, either.”
Xavier sat down again. “I wouldn’t have judged you. Remember Shavonne, my cousin on my daddy’s side? The one with the light eyes that you met at the family reunion last year?”
Ruth nodded.
“She got pregnant her sophomore year in high school and dropped out. She still talks about getting her GED. The same thing could have happened to me. I messed around with my share of girls in high school and didn’t always strap up.”
“But it’s different for guys,” she said. “People don’t shame you for it. You still get to walk away and have a future.”
Xavier paused at that, then said, “I just wish you’d trusted me more. Or trusted me at all.”
He rose from the table again and moved to the sink to continue washing dishes, and so did she. They moved like an assembly line in the kitchen, washing and rinsing plates and scooping leftovers into Tupperware containers. When Ruth had first told Xavier that her grandmother didn’t believe in dishwashers, she thought he would laugh and consider it old-fashioned like she had.
Mama always said dishwashers were nothing but a waste of water, and besides, nothing beats good ol’ elbow grease. Xavier accepted that as reasonable and suggested he and Ruth wash and dry dishes together as a team. They usually talked while they worked. Not this time, though. The hinges of their new cabinets squeaked louder than usual, it seemed, when they put away each dish.
Through a narrow opening of their bedroom door that night Ruth heard Xavier moving about the house. The announcer on ESPN analyzing plays in a football game. Then the pop from the opening of his bottle of Sam Adams. About two commercial breaks later, the sound of him using the guest bathroom.
Sitting in bed alone, she pulled the comforter around her shoulders and rocked lightly against the headboard. She thought about the first guy she’d built her world around, only to have him back away from her.
She remembered Friday nights in Ganton, no particular one because they were all the same. Fast-food islands every few miles teeming with pent-up adrenaline. Taco Bell and Walmart as destinations, not pit stops on the way to something more exciting. Malls jittering with girls telling jokes Ruth didn’t get. When she dreamed of her future, she imagined being on an airplane looking down on Ganton from ten thousand feet, then twenty and thirty thousand feet, until the clouds obscured her hometown altogether. There had to be a world out there that didn’t revolve around high school football.
As luck would have it, though, it was football that introduced Ruth to Ronald. His sweat-streaked face had glimmered in the moonlight, black and shiny like fresh asphalt after a hard rain. He wore shades even in the dark and a tribal tattoo snaked down his neck, inviting her to follow wherever it led. But it didn’t matter whether he noticed her, because she’d always pitied girls like her best friend, Natasha, who had to rely on their looks instead of their brains to attract boys.