Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(97)

Her fists tightened on the steering wheel. By doing without almost everything, she had managed to save the one hundred and fifty dollars the San Antonio abortion clinic would charge her to get rid of Dallie Beaudine's baby. She refused to let herself think of the ramifications of her decision; she was simply too poor and too desperate to consider the morality of the act. After her appointment on Saturday, she would have averted one more disaster. That was all the introspection she allowed herself.

She finished running her errands in little more than an hour and returned to the station, only to have Clare yell at her for having gone off without washing her office windows first.

The following Saturday she got up at dawn and made the two-hour drive to San Antonio. The waiting room of the abortion clinic was sparsely furnished but clean. She sat down on a molded plastic chair, her hands clutching her black canvas shoulder bag, her legs pressed tightly together as if they were unconsciously trying to protect the small piece of protoplasm that would soon be taken from her body. The room held three other women. Two were Mexican and one was a worn-out blonde with an acned face and hopeless eyes. All of them were poor.

A middle-aged, Spanish-looking woman in a neat white blouse and dark skirt appeared at the door and called her name. “Francesca, I'm Mrs. Garcia,” she said in lightly accented English. “Would you come with me, please?”

Francesca numbly followed her into a small office paneled in fake mahogany. Mrs. Garcia took a seat behind her desk and invited Francesca to sit in another molded plastic chair, differing only in color from the one in the waiting room.

The woman was friendly and efficient as she went over the forms for Francesca to sign. Then she explained the procedure that would take place in one of the surgical rooms down the hall. Francesca bit down on the inside of her lip and tried not to listen too closely. Mrs. Garcia spoke slowly and calmly, always using the word “tissue,” never “fetus.” Francesca felt a detached sense of gratitude. Ever since she had realized she was pregnant, she had refused to personify the unwelcome visitor lodged in her womb. She refused to connect it in her mind to that night in a Louisiana swamp. Her life had been pared down to the bone—to the marrow —and there was no room for sentiment, no room to build falsely romantic pictures of chubby pink cheeks and soft curly hair, no need ever to use the word “baby,” not even in her thoughts. Mrs. Garcia began to speak of “vacuum aspiration,” and Francesca thought of the old Hoover she pushed around the radio station carpet every evening.

“Do you have any questions?”

She shook her head. The faces of the three sad women in the waiting room seemed implanted in her mind—women with no future, no hope. Mrs. Garcia slid a booklet across the metal desktop. “This pamphlet contains information on birth control that you should read before you have intercourse again.”

Again? The memory of Dallie's deep, hot kisses rushed back to her, but the intimate caresses that had once set her senses aflame now seemed to have happened to someone else. She couldn't imagine ever feeling that good again.

“I can't have this—this tissue,” Francesca said abruptly, interrupting the woman in midsentence as she showed her a diagram of the female reproductive organs.

Mrs. Garcia stopped what she was saying and inclined her head to listen, obviously accustomed to hearing the most private revelations pass across her desk.

Francesca knew she had no need to justify her actions, but she couldn't seem to stop the flow of words. “Don't you see that it's impossible?” Her fists clenched into knots in her lap. “I'm not a horrible person. I'm not unfeeling. But I can barely take care of myself and a walleyed cat.”

The woman gazed at her sympathetically. “Of course you're not unfeeling, Francesca. It's your body, and only you can decide what's best.”

“I've made up my mind,” she replied, her tone as angry as if the woman had argued with her. “I don't have a husband or money. I'm barely hanging on to a job working for a boss who hates me. I don't even have any way to pay my medical bills.”

“I understand. It's difficult—”

“You don't understand!” Francesca leaned forward, her eyes dry and furious, each word coming out like a hard, crisp pellet. “All my life I've lived off other people, but I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to make something of myself!”

“I think your ambition is admirable. You're obviously a competent young—”

Again Francesca pushed aside her sympathy, trying to explain to Mrs. Garcia—trying to explain to herself—what had brought her to this red brick abortion clinic in the poorest part of San Antonio. The room was warm, but she hugged herself as if she felt a chill. “Have you ever seen those pictures people put together on black velvet with little nails and different colored strings—pictures of bridges and butterflies, things like that?” Mrs. Garcia nodded. Francesca gazed at the fake mahogany paneling without seeing it. “I have one of those awful pictures fastened to the wall, right above my bed, this terrible pink and orange string picture of a guitar.”

“I don't quite see—”

“How can someone bring a baby into the world when she lives in a place with a string picture of a guitar on the wall? What kind of mother would deliberately expose a helpless little baby to something so ugly?” Baby. She'd said the word. Twice she'd said it. A painful press of tears pricked at the backs of her eyelids but she refused to shed them. In the past year, she'd cried enough spoiled, self-indulgent tears to last a lifetime, and she wasn't going to cry any more.