Somewhere Out There(12)
She exited the stall and then stood in front of the sink, cupping water in her hand and washing out her mouth as best she could. Smoothing her black curls, she wiped away the mascara smeared beneath her eyes and applied a fresh coat of red lipstick, then popped three Altoids. The door swung open, and her coworker Tanya entered.
“Hey,” Tanya said. “I just delivered your order to table twelve.”
“Thanks,” Brooke said, turning to look at Tanya, a short black woman with a heart-shaped face, a multitude of shoulder-length slender braids, and an enormous rack. “Tits equal tips,” she liked to claim, completely unashamed to exploit her sexuality to make money.
“No problem,” Tanya said, taking a minute to glance in the mirror. She reached into her tight, blue V-necked T-shirt and adjusted her breasts for optimal cleavage exposure. She looked over at Brooke and frowned. “You okay? You look like hell.”
“Think I ate a bad burger,” Brooke said. “I’m fine, now.” After making her ill, her nausea had vanished.
“Hopefully not the kind of burger where you wake up with a baby nine months later,” Tanya said with a grin. Her teeth glowed white against her dark skin.
“Oh, god, no,” Brooke said, but something inside her dropped a few floors at what Tanya’s joke implied. A pregnancy scare was not what her relationship with Ryan needed. They’d met a year ago, when he was newly separated and living on his own, and twelve months later, he had yet to pull the trigger on making the end of his marriage legal. This bothered Brooke less than it might have someone else—when she’d told Tanya about his circumstances, her coworker shook her head and made clucking sounds to indicate her disapproval: “Girl, that man has more baggage than a European vacation. You need to cut him loose.”
But the truth was, Brooke was happy with how things were. Ryan didn’t push her to move in with him and she didn’t ask him where their relationship might be headed. Instead, the two simply kept each other company. They went out for dinner a few times a week, always ending up at his beautifully furnished downtown apartment, which overlooked the glittering lights of Elliott Bay, where they had the kind of passionate, mind-numbing sex that felt as necessary to Brooke as taking a breath. They kept things simple. Uncomplicated. Which was exactly how Brooke liked her relationships to be.
On the days she didn’t see Ryan, she’d read the books she checked out from the library or binge-watch Scandal or House of Cards on Netflix. She’d go to the grocery store, noting the other shoppers with their big carts piled high with family-size bags of chicken breasts, pot roasts, and bulk packages of hamburger and boxes of macaroni and cheese—purchases that promised loud and happy meals around a dining room table, parents bribing their children with the reward of ice cream if they ate at least three forkfuls of green beans. The kinds of meals Brooke had never had. She’d stand in the frozen food aisle, watching these scenes play out, finding herself wishing that she, too, had grown up with a mother to nag into buying Double Stuf Oreos, Doritos, and pouches of sugary juice. She wished for any kind of mother other than the one who’d given her away.
“See you out there,” Tanya said.
Brooke watched as Tanya spun around and headed back out the door, then a moment later followed her. As she worked the rest of her shift that night, Brooke tried to forget what Tanya had suggested. But after the bar closed and she sat at a table, tallying up her tips, she couldn’t help but count backward to the last time she’d had her period—five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight weeks. She was late. Panic flooded her body in a cold rush, causing her skin to sprout goose bumps.
Calm down, she told herself. It could be anything. It could be stress. It could just be her, being irregular.
But even so, after she said good-bye to Tanya and Fred, the bartender, she drove toward her studio apartment on Capitol Hill, a voice inside her head reminding her that she was never irregular. She was on the Pill, but there were a few times this summer when she’d forgotten to take it and had to double up the next morning. If she was carrying Ryan’s baby, she had to know. And so, on her way home from the bar, she stopped at a twenty-four-hour Walgreens and bought two early-detection pregnancy tests, along with a box of saltine crackers and a six-pack of ginger ale, in case she started to feel queasy again.
As she made her way back to her car, Brooke thought about the night Ryan first came into the bar and sat down at one of her tables with a group of his employees. Brooke had found herself doing a double take when she saw him, appreciating the strong angles of his jaw—the ruddy, lined map of his face. He had light brown hair, brown eyes, and a mischievous smile that hinted at a good sense of humor. She was attracted to him immediately.
“Can I get you another drink?” she asked him after he’d already had two. She lifted her eyebrows and put one of her hands on her jutted-out hip.
“No, thanks,” Ryan said. “But when can I buy one for you?” The line could have come off as cheesy, but he spoke the words with such confidence, she found herself laughing and giving him her number.
They went out the next night she had off from work. From the beginning, he was up front about the fact that he and Michelle were still married, but only in name. “Before I finally left, we hadn’t slept in the same bed for five years,” he told her on their first date. He took her to the Metropolitan Grill, a landmark restaurant where the steaks were legendary, and the bottle of wine Ryan ordered cost more than Brooke’s monthly grocery budget.