She leaned close to me and, barely in front of a torrent of tears, she blubbered:
“I’m pregnant!”
**************************
Gail kept splashing water from the gushing faucet onto her face. Then she would look into the mirror, assess the redness of her eyes, and repeat the process.
We had adjourned to the bathroom when even I thought she might be loud enough to impinge on the sports fans below.
“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it …” she chanted over and over again.
I gave her time to react, process, mull—whatever she was needing to do. My patience was rewarded by a new chant:
“Stupid, stupid , STUPID!”
“Come. Sit,” I soothed.
We traded places. She sat on the edge of the tub and I wet a facecloth at the sink. Then I sat beside her and gently washed her face.
“Ready to tell me how this happened. You know I won’t judge you.”
Gail grabbed the facecloth from my hand and, with eyes as wide as I’ve ever seen, croaked: “Oh, but you will. You will!”
“Let’s take it one step at a time. I’ll ask easy questions. Little ones. And you … all you have to do is answer.” I lifted her chin in put my forehead against hers. “Okay?”
She nodded and took a deep breath, then blew it out.
“First thing: are you definitely sure you’re pregnant. You know your period had been irregular for the past year.”
“Yes! Yes! I’m sure! I’ve bought so many of those goddam pregnancy tests my car can drive itself to every drug store in town! Every piss I’ve taken in the past three days has been onto a piece of plastic.”
“And …?”
“And every single one had a big, clear plus sign or the friggin’ word ‘pregnant’ on it. So yeah, I’m sure. Very sure. And I can feel it. Something told me—just like I knew immediately with the twins. I knew then, and I know now! I’m knocked up—but good.”
“Does Vance know?” I thought that was a good and logical question. Gail differed.
“Vance? Are you shittin’ me! Be serious! You know Vance. You know we haven’t … He hasn’t been interested in a long, long, looong time. And besides, all those years ago, after the twins were born and he said ‘Good, we got one of each’ and he went out and got—”
“A vasectomy,” I added.
“Yeah, a vasectomy. Shooting blanks for over twenty years.”
I sighed. Without the aid of the “snip, snip,” Ned had also been “shooting blanks” for all of Doug’s life. We had been trying to get pregnant all those years, and now, I didn’t know if it bothered me more that we had failed, or that I knew I had finally given up.
“So Vance isn’t …?”
“No Vance isn’t. He isn’t. He isn’t,” she said in a mean and mocking tone. “He isn’t the father.”
Then she cried again. I cradled her face into my shoulder, as much to muffle her sobs as to comfort.
A light knock on the door startled us both. Ned’s voice drifted through the wood: “Game’s over and Vance is ready to leave. Everything Okay in there?”
Gail lifted her head off my shoulder, and sounding like she was half under water blurted loudly: “Woman problems”
“Uh-oh!” came from the other side of the door, then footsteps getting fainter.