Page 10 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“You chose to keep me,” I said. I could hear the faint ticking of the carbonation in her beer.

“I did. But there were other times, later, when I chose different.”

I was silent. I had not known that. It made sense, though.

“Do you think things happen for a reason?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think you’re just scared to admit you want to wreck your life.”

“You think it will wreck my life?” I asked.

She stroked my hair. “Yes, Noodle, it will ruin your life, for sure. But sometimes ruining your life is the only thing you want.”

I knew she was talking about deciding to keep me when she was pregnant. About the gray area she and Jinx had spent their whole lives in, the bittersweetness of making do with another woman’s husband. The way I would scream and chatter when he came in the door, begging him to suplex me before he’d even set down his bag, and her coming out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel, having tried to cook some weird retro dish, tuna casserole with raisins in it, meat loaf covered in ketchup. She would snap at me and tell me to give him some space, offer him a beer as I clamored to tell him about school. And when he’d leave again in a few days, the apartment would be so quiet, and we wouldn’t know how to talk to each other exactly, like we were embarrassed of ourselves and how we had behaved.

“I ruined your life,” I said, not a question. I just wanted her to know that I knew.

“You ruined my life so pretty, Noodle.”

I didn’t say anything, only lay there on the couch with my head in her lap. She petted my hair, skritched my scalp with her acrylic nails.

But there had also been the two of us laughing and eating popcorn, her loopy handwriting on notes she left in my school lunches that she pretended were written by the cat. Our arms moving in perfect synchrony to fold a fitted sheet. The day we drove all the way to the Grand Canyon, a solid eight hours, and just looked at it, bought some Sour Patch Kids, and drove all the way home so I could go to school the next day.

If Shyanne hadn’t had me, what would she have had?

“I scheduled an abortion,” I told her. She didn’t say anything. “But I don’t think I can go. Like, I can’t picture myself going.”

“Well,” she said, “you’ll have to wait until it’s time and then figure out if you want to go or not.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to show how thrilled I was that she’d backed off the idea of me definitely going through with it. Like I was lying to stay home sick.

I called and canceled the abortion the moment I left her house that day. I couldn’t tell you why. It was a bad idea. I did not have good reasons. And it wasn’t because I wanted to be a good person, not really. It wasn’t because I was in love with Mark. I just wanted that baby. I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything.

I cut out the best of the ultrasound pictures and kept it on my bedside table. I would spend hours staring at it. It was such an inadequate, ugly image, so frustrating in its refusal to give me anything to hold on to, any way of envisioning who the baby would be. My body was making something in secret, and I was reduced to spying on my internal organs with these grainy black-and-white photos. But I hung on, faithful, waiting.

Once she was past sixteen weeks and an abortion was no longer legally possible, Margo wrote to Mark to tell him she was keeping the baby. She didn’t want him to be able to talk her out of it. He didn’t write back. She’d expected a lecture, a panicked phone call. For days she waited for the reaction she was sure would come. Even two weeks after the email, she expected him to do something, reach out in some way. He didn’t.

It scared her, how much this stung. To be ignored. How much, perhaps, she had thought that keeping the baby would force him to deal with her. She didn’t think that was why she’d made the decision, but it wasn’t not why. It’s not like she wanted Mark to play husband, play Daddy—she knew that. If he had said, “Okay, my marriage is a sham anyway, I’ll get a divorce and marry you and raise the baby,” she would have been horrified. She wasn’t even interested in seeing him that regularly. But he had always been clear about one thing: That she was important. That she was amazing. But if she really was, would this be how he treated her?

When Margo told Jinx she was keeping the baby, he was very relaxed about it. “I’m looking forward to being a grandpa,” he said in his weirdly calm, Mr. Rogers–esque voice. She was the youngest of his kids, the first to have a baby, and this was not lost on her.

“Maybe it will be a boy, and he’ll be a wrestler,” Jinx suggested.

Margo felt instantly terrible that Mark was so short. She hadn’t even chosen a big, strong dummy to procreate with; instead, she’d mated with a small, immoral weirdo. Jinx elegantly filled in the pause.

“I didn’t realize you had a fellow,” he said.

“I don’t really,” she said.

“Oh, that’s all right, Margo. You’ll do just fine, I think.”

They hadn’t spoken since. She called him now.

“I’m scared,” she blurted out the moment he picked up.

“Hello there,” he said, and his voice sounded weird. Then she heard a woman in the background. It could have been a lover or his wife or one of his daughters, and Margo knew it meant he would keep this conversation short. At least he’d picked up, she told herself. He could see it was her, and still, he’d picked up. That was a kind of love.

She cut to the chase: “What if I’m making a big mistake?”

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