Page 8 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

After the doctor stepped out of the room, while she was changing into the gown the nurse had brought her, she silently thanked God that Mark hadn’t come to spectate such a thing. It would be weird enough if her mom came, but Shyanne was working.

And then it was time for her to get fucked by a robot to meet her unborn child.

“Okay,” the doctor said, “now the gel is heated, so this shouldn’t be too bad.”

He began to insert the giant dildo. It didn’t hurt. It was just weird as hell.

He was really digging around in there, trying to see something perhaps in her spinal column. “Okay!” he said, turning a knob on the machine, and suddenly there was sound, a quiet, fast whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. “That’s the heartbeat.”

“It is?” It sounded like a mechanical toy. She didn’t know why she was crying; it was completely underwhelming as a sound.

He kept digging the wand around, taking pictures, clicking the mouse of the computer with his other hand. It was really quite impressive, his ambidextrousness. “I’m taking measurements so we can get some idea of the age of the... uh... fetus.”

She noticed he had avoided using the word baby. She thought that was kind of him, and it made her start crying again.

“Okay,” he said, “so I would say, based on measurements, and these are pretty accurate especially this early, that you’re about eight weeks.”

It wasn’t that this wasn’t possible, only that Margo wasn’t prepared. Eight weeks pregnant sounded awfully pregnant.

He removed the wand and peeled off the plastic condom thing, then he pressed a button on the machine and a printer started. “Oh, I should have asked—do you want copies of the pictures?”

“Yes,” she said, though saying it made her cough because she was crying so hard while trying to be relatively silent.

“Do you... know what you want to do about the pregnancy?”

“No,” she said, and closed her eyes.

“I’m gonna let you get cleaned up, and then we can talk more about your options,” he said.

When he was out of the room, she looked at the pictures, which were still dangling out of the machine on their shiny, thin strip of paper. And there he was. Her baby, looking for all the world like a tiny, deformed dove.

Chapter Three

After the doctor’s appointment I drove to my mother’s apartment.

“Hey, Noodle,” my mom said.

“I’m eight weeks pregnant, it turns out,” I said, flopping down on the couch. My mother looked down at me for a long time.

“You want to keep this baby, don’t you?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She went into the kitchen. I heard the crack and hiss as she opened a beer. She came back into the room.

“I like your nails,” I said. They were new. A kind of radioactive-looking yellow.

“If you keep this baby,” she said, “I’m not taking care of it. It would be your baby.”

“I know,” I said, genuinely baffled. I would never give the baby to my mother.

“Goddamn it,” she said, pacing back and forth in front of the TV with her beer.

“Mom, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ll figure it out.”

“I just... I thought I did so good! You were in college! You were gonna be somebody!”

“Who was I going to be?” I asked. I had a sudden image of my mother pressing her idea of who I was onto the actual me, like an acrylic nail, this big mask-shell of a face on top of my actual face.

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