Page 7 of Salty Pickle

Her head snaps up at that. “Of course you are. You were there.”

“Properly sheathed in a condom.”

“With eighty percent effectiveness.”

“When used improperly, which wasn’t the case.”

She swipes away her tears. She’s switched to angry. I can see it in her steely posture, the uplift of her chin. “It could have been defective.”

“Why aren’t you on birth control?”

She lets out a huff. “Why would I put unnatural hormones into my body?”

Oh, now I’m remembering. She’s a yoga, vegetarian, crunchy-granola naturalist. Eight months ago, she’d gone on quite a while about the ills of modern industrial society.

Not that she’s wrong. But she takes it to an impractical level. In fact, I think she lives off the grid.

Which explains the no phone, no email, no car.

“When can we do a DNA test?” I ask her.

Her face pales, two bright spots of pink standing out on her cheeks. “I have no idea.”

“You hitchhiked here all the way from Colorado, and you don’t even have a way to prove that this pregnancy is mine?”

Then it happens again. The waterworks. She sniffs. She wipes her eyes.

Holy Christ. I don’t know what to do with this.

She points at my computer. “Can you look it up?”

“Look what up?”

“DNA tests.”

I’m happy to spin away and face my monitor. The impassive glow of technology is vastly preferable to her misery.

She sniffles while I tap and scan the results.

I speed-read the first hits. “You can do it while pregnant, but it’s an invasive procedure.”

“A needle? Like amniocentesis?”

“Yes.”

She makes a little cry.

“But once the baby is out, it’s a simple swab of saliva.”

Another cry.

I want to read more than headlines about how this works, but I turn back to her. I try to imagine what a kinder, gentler person would do. Someone like, I don’t know, my brother Axel. Or my cousin Anthony. Maybe all the patience went to the A names in the family.

“I tell you what. I’ll buy you a ticket home, pay for the test, and we can revisit once the baby is here and you know.”

She sucks in a gasp. “You would miss the birth of your baby!”

“Not if it’s not my baby.”

---