Page 3 of Beside the Rolling Waves
A little slice of unease sat on that thought for a moment before she pushed it aside. So life wasn’t turning out quite the way she wanted it to. Or the way she thought it was going to. Or the way she had hoped. She had to move on. She couldn’t wait around forever for someone who wasn’t going to keep his word and who’d ghosted her years ago.
Opening up Rita’s text with her nose, she blinked as she read the text, then read it again to be sure.
I need to talk to you.
The next text was just as mysterious.
Please. As soon as you can.
That was really weird.
She pulled a glove off with her teeth and held it in her mouth. Should she finish doing the horses? Was this like an emergency where…what? Her sister lived in a suburb of Chicago, and considering their upbringing, she’d done pretty well for herself. She had an apartment and a job, and while she had just broken up with her boyfriend of six months, a six-month relationshipwasn’t a terrible thing. Considering that Rita hadn’t been raised in the best of conditions, it was pretty good that she was as stable as what she was.
She was more stable than Becky anyway.
But Becky had always had more pluck. More grit and determination. There weren’t a whole lot of people who could live the way she was living and even enjoy it and be happy about it.
At least that’s what she told herself anyway. Still, she decided that this was probably something that she ought to address immediately.
Knowing that she would get cold if she stopped working, she went into the small office, where she allowed herself the luxury of a space heater. She turned it on, pulled her other glove off, and sat on the folding chair in front of the heater so as not to waste any of the glorious warmth coming from it.
She wouldn’t have it on for long, just long enough that her fingers wouldn’t freeze as she pulled her sister’s contact up and put her phone on speaker so she could put her gloves back on and turn the heater off.
“Becky. You didn’t have to call me that fast.”
“I sure did. You asked me to call you as soon as I could. You know that there isn’t too much that I would have been doing that I wouldn’t have dropped in order to talk to you right away. What’s going on?”
“I got my test results back.”
Two
Rita hadn’t been feeling the greatest, and Becky had talked her into going to the doctor, who had sent her for a few tests. After all, her job afforded her health insurance, and Becky said she ought to take advantage of it. Whatever it was, it was probably something that would be easily taken care of. At her age, it wouldn’t be anything serious, but if a person had insurance that would cover taking care of the little things, she ought to get it done.
She had missed seeing her sister over the holidays, because Rita hadn’t felt well, and Becky didn’t have anyone dependable with whom she could entrust her horses.
Still, she was looking forward to spring, and she was going to make a point of going to see her sister. It had been way too long, almost a year.
“So what are they saying?” she asked, relieved that Rita had some answers, obviously. Whatever the problem was, they would be able to figure it out; it was the fear of the unknown that usually made things so bad.
“Well, there are a couple of things I didn’t tell you.”
“Okay,” Becky said slowly, reaching over, and against everything that she wanted to do, she turned the heater off.
She sat back, huddled on the chair, holding her phone in her gloved hands. She could see her frozen breath coming out in puffs.
“All right. So the first thing I didn’t tell you was that before Brian broke up with me, there was a guy.”
“Okay,” Becky said, not sure how this had anything to do with anything.
“His name was Chad, and I saw him off and on for about three months.”
“He wasn’t a drug dealer, was he?” Becky said, knowing that she was using her stern older sister’s voice.
“No,” Rita said, like it was obvious. “Of course not.”
“Okay.”
“Well, anyway. I got pregnant.”
