Page 77 of Everything You Want Me to Be
“You’re going to keep the baby.”
“Don’t you dare suggest what I think you’re going to suggest.” Her voice, still low, was like steel now.
“What am I going to suggest? How do you know what I think, when I don’t even know what I think?”
“I know you, and I know we haven’t been happy, but this is my baby.” Her hands broke apart, spread over the small, flat plane of her abdomen. “This is our baby, our family.”
“You’re raising it here.” All I could do was state the obvious, mumble each bald fact as it punched me in the gut.
“We’ve already talked about that. I’ll need some help with the chickens. I can’t lift all the feed bags on my own anymore. The wheelbarrow should still be fine. I’m not sure about the ammonia in the excrement, but at the most it would be an hour of your day. I made an appointment with an OB-GYN.”
She sat there on the faded couch with her gaze falling somewhere between us, outlining details I could barely comprehend. It all felt horribly wrong: Mary’s tightly controlled pragmatism, my monumental panic. We were a parody of what this moment should have been, what it would have been if it had happened a year ago. Instead of a celebration she was giving me an ultimatum, the second I’d been handed in as many hours.
“You don’t seem overjoyed by the news,” I managed.
“I was surprised.”
I made a half-strangled noise that suggested agreement.
“It’s been better lately, though, hasn’t it?” she appealed. “You’ve been spending time with Mom. The principal says you’re doing a great job with the play, that you’re working with some talented students.”
“Jesus.” I couldn’t take any more of this, not when Hattie’s presence hovered at the edge of the conversation, threatening to spill into this nightmare. “I have to think.”
“Peter—”
“I just need some time to think.” I grabbed my keys and left the house, gunning the car out of the driveway and flying over the gravel road. I hit sixty, then seventy, and the rocks that pummeled the underside of the car sounded like a stampede, a hundred desperate, hoofed creatures running for their lives.
Thirty minutes ago I’d been fantasizing about—why whitewash it?—the sexual torture and abduction of Hattie, and the abandonment of Mary in the process. Why hadn’t I gone? Why hadn’t I scooped Hattie up the minute she’d uttered the words and forced her in a car before she could change her mind? We’d be in Wisconsin by now. I could’ve sent Mary an email from Madison, blissfully unaware of this child. I could’ve escaped.
Now there was no escape. Was there? Jesus, could I leave Mary, pregnant and alone, branded forever as the woman whose husband left her for Hattie Hoffman, that girl who was in the plays and not even out of high school? He was her teacher, you know. I could hear their whispers, picture their sympathetic looks.
I sped toward Rochester. The melting fields blurred into rolls of white and brown, and then subdivisions gave way to the car dealerships and big-box stores that lined the freeways on the outskirts of the city. I turned toward Mayo Clinic and downtown, slowing the car as people spilled into the sidewalks for lunch hour, their faces lifted, basking in the unseasonable warmth of the day.
It was warm the day I’d proposed to Mary, too. God, it seemed like a lifetime ago now, but it was less than six years since that day after graduation.
I zigzagged up and down the streets of the business district and finally parked next to a café and started walking, thinking about the girl I’d proposed to, everything I prized about her. I loved her sweet, dependable personality. I loved how loyal she was to the American classics, to Steinbeck and Cather and Thoreau. I loved how she’d shop the thrift stores twice a year, always on the Daylight Saving Time days so she never forgot, and she’d take back grocery bags of her old clothes and sell them for half the money of her new finds. She was so responsible with her money, not like me. I could get by on ramen and tofu for a week, but then I’d go to the bar on Saturday and blow two hundred dollars on drinks and cabs. I knew I needed a wife like Mary. It made sense on so many levels that I never wondered—like a lot of my friends did about their own girlfriends—if I could find someone better. To think that one day I’d long to leave her for a deceptive, brilliant actress would have been laughable.
I planned to propose at Solera, the same tapas restaurant that I’d taken Hattie to in Minneapolis, but when I told Mary about the reservation, she balked.
“It’s too expensive,” she said. “Thirty dollars for a bottle of wine? That’s ridiculous.”
She suggested a picnic instead, so on the Saturday after graduation we took the bus to the Stone Arch Bridge and walked to the park on the north side of the river. Mary had prepared a cold feast—a fruit-and-cheese plate, crunchy baguette, and wine poured into grape juice bottles so the park police wouldn’t bother us. We lay out in the sun and watched the bikers and rollerbladers zoom over the bridge from our vantage point up on the bluff, eating and throwing our crumbs to ducks that became progressively bolder as the afternoon passed. As settings for marriage proposals went, it was absolutely ideal.
Dessert was my cue. I’d brought Mary’s favorite chocolate cake from the bakery, but when I brought it out—while the jeweler’s box bulged conspicuously in my pocket—I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make myself say the words. Mary noticed my sweaty anxiety after a few bites and asked whether I was feeling okay. I lied and said I’d probably had too much sun. We packed up the picnic while I kicked myself, trying to figure out a way to propose now that I’d missed my moment. It wasn’t until we were walking back over the bridge that Mary unknowingly handed me a second chance. She stopped, leaned against the railing, and smiled at the small rapids rushing in front of Nicollet Island.
“Isn’t that just perfect?” she asked, and even though the question was obviously rhetorical, I seized upon it.
“Not quite.” I dropped the picnic basket, pulled out the ring, and bent to one knee. “You can make it perfect, though.”
“Oh, my.” She breathed it, I remembered. Her hands came up over her mouth just the way I’d imagined. A few rollerbladers cheered and whistled as they shot past us.
She blushed, dropping her hands, but then abruptly sobered and looked intently into my eyes.
“Are you asking me something?”
“Yes,” I stammered, finally spitting it out. “Mary Beth Reever, will you marry me?”
“That depends.”
