Nancy

 

I return to my apartment, unable to stop clenching my jaw, my entire mouth aching from the tension. My fist is clenched so tightly around the pregnancy test I’ve crushed the cardboard. I grind my teeth together, feeling enamel flake away. Dad’s gun presses into my waist. I take it out, unload it, and place it in a kitchen drawer. And then I take the pregnancy test and go into the bathroom, heart beating at the back of my throat, cutting off my airwaves, making it difficult to breathe.

 

I unbutton my shirt, sucking in big lungfuls of air. When I sit on the bowl with the stick between my legs, my body betrays me. I force the pee out but nothing happens. It’s like my body doesn’t want me to know the results. It’s like my body would prefer if I just went on being angry and ignorant. I lean over to the sink and take a drink of water, knowing I must look pretty stupid hunched over with my dress around my knees like this. I drink until my belly aches and then lean back, waiting for the magic to happen.

 

Finally, my body complies. I pee on the stick and stand up, placing the stick on the sink and pacing into the living room and back into the bathroom. For some reason, my mind is thrown back to one night a long time ago. I couldn’t have been older than ten.

 

Mom came into my bedroom with a knife clutched in her hand, her eyes wide and full of fear. “I’ve had enough,” she said, kneeling beside me in bed with the knife aimed at the ceiling. “I can’t take it anymore, Nancy. I shouldn’t be unloading on you like this . . . He doesn’t hit me, or hurt me in other ways, but . . . I’m not a babysitter, am I? I’m not a minder! And he scares me. He scares me so much because, one day, he might cross the line. He’s broken enough glasses. It would be simple for him, wouldn’t it, to use one of those broken glasses and slit me—oh, God, what am I saying?”

 

She dropped the knife and cradled my cheeks. That was when I smelled the wine, heavy on her breath, lingering in the air around her like an acrid perfume. “This is just a dream, baby,” she said. “That’s all. Just a bad dream. Go to sleep.”

 

But it wasn’t just a dream. When I woke up, the knife was on the floor. I slid it into the knife block in the kitchen and pretended it never happened.

 

I might be a mother, I reflect, waiting for the test to either smile or frown: smile for positive and frown for negative, though that seems quite presumptuous to me. I might be a mother. Me, with all my problems, with no stable model for what a family should be. I walk into the living room; I return to the bathroom. Only this time, the test is done.

 

The little face smiles up at me. I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant with Fink’s baby! I don’t know how to react. I place the test on the metal rack in the bathroom and then stumble into the living room, drop onto the couch, and stare at the muted TV. Someone is playing with me. The smiling shopping-channel woman is selling a buggy. I laugh, quiet at first, but then the laugh gets louder and louder, until I’m cackling like a mad woman. I cover my mouth, but the laughter persists.

 

The apartment buzzer interrupts my laughter. I press down on the receiver button. “Yes?” I’m dreading that it might be Dad, dreading his drunken voice slurring over the intercom, demanding his apology and demanding his gun.

 

But it’s not Dad. “Can I come up?” Fink asks.

 

“Okay . . .”

 

I buzz him up, truly freaked out now. I find out I’m pregnant and then two minutes later, Fink turns up at my door. I’ve never been a believe-in-fate kind of person, but this might just change my mind. I massage my temples, steeling myself for what I have to do. He needs to know about the child growing inside of me. I have to tell him before he disappears again, perhaps forever this time.

 

He knocks on the front door. I open it, trying to get control of myself: trying to stand confidently and appear confident in general, when in reality all I want is to shrink from this problem.

 

“Hello,” he says, watching me. Maybe he thinks I’m going to send him away. He reads my mind: “I wouldn’t blame you if you asked me to leave. I get that, Nancy. Really, I do. I left and … well, I left. And I can’t exactly stand here and beg for your forgiveness because, honestly, I’m not sure if I wouldn’t leave again.”

 

“Why are you here, then?” I ask.

 

He smiles, and then the smile falters. “As strange as it seems, you’re the only person in the whole city—damn, the whole world, even—who I feel comfortable with. Everywhere else I feel like I’m walking a tightrope or I’m playing an act. I’m tired of that. For now, I’m tired of it anyway.”

 

“Come in.”

 

I lead him to the couch, telling myself to just blurt out the news, get it over with. It’s like tearing a Band-Aid, I guess, just grab hold and rip it quickly, get the pain out of the way so that regular life can continue. But looking down at him looking up at me, his light green eyes studying me attentively, I can’t find the words.

 

“Do you want a drink?” I ask instead.

 

“Sure, whatever you have.”

 

“I have Diet Coke.”

 

“Diet Coke, then.”

 

I get the drinks and return to the couch.

 

He nods to the TV. “Do you often watch the shopping channel?”

 

“It’s my greatest passion,” I say.

 

We both laugh. “I’ve missed you,” Fink says. “I know that must sound pretty goddamn rich, but it’s the truth.”

 

“I don’t like being messed around, Fink.” I hear the bite in my voice, the cutting edge, but I can’t blunt it. “If you don’t want to be here, you don’t have to be here. But you don’t need to sneak out on me like I’m some kind of child.”

 

“Fair enough,” he says. “But I’m not going to apologize. I shouldn’t even be here now.”

 

“Because you’re the big bad wolf?” I say. “Because you’re too big and dangerous for a little lady like me?”

 

“Well, yeah, actually.” He sips his Coke. “That’s exactly right. I almost lost Sal his business a couple of hours ago.” He explains to me about Michaels and his cop friends.

 

“I hate that man,” I mutter. “I really, really hate him. I don’t consider myself a violent person, but if he was tied to a train track I think I’d have trouble with the knot.”

 

Fink stares at me. “Goddamn. I didn’t realize you were such a psycho.”

 

I slap him on the arm. “Maybe you should remember that the next time you sneak out.”

 

“Are you all right?” he asks. “You seemed a bit flustered when I first came in.”

 

“Did I?” I shrug. Tell him, I urge myself. Get it over with. Tear off the Band-Aid. “I was cleaning the bathtub. I haven’t met anybody yet who enjoys cleaning the bathtub. Oh, and I might be unemployed, too.”

 

“Unemployed? Why?”

 

Shit, shit. I regret saying it right away. I had to leave work early to buy a pregnancy test. I should just come out with it like that, but I can’t. The memory of waking up to an empty apartment is too fresh. If I tell him now, he might just leave again, leave and never come back. But if I don’t tell him, he might vanish, and I’ll never get a chance.

 

“Nancy?” He places his hand on my leg, warm, solid, whispers of pleasure moving up my thigh

 

I tell a half-truth, saying I left early because of Dad. “I don’t think I want to work there anymore, anyway,” I tell him. “I’m not sure what I want to do, though.”

 

“Being sure is harder than people think. I reckon most people just do what they do because they never stop to think about anythin’ else, or maybe they do but it’d require too much effort. I’m at a strange place in my life where it’s easier to outlaw than to do anything else. Easier to kill men and ride and rob and set fire than to sit at a desk or work in a garage. What sort of life is that?”

 

“Are you self-pitying?” I ask. “Because the man I met at the garage all those weeks ago didn’t self-pity.”

 

Fink snorts. “The man you met at the garage all those weeks ago, pretty lady, isn’t the man who’s sitting here today.”

 

“What’s changed?” I ask.

 

“I reckon you know what’s changed.”

 

“I don’t.”

 

He meets my eye, blazing green focused on me and me alone. “You,” he says. “You’ve changed me.” He squeezes my thigh, sliding his hand further and further up my leg. My lips part, my tongue licking my lower lip, my fingers tWolfing. “I met a beautiful woman at the garage and now my whole life is turned upside down. I’m not gonna try and explain it, because I wouldn’t know where to start. All I know is I don’t feel like the man I once was. I’m starting to wonder if that man was ever real at all.”

 

I touch his hand, stopping him just before he reaches my crotch. “I have to . . .” I trail off. The words won’t form. They linger on the tip of my tongue but when I try to push them into reality they just stay there, stubborn and disobedient. I want to tell him—I need to tell him—but part of me is terrified that if I do, he’ll run again, this time so far away I’ll never be able to find him. “It was wrong of you to run out on me like that,” I hear myself say. That’s what it’s like: as though I hear the words instead of speak them. “Is that what you think I am? Some kind of whore who’s on demand whenever you’re horny?” I’m angry at him, sure, but I’m also angry at myself for not telling him about the smiley face in the bathroom.

 

“I don’t see you that way,” he says, removing his hand from my leg. “I left because it was better for you—”

 

“I’m a fucking adult!” I scream, leaping to my feet, anger at him and anger at myself fusing together now. “You don’t get to decide what’s best for me. Nobody gets to decide what’s best for me apart from me. If you want to leave because you don’t like me, or think I’m boring, or we don’t click or whatever, fine, but you don’t get to march out because you think I’m too immature to make up my own mind. That’s not how this works.”

 

“With all due respect,” Fink says, standing up and facing me, “this isn’t about making up your mind. I’m not telling you I’m dangerous in some emotional sense, Nancy. I’m telling you that one day bullets might rain down on this apartment just because I’m in it. I don’t think you know what you’re—”

 

“I know exactly what I’m saying. But if that’s true, if you really are the big bad wolf, then why are you here? Why come here at all? Because you feel comfortable here? Okay, fine, I’m glad. But surely your comfort isn’t more important than my safety if you really are the boss of me and I don’t get a say.”

 

“You’re right,” Fink says, trying to push past me. “I shouldn’t be here.”

 

I grab his face in my hands, stopping him in his tracks. “I didn’t say that. You need to understand something, Fink. I can make my own decisions. I can choose my own path. I don’t need you or anybody else telling me what I can and can’t do, who I can and can’t do it with. I want you; you want me. And anyway, since when did anyone say love was safe?”

 

“Love . . .” Fink chews his bottom lip. “I’ve never loved a woman before, Nancy.”

 

“Then we’re even, because I’ve never loved a man before.”

 

Tell him! Tell him now! Don’t let this fester!

 

“But it doesn’t make sense,” Fink says. “I don’t understand it.”

 

“I don’t think it ever does. Maybe it’s not supposed to.” I stand on my tiptoes, all thought of telling him vanished from my mind now. “I’ll make a deal with you. You can stay here, but only if you stay the whole night.”

 

“Stay the whole night . . .” He touches my chin, and then my cheek, trailing my skin with his forefinger. “I reckon I can live with that.”

 

I turn and lead him toward the bathroom. “Follow me,” I say. “I need to take a shower, and I don’t want to take it alone.”