Charlie
After Nicolette told me about Jack beating her until she miscarried, I lost all the respect I’d had for my former boss. I couldn’t believe that a man like Jack could have been so cruel. He’d always been tough, and I never would have crossed him, but I’d always thought he was an insecure man who wanted to do whatever he could to keep hold of his girl.
But, God, I’d never been more wrong in my life. Jack was deranged – a real psychopath of a man. I knew then, in my gut, that I’d made the right decision and agreed to hole up with Nicolette until the baby was born. No wonder she’d been so fuckin’ terrified when she found out she was pregnant. I could even begin to understand what made her go to Planned Parenthood in the first place.
I drove Nicolette to the hospital for her checkup. She was officially starting the last trimester of her pregnancy. She’d gotten bigger, and the belly suited her. Her skin looked good, too. Even though Nicolette said she felt miserable and sick all of the time, I thought pregnancy made her look even more gorgeous than before. The thought of someone hurting a pregnant woman like Nicolette – especially to the point of losing the baby – made me sick. I couldn’t believe Jack had been such a monster.
We didn’t talk much in the truck on the way over there. That wasn’t anything new – it’s not like Nicolette and I were real big on talking to each other. But even the silence was starting to feel different between us now. More comfortable, like we were friends who’d talked so much that we no longer had anything left to talk about.
“I should be done in an hour or so,” she said as we pulled up to the St. George Regional Medical Center. “You can stay. It doesn’t matter.”
“Do you want me to come in with you? Are they gonna do one of those things where you see the baby?”
A smile flitted across Nicolette’s face. “I hope so,” she said. “But no, thanks. I’m fine. I’ll see you later, Charlie. I’ll call you if anything happens.” She hopped down from the truck and slammed the door once her feet were on the ground. “Bye!”
“Bye,” I echoed, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. Nicolette strode into the hospital without looking back once, and I pushed the truck into gear and slowly pulled out of the parking lot.
I don’t know where the idea came from, but it suddenly seemed like a good idea to cook dinner for her. I didn’t have a lot of experience cooking. About the most I could do was heat up water without managing to burn it. And while Nicolette had downplayed her culinary abilities, I didn’t think her cooking was that bad. I thought it was overall more likely that Jack had just told her she was a shitty cook in order to drag her self-esteem down even further.
There was a grocery store about a mile from the hospital, and I parked in the lot and strolled in. The produce section was full of housewives wearing sweatpants with their hair piled on top of their heads in messy twists. All of the women around here were so plain – there was no one young and fiery, like Nicolette. I didn’t really know much about Utah before we’d moved here, but it was a really religious area. Lots of people who got married before they’d even finished high school, and had a passel of kids before twenty-one.
I couldn’t believe it. I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t grown up in a place exactly like this. If I had, I’d probably be divorced, with ten kids, all sucking child support money out of what little paychecks I could scrape together. Just having one kid was going to be pricey enough; I didn’t know how we’d afford it when it came time for the baby to be born.
But right now, we were doin’ okay. I figured that maybe after shopping for groceries, I could stop by the store and pick up some stuff for the baby. Nicolette had been shopping at Target with her employee discount and bringing home various things, but the crib hadn’t been built yet and I knew she’d need some kind of a changing table.
Wandering through the aisles of the store, I realized I had no idea what I was going to make. My foster mother, outside of Carlsbad, used to make pasta a lot. She hadn’t been a great cook, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I bought a couple boxes of spaghetti, jars of sauce, and on the way towards the checkout lines, grabbed a loaf of French bread. Nicolette’s gonna be happy, I thought as I paid for everything. At least, I hope she will.
I still hadn’t ever really apologized to her for kidnapping her. I knew I should, but every time I thought about what to say, the words didn’t seem good enough. It wasn’t like I could just come right out and say, Hey, sorry I stole you and almost returned you to your abusive psycho of an ex!
I’d only spent twenty minutes in the grocery store, so I drove over to the local discount furniture place and picked out a changing table. The salesman told me it was real easy to assemble – the kind of thing I could do in my sleep – and I grinned as I paid. I wanted to impress her, but so far, I didn’t have any ideas beyond cooking and trying to build shit. I mean, I’m not really a romance kind of guy. It wasn’t like I was going to write her a poem, or some shit like that. She’d already fucked me, so I had a feeling she wasn’t really the flowers-and-candy type of girl.
Still, though, I wanted to do something nice once in a while.
Nicolette was waiting in front of the hospital for me with her hand resting on her belly. She smiled when she saw the truck.
“What’s that?” Nicolette pointed to the box in the bed. “Did you get something?”
“A changing table,” I said gruffly. “And some stuff for dinner.”
“Oh,” Nicolette said. She twisted up her mouth. “Charlie, I don’t really feel like cooking tonight. I was hoping we could just order something. Would that be okay?”
I laughed as we pulled away from the hospital. “I’m cooking,” I told her. “Or at least I’m gonna try. I hope it doesn’t suck.”
Nicolette’s eyes widened but she didn’t say anything. “Oh,” she finally said. Her cheeks were pink but I kept my eyes on the road. “That’s nice of you.”
“I wanted to do something nice.” I cringed. I sounded like a goddamn after-school special. “I hope it’s all right with you.”
“The appointment went well,” Nicolette said. When we were at a traffic light, she passed some paper into my hand. “That’s the baby. Growing right along.”
“Boy or girl?”
“They think it’s a boy,” Nicolette replied. She toyed with a strand of her brown hair, pursing her lips and running the hair over her mouth. “But I want it to be a girl. It feels like a girl. Does that make sense?” She blushed again. “It probably sounds dumb. Forget I said anything.”
“It makes sense,” I lied. “I mean, not really. But women’s intuition and all that. I bet you’re probably right.” I rolled my eyes. “And in sixteen years, I’ll be beating the boys off with a stick. I bet she’ll be a looker if she gets any of your genes.”
Nicolette fell silent. I could tell she was thinking about Jack again.
“Nicolette, don’t worry about him,” I said, reaching over and touching her shoulder.
She didn’t recoil from me – not this time. Instead, she looked down at my hand and then sighed. “I can’t help it,” she said. “He’s in my head all the time. I hate him so much! I wish I’d never met him, or that I’d at least listened to my parents when they told me he was a bad guy. I mean, I had no idea shit was gonna turn out like this. I didn’t think he’d be that bad! I knew he was kind of a jerk, but I always thought he loved me.”
I kept my eyes on the road and finally pulled my hand away from Nicolette’s shoulder, resting it on the steering wheel. “I don’t think Jack knows what it means to love something,” I said quietly. “Or someone. I think all he knows is himself. He’s selfish and he’s used to getting whatever he wants. And that probably passes for love, at least by his definition of the word.”
Nicolette sighed. “I’m going to take a nap when we get home,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
As soon as I pulled into the driveway, she hopped out of the truck. She didn’t even wait for me to turn the engine off. She darted inside and by the time I was in the cottage, her door was closed and the lights were dark below the door.
She slept for most of the afternoon. At some point, after a couple of beers, I remembered the groceries and the changing table in the truck. I didn’t wanna put the table together right then and there – I thought I’d probably make too much noise. I had no idea whether or not Nicolette was really sleeping, but it wasn’t something I wanted to press. Either way, she wanted to be alone. She had made that much clear.
I put a pot of water to boil on the stove and then dumped the pasta in. It couldn’t be that hard, right? The box said to cook the spaghetti for six to seven minutes. I stared at it for a second – the noodles were still stiff, and they didn’t seem to be softening in the pot. Finally, I rolled my eyes and walked into the living room. Cooking couldn’t be that much of a pain in the ass – so many people did it. I figured there had to be something there.
When Nicolette came out of her room ten minutes later, I jumped up in surprise. “Shit!”
“What?” She frowned, rubbing her eyes. She did look tired, but the dark circles under her eyes were starting to fade. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I muttered, standing up and darting into the kitchen. I groaned when I saw the pot on the stove – the water was boiling over and steam was rising from the pot at an alarming rate. Quickly, I grabbed the handles and immediately dropped the pot down a second later – the thing was burning hot! Screeching, I looked around for something to use as a buffer. Finally, I saw a dishtowel on the table and grabbed it, wrapping it around the pot and dumping the water in the sink. The pasta went with it, in a big gluey lump. “It wasn’t supposed to look like that,” I muttered as I turned on the water. “What the fuck did I do wrong?”
Behind me, there was a bright, girlish giggle. “You didn’t stir it, did you?” Nicolette walked up to me with an amused smile on her face. “You’re supposed to stir the pasta, so it doesn’t clump like that.”
“Thanks for telling me now,” I said sarcastically. “I was just trying to make a nice dinner for us.”
“Let’s order pizza instead,” Nicolette said. She winked at me. “I told you, I don’t really feel like cooking tonight.”