Lana
The coffee-making process is simple here at Twin Peaks. You spin around on the stool, take a paper cup, place it in the machine, press the appropriate button, and wait. This is an in-and-out coffee joint, a drive-by-and-look-at-some-breasts coffee joint, so nothing more intricate is required. There is no mixing espresso shots with steamed milk by hand or crafting patterns in the froth with chocolate sprinkles or expertly swirling towers of cream on top of hot chocolates. We don’t even have to bother folding napkins; there’s a bin of them right by the window if anyone wants one. All of which means that the actual contact with coffee grinds or whatever is kept to a minimum, only becoming necessary when the machine needs to be refilled. Literally anyone could do this job. Nothing like working as a real, black-pants white-T barista at all.
But I’ve always loved the smell of coffee, and even in this push-a-button-pass-a-cup variation, I’ve enjoyed the smells and sounds. So why the hell can’t I stand the smell of coffee all of a sudden? I sit on my stool as usual, breasts mushed into my bikini top as usual, legs on display as usual, waiting for a chance to chat with Kelly and thinking of Kade far back in my mind as usual, and yet every time I pass a customer a cup of coffee and the smell rises up into my nostrils I feel a sharp, intense wave of nausea. I keep pressing the back of my hand against my mouth and swallowing hard, but the smell I used to love is now making me want to spew up everything I had for dinner last night and the night before that and every night since I was born.
When there is a break in the flow of customers, I almost run to the foldout table, sitting right in the middle of the booth where the scent of recently-made coffee is weakest. Saliva fills my mouth, and even the sensation of that is sickening. I can imagine what the customers would make of that: “Yeah, I went to the Twin Peaks and it was pretty good, except there was this dribbling weirdo serving me.”
Terry joins me, pulling her chair around to my side of the table and sitting next to me. She places her large hand on my back and rubs softly as I hunch over and try to steady my breathing, three seconds in, hold, three seconds out. More than anything, I don’t want to be sick. I despise being sick. The idea of being sick makes me feel sick in itself.
“You haven’t been eating rotted bacon and washing it down with expired milk, have you?” she asks, with a playful grin.
“Very—funny.” I bite down when nausea hits me, churning my stomach. “Ha, ha,” I add, as sweat slides down my almost-naked body.
“It’s been a month and a half since the night with Kade,” Terry says softly, eyes trained on my face, watching for my reaction.
A month a half.
Goddamn.
I’ve been thinking about my new friendship with Terry, and Dad in prison, and Mom sinking ever deeper into the couch, and moving to Seattle, and my studies and Kade, Kade most of all, thinking and overthinking so much that it completely slipped my mind.
My period completely slipped my mind.
“Oh,” I mutter. “Oh shit.”
Terry is about to reply when a customer appears on her side of the booth. With a sigh, she stands up and goes over to the window. “Hey, beautiful. What can I get for you today?”
I reach across the table and pull the notepad toward me, take the pencil from the ring binding. Every movement provokes a pang of pain and sickness somewhere in my body, mainly deep in my stomach but sometimes strange places like my temples and the back of my head, the top of my neck. I’ve been feeling this way for about a week now and if I know Terry, and I think I do, she would’ve documented it if she’s spotted it. I open the notepad—I’ve been too sick to participate much in it lately—and there, sure enough, is a cartoon version of me with a belly five times the size of a normal pregnant person’s belly.
She returns from serving the customer and winces when she sees it. “I just doodled that,” she says. “I didn’t mean any offence, hon.”
“No, it’s fine.” I try and smile, but even smiling is difficult when you feel this ill. Slowly, with a shaky, sweaty hand, I write the caption: I feel like my belly is full of Kade. “What do you think?” I ask, sliding it to her.
She winces again. “Look at you. You can barely even sit up straight.” She watches me for a few moments, glances around the booth, and then mutters, “Fuck it.” She paces to me and hooks an arm underneath my armpit.
“Woah, what’re you doing?”
She hauls me up and marches me to the lockers, takes out my overcoat, and wraps it around my shoulders. “Put your arms in,” she commands, the voice of a mother who isn’t in the mood for any nonsense, the growl of a lioness somewhere in her voice.
I do as she says, mostly because I feel too ill to do anything else. Terry slips on a T-shirt and some shorts and tells me do get my comfortable shoes on. I do it, and then she hauls me up toward the big oval entrance, past the Twin Peaks Man, and toward the side of the road where her car is parked. She stops for a second to lock the door to the Twin Peaks, and then marches across the road with me.
“You know we shouldn’t be doing this,” I point out. “If David finds out—”
But then the sickness hits me again and I can’t tell about what will happen if David finds out, but judging by the way she looks at me, she knows already. She’s risking her job for me. Risking my job for me, too. But hell, I can’t sit in that booth for another eight hours and pretend that everything’s okay. Sooner or later I’m going to be sick. I’m going to be sick and maybe I’ll be sick right out the booth window onto a customer’s car. That wouldn’t be good for business, would it? So in a way we have to leave and get this seen to. I reflect to myself, as I sit in the passenger-side seat in Kelly’s car, that all I am doing is justifying.
Kelly screeches down the lane. On the way, we pass a couple of cars, most likely on their way to the Twin Peaks.
But Kelly pays them no mind. As I lay my head against the glass, thankful for its relative coolness, Kelly presses the pedal down and drives us straight to the nearest convenience store, a block of public bathrooms sitting next to it.
“Go and wait in the ladies’ bathroom,” she tells me. “I’ll go and get—get it.”
“It’s not Voldemort,” I say. “You can say pregnancy test.”
She laughs gruffly. “Yeah, I know. It’s just . . . damn. Go and wait for me.”
She climbs out the car and paces across the lot to the store. I climb out and walk to the bathrooms, each step feeling like a struggle now. Kade is in me. The cartoon wasn’t a joke. Kade may very well be inside of me. I tell myself to calm down; we don’t know anything yet. But we didn’t use a condom and now that I’m counting, I’m at least two weeks late. I haven’t slept with anybody else, so I think we know a hell of a lot even before Terry returns with the test.
The toilet is surprisingly clean for a public toilet, with minimal graffiti and only a couple of waterlogged bowls. I go to the cleanest one, close the seat, and sit down hunched over with my chest to my knees, dragging in breaths now rather than simply breathing, every moment picturing what it’d be like if I just vomited all over the floor. Don’t vomit, I tell myself. Don’t you dare. “Don’t you dare,” I mutter. My voice is shaky, weak. In a way, I hope I’m pregnant. It’s either that or I’ve somehow contracted malaria.
I jump up from the seat when Terry enters. Enters being a flattering word for the way she barges into the toilet holding a box of pregnancy tests—why the hell do they come in two packs?—in one of her hands, a liter bottle of water in the other.
“Overkill, maybe?” I say.
She shrugs. “The water will help you not puke. Or make it easier to puke. Whichever’s gonna happen, it’ll make it easier. Here.” She passes me the box of tests and then starts pacing, like she’s the one who might be about to have her life turned upside down.
“I think I can manage that,” I say, taking a sip of water. It’s incredibly cold, and eases some of the tightness in my throat.
Terry paces and I sip and pee. I pee on one stick, and then another, and then I make Kelly go buy two more, because I don’t like the answer I’m getting. But all four show the exact same answer, in different colors and patterns. There’s no question. We stare at each other in the mirror, and I’m sweaty and tired-looking, but Terry looks like she’s already picking out nursery furniture.
Positive, positive, positive, positive.
“Oh,” I mumble, taking a step backward.
Of course I am pregnant. You do not miss a period and suddenly find the scent of coffee sickening if you are not pregnant, and yet when I see the positives staring up at me it’s like I’ve just been slapped in the face. I lean down, bracing my hands on my knees, struggling to make the information really sink into my head.
“What,” I mutter.
Kelly puts her hand on my shoulder. “You’re pregnant, hon,” she says.
“What,” I repeat.
I am pregnant with Kade’s baby. With Kade’s baby. Kade the biker, the leader of the Tidal Knights, the man I had one passionate night with—his child is inside my body. Okay, the beginnings of a baby, at this point I know it’s just a clump of stuff, but. But.
Stating it like that, clearly, obviously, undisputedly, still does not make it real enough.
“What,” I say a third time.
Then sickness comes, angry sickness, not-messing-around sickness.
I dive for the toilet, throw myself to my knees and vomit violently into the bowl, belly twisting, sweat pouring down me in buckets.
And even as I sit here, puking up my insides, even as Kelly holds my dank hair from my eyes, even as my belly feels like there are a hundred jugs of bilge water in there sloshing around and forcing themselves up and out of me, even as my entire worldview shifts and my entire life plan is changed—even with all that, as I’m wiping vomit from my lips with a piece of toilet towel I say:
“I am keeping this child, Kelly.”