It said, "Janet." It was the first time I'd seen her name in 3 months. I answered before the second ring. "Jake," she said. Her voice was steady, but it was the kind of steady you have to hold up with both hands.
"We need to talk in person." That was all. She hung up. And now you know how I ended up standing at my own front door on a Saturday afternoon with the sun slanting through the wood of the frame, staring at a white plastic stick with two red lines on it. I stepped back and opened the door wider.
"Come in," I said. It was the only thing my mouth could manage. Janet walked past me into the kitchen and stopped beside the table, the same table where a small bundle of lavender and an upturned coffee cup had waited for me 4 months earlier. She looked at the wood for a moment, and I knew she was thinking about the same morning. We sat down.
For a while, neither of us spoke. The refrigerator hummed. A truck rattled down the street and faded. "I'm 49 years old," she finally said. "I thought that part of my life was over.
I honestly didn't think it was possible." She set the test on the table between us, the two red lines facing up. I took four of them, Jake. I took four on four different days because I didn't believe the first three. Then I went to see a doctor.
She says I'm about 4 months along. It's a high-risk pregnancy because of my age, but so far everything looks healthy. The baby is healthy. I stared at the test. I had been trained for a thousand situations.
Ambushes, IEDs, comms, failures, a man bleeding out in the dirt with nothing but a tourniquet and my own two hands. Nobody ever trained me for a kitchen table and a woman across from me saying the word baby. I didn't come here to ask your permission, Janet said. I came here because you have a right to know. What you do with that is your decision.
I won't blame you for anything. I looked up at her. She was holding her back straight, hands folded the way she did behind the counter at the shop when a customer was upset, but her thumbs were pressed white against her knuckles. "Janet," I said, and my voice came out rough. "I'm not going to walk away from this."
She let out a long breath like she had been holding it for a month. We agreed on a plan, if you could call it a plan. Quiet, careful. We would go to the appointments together. We would take our time and think.
We wouldn't tell a soul until we knew what we were doing. For two months, it worked. Some evenings, she came by after closing the shop, and we sat on my back steps without saying much. I had picked up a pamphlet at the clinic and left it on the counter. She read it, folded it, and slipped it into her bag.