Beth rolled her eyes. “Does that line actually work in Wisconsin?” she said. “I’m still going to need your ID.”
He fished in his pocket for his wallet and pulled out a license. Beth scanned the birth date and then the name. “John Smith,” she said dryly.
“Blame my parents.” He winked at her, took his beer and his pie, and then turned back just before he walked out of the market. “You should come to the meet.”
And then he was gone, and with him, all the air in the market.
She knew better. She had been counseled her whole life about how when the devil came to you, he would come in a form you couldn’t resist—like a Yankee boy who seemed to glow like a Roman candle when he grinned. The way Bethknewit was the devil was that he made her lie to her father, saying she had a double shift, when instead she went to the university and sat in the bleachers and watched him in the 4 x 100 relay. Every time he rounded the corner, it seemed he was running straight to her.
What Beth didn’t know—in spite of all the hours she had gone over it in her mind since then—was how, in the moment, it felt like a door had opened on a whole new world—yet, afterward, she was nothing but a cliché. He had spread his fancy blazer on the ground beneath the bleachers like a picnic blanket, he had given her her first beer, and when her head was full of stars, he had laid her down and kissed her. When he peeled off her blouse and touched her, she transformed into someone else—a girl who was beautiful, a girl who wanted more. When he pushed inside her, burning, and then suddenly he stopped, Beth panicked. She had not told him he was her first, but it wasn’t the only lie between them.I’m sorry,she told him, and he kissed her forehead.I’m not,he said.
He promised that he would come visit her and that this wasn’t a one-time deal. He put his phone number and his name into her contacts. She floated home, wondering if everyone in Mississippi could see how different she was now, as if being loved left a patina on your skin.
Two days later he had still not texted, so she gathered up all her courage and made the first move. One second later her phone buzzed with the news that the text was undeliverable. She dialed the number, only to have an elderly lady pick up and tell her that there was no one there by that name.
There were too many John Smiths on Facebook to count. There was a John Smith at the University of Wisconsin, but an Internet search revealed him to be a professor of comparative literature in his mid-seventies.
“That rat bastard,” Miz DuVille said, shaking Beth out of her reverie.
“Yeah, that was only the start,” Beth replied. “I missed my period.”
“No condom?”
“No, but Susannah at church—who volunteered with me for the little kid Sunday School—told me you can’t get pregnant the first time.”
“That’s not—” The lawyer shook her head. “Never mind. Go on.”
“I figured I was all right. But I missed another period, so I took a pregnancy test.” She looked up, sheepish. “Actually, three.”
“Then what?”
Beth shifted. “I kept putting it off. I thought,Something will happen. It’ll go away.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I prayed. I prayed for a miscarriage.”
“Is that what happened?”
Beth shook her head. “I called the clinic and made an appointment.”
“Didn’t they ask your age?”
“Yeah. I said I was twenty-five. I was afraid they’d tell me they couldn’t help me.” Beth shrugged. “They asked when my last period was, and they told me I was fourteen weeks and they did procedures up to sixteen weeks. They said it would be eight hundred dollars for the procedure.”
“But the Center is—”
“Two and a half hours away. I took a bus, and all the savings I had from my job—a whopping two hundred and fifty dollars. I didn’t tell anyone. Icouldn’t.” Beth took a deep breath.
“How were you going to raise the rest of the money?”
Beth shook her head. “I don’t know. I figured I’d steal, if I had to. From my dad. Or the cash register at work.”
“I’m confused. If you went to the Center—”
“They asked for picture ID, which would have given away that I was a minor. I started to cry. The lady at the front desk said if I couldn’t tell my parents, I could get a judicial waiver, and then come back. She gave me a form to fill out.”
Mandy DuVille frowned. “But you didn’t. And that’s why you wound up here.”
“Itried,” Beth said. “But the day before, someone from the judge’s office called and told me my hearing was canceled. They told me the judge was having a personal emergency and going to Belize with his wife.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” the lawyer said. “There’s always a judge on call, for restraining orders for domestic violence cases or anything else life-threatening—”
