Page 37 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

The test goes in my bag, wrapped in the receipt. The card says THINKING OF YOU on the front, which is one way to put it. The gum is spearmint. I will never buy spearmint again without standing in this exact minute.

The shop’s back bathroom is small with an exposed pipe, a mirror with a corner chip, and the good hand soap because some standards survive everything. I do what the box says. Set a three-minute timer on my phone, put the phone face down on the sink, then spend the three minutes reading the grout, which needs attention. I add it to the list because it’s the only way I’ll survive any of this.

The timer sounds, tinny and enormous.

Two lines, pink.

I look for a long time. Long past confirmation, past double-checking the box diagram, past any data-gathering justification at all. My eyes bounce between the test and the diagram dozens of times. But they don’t need to.

Two means pregnant. Not that I didn’t know that already.

I don’t have words yet. Just a vast rearrangement, and at the bottom of it, very small and very stubborn. Then I wash my hands, fix one piece of hair, wash my mouth out because I keep tasting sick, and go back out front because it is one forty on a Monday and the shop is mine.

Invader on board or not, I have rent to pay.

A woman comes in at two wanting a candle for her sister’s birthday, the difficult, hippy sister, she clarifies, the one who returns things.

Not on my watch. I walk her through the wall the way I have a thousand times. Patchouli or amber, that’s the real decision, and we test both on her wrists. I tell her what I always tell people, that patchouli forgives and amber commits, because it lingers far longer after you blow out the candle.

She laughs and takes the amber, and I ring her up with steady hands and a working smile. She wishes me a good one on her way out. The bell does its small bright clang. I restock the amber, one jar forward, faces aligned.

She has no idea I was dying inside that whole time. That I was on the verge of a meltdown. That’s the thing about any customer-facing job. It turns you into a liar, whether you want it to or not.

People expect a smile or, at the very least, friendliness. They don’t expect your life story, or the problems you’re facing, or the fact that the man who got you pregnant may have killed people in the process of conducting his business.

Funny. That part of things never really sank in until I thought about having his child.

I say nothing all afternoon. Not because I’m hiding. Because I don’t know which words yet, and words you say before you know them belong to other people forever.

I cannot fuck this up any more than I already have.

Mike, restocking the make-your-own tables at four, stops on his way past and puts the good tape gun on my counter, the one we fight over, the one with the smooth action. “You seem quiet,” hesays, with the simple diagnostic confidence of a man who notices exactly one thing per day and today chose me. “You can have the good one today.”

It means more to me than he can possibly know. “Thanks, Mike.”

“Anytime.” And he’s gone again, back into his boxes, kindness deployed and forgotten in the same motion.

I hold the tape gun and have to blink at the register for a second, because some people just hand you things, no invoice attached, and I work with two of them.

At seven, we flip the sign. Mike bikes off into the dusk with his helmet light blinking. Cherry pretends to leave and doesn’t and finds me in the stockroom among my over-organized shelves, standing in front of the wicks-by-gauge with my bag in my hand and no plan in my head.

No thoughts, either.

I don’t say anything. I just open the bag and take out the receipt-wrapped shape and hold it where she can see. I watch her read it all. The test, the day, the stockroom, all of it, in about one second flat.

“Okay.”

She gives my hand a squeeze, then sits down on the stockroom floor. A woman in a vintage wiggle dress and good stockings, down onto the cold concrete against the shelf of jars, and pats the floor beside her.

I fold down into the spot, strings cut, and our shoulders touch, and that’s all.

“You can talk,” she says. “You can cry. You can lose your whole mind in any direction you want. I’m here for the duration, baby. There’s no wrong way to do it.”

And then she says nothing.

Ten minutes, maybe more, the stockroom ticking around us, we sit. The street sounds arrive small and far away. She doesn’t fill it, doesn’t pat my knee, doesn’t tell me it’ll be okay or ask what I’m going to do or wonder out loud about Ivan, doesn’t spend one syllable on her own feelings about it.

She just sits with me.