Run Away Baby

“We just talked about it.”

“Huh.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“That message said your appointment is in two days.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“I thought we were a team,” she said, desperate to make him understand how powerless he was making her feel.

“No,” he said. “A man and a woman are never a team. I’m the quarterback. You’re the cheerleader. It’s how God and nature intended.”

“Did God and nature intend for you to not have babies with me? ‘Cause if so, you wouldn’t have to have an operation to keep it from happening.”

“Don’t try to argue with me. You’ll never win.”

“Then I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Don’t say anything at all.”

This was her first inkling of how screwed she was. She’d seen and heard him treat plenty of other people this way, but she never imagined she’d be one of them.

A few days after his vasectomy, Randall was on damage control. “Go get your hair done,” he told her.

“I’m fine,” she said. No one from her generation thought getting a haircut was a treat.

“I insist,” he said.

When she got back home there was a silver BMW in their driveway, complete with a gigantic bow on it. It was not anything she’d ever wanted, but he felt good giving it to her, and enjoyed the way she looked driving around in it. He wanted people to believe he spoiled her.

From the time of his vasectomy on, no matter how many times she asked him to stop, whenever people asked them if they had children he’d wrap his arm around her shoulder, give her a squeeze, and say, “Just this one.”

Chapter 11

Longevity ran in the Greer family. The fact that Randall’s father was ninety and still partying at his Arizona retirement home gave Abby little hope of ever becoming the young widow with the fresh start that she dreamed of.

Sometimes, when she was feeling particularly hopeless, she would play the But-this-is-worse game. She’d scan the news for awful stories, read them, mull them over, and then tell herself, “Your life sucks, but this is worse.”

For instance, a young woman was assaulted, raped, beaten, and left for dead by two assailants on her way back to her dorm. After telling the police just that much, she slipped into a coma. Abby, on the other hand, had spent her evening with Randall and his friends, listening to hours of drunken, slurred work talk at the Bergmans’ annual barbeque.

That was worse, she’d tell herself, meaning being attacked and left for dead.

Or a four-year-old child was killed by the family pit bull, and his parents were forced to euthanize the dog. They buried their child and dog in side-by-side caskets, seventy miles away since the city ordinances wouldn’t allow pets in the cemetery near the

m. Abby, by comparison, had spent the evening wearing high-heeled rubber boots, and whipping Randall while he blubbered like a baby and begged for more.

The pit bull story, despite Abby’s terrible life, was still far worse.

The But-this-is-worse game helped her keep it all in perspective.

The funny thing was, women in their fifties and sixties were jealous of her. Her life looked great to them. Fab. Divine. The shopping and vacations and being young and beautiful and childless. They couldn’t imagine how she could want for anything. A few of them, the ones who weren’t terribly proud, even said things to her like: “You’ve got it made in the shade!” or “What I wouldn’t give to be you.”

Abby guessed they looked at her and saw someone old like them on the inside, but in a younger package. That’s not exactly what a woman in her twenties was, though, whether or not they remembered that.

Chapter 12

Abby was sitting at the front desk of Lorbmeer, Messdiem & Miller, taking rubber bands from the dish on the desk and wrapping them around Danielle’s rubber band ball. She was doing her best to evenly arrange the colors, and to keep the ball a perfect sphere. The maintenance of this ball had begun to take on an irrational level of importance in her life.

When there were no more rubber bands to add to the ball, she evaluated her work, spinning the ball, adjusting bands here and there by a couple of millimeters. She was waiting for the mailman to arrive; with him came mail held in bunches by more rubber bands, along with a heavy dose of flirtation. Against her better judgment, he was growing on her. Awakening something long dead in her. Curiosity, perhaps. The remembrance that the unexpected hadn’t always been bad.