Page 38 of His Curvy Obsession

“I’ve been feeling so awful,” my wife continues, going back to her seat at the table and pushing the plate of pancakes away from herself as though they’re too repulsive to look at. “Tired and nauseated and…what? Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something in my hair?”

She pats her hair, frowning at me.

I shake my head and inhale deeply.

“You don’t think you’re…” I drift off, unwilling to say the wordpregnant.

As much as we tried after we got married, the double pink lines on the test never materialized. It was hard at first, even if we both said we were okay with never having a biological child. It’s not the sort of pain that you can really prepare yourself for, no matter how ready you believe you are to hear disappointing news.

After a year of trying, we decided to stop. The doctor appointments, the medication…it was wearing us both down. And at the same time, we’d started the adoption process and were introduced to the most special little girl we’d ever met.

When we met Loren, we realized that there was more to parenthood than DNA. And that there are a lot of children out there who don’t have a permanent home, nobody to call their mom and dad.

But even after all of this time, I know it still pains Rebecca to talk about her fertility. We don’t discuss it.

We also don’t use birth control. Knowing that we have greater odds of being struck by lightning three times, we see no need for it. Condoms, the pill…what’s the use? There’s no point…right?

Rebecca looks at me with recognition in her eyes, tinged with sadness.

“Not possible,” she replies.

“But you’ve been sick in the mornings?” I ask.

“Well…yeah,” she says. “Probably a stomach bug. But then the fatigue…tender breasts…”

“When was your period due?”

“It’s irregular,” she replies, shaking her head again as though mentally pushing away the idea of pregnancy. “It’s never really ‘due’ in that way. You know that.”

“Still,” I say, looking beyond her, out the windows of the French doors that lead to our back patio, where Loren is drawing on the concrete with chalk. Recently she’s been obsessed withwriting our names.Mama. Daddy. Loren. Mama. Daddy. Loren.

Over and over again, in pastels and fluorescents picked from her mega-box of 64 colors. Her handwriting is getting pretty good, too. Soon it’ll be better than my own sloppy chicken scratch.

“If you’re pregnant, we’ll need to get you to the doctor early for monitoring,” I continue, looking back at Rebecca. “That’s my concern. You’d be high risk. The earlier, the better. That’s what the doctor said.”

“There’s no way I’m pregnant, though,” she says, her voice hardening. “How could I be? We tried and tried, with all of the medicine and…”

My jaw clenches, remembering all of the disappointed hopes, the many months of taking pregnancy tests only for the night to end with my wife crying into my chest, with me holding her tightly, wishing that I could make her pain go away.

Do I really want to ask her to take a pregnancy test, knowing the toll that it takes on her?

“You’re worried,” Rebecca sighs.

“I am.”

“I’ll take a test,” she volunteers, her eyes sad. “But you have to read it. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be told it’s negative. I’ll just…pee on a stick and leave it. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Two pink lines,bright and clear, appear nearly as fast as my wife flees the bathroom, unwilling to stay a second longer than she has to.

My whole body freezes when I see the positive test. I read the box’s instructions again, even though I know the directions to a pregnancy test very well by now. My wife has taken dozens ofthem. I could recite the step by step instructions printed on the side of the pink box in my sleep.

Still, I read the directions two more times just to make absolutely sure. Telling Rebecca she’s pregnant only for it to turn out to be a mistake would be an awful thing to put her through, after all that we’ve already been through.

When I exit the bathroom, she’s not in our master bedroom. I find her downstairs on our back patio, drawing with Loren.

Mama. Daddy. Loren.

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