Page 72 of This Love
“That would have been the last week of December.” I counted on my fingers. “Then four weeks of January and a week of February. You should have had another one by now.”
“I know.”
“Let’s stop at the store on the way home. We have to know right away.”
I wanted to kick myself the entire drive to our neighborhood. Why hadn’t I checked on something so important? I guess because I’d never had to.
But if she bled in December, she wasn’t pregnant then.
And probably she was only late because it had been years since her last cycle. Her mother had put her on the shot as a teen. She might not have had a cycle in a decade.
I tried to relax. The likelihood that she would get pregnant on her first cycle ever was practically nil.
It would be okay.
This time, Ava sat in the car while I ran inside to buy the test. I had no idea which one to get. There was a package with two. That seemed like a good idea. The indicator was very clear, either “Pregnant” or “Not Pregnant.”
I stood in line, ignoring the far-too-interested look of the young female cashier. I guessed men didn’t buy pregnancy tests very often.
We were quiet on the drive home. Ava pulled the instructions out of the package. “I have to pee on the end of the stick, and then it has a countdown to tell us when the results are ready.”
“How long does that take?”
“One to three minutes.”
One to three. How quickly a little stick could change the course of your life.
We entered the front door, not talking or holding hands. Every step felt grave, like we were walking into the unknown.
She couldn’t be pregnant. Surely not. The world wouldn’t do that to us. She would have to change medications. It might not work. We’d reset with a baby in her, not married.
My stomach roiled. I’d let this happen. I was the keeper of the memories, the medication, the appointments.
She’d had her last shot a week before the wedding. I remembered that now. When the next shot came due, she might have gotten a notification and ignored it. We got so much random stuff all the time. Everyone did.
“I’m going to go pee on it,” Ava said. She took off alone. I wondered if she would do all of it without me, including waiting for the result. She could be so private. It was more pronounced this time than after any of the other resets.
It was that same hesitation that made her not want to get married, I feared. Something she saw or learned early in this reset had triggered that feeling. She wasn’t as close to Maya this time, either.
Maybe it was Harry, or Schitt’s Creek, or the history documentaries, or working at the diner. Something Flo said. Cosmopolitan. We couldn’t control what influenced her early thoughts.
It didn’t matter now. We could only move forward from here.
She returned to the living room quickly and set the test on the coffee table. It was in countdown mode.
I let out a small sigh of relief that we was including me. She sat down, and I took her hand.
All we could do was wait.
The rectangles at the bottom of the window blinked. There were two when she put it down, then three. Space for one more rectangle remained.
“It will be all right.” Ava kept her eyes on the test. “No matter what. It will be all right.”
I gripped her hand more tightly. “It will.”
Fourth rectangle. It blinked for only a moment before all of them disappeared, and words formed at the top of the window.
I blinked, not sure I could register what it said.
