Page 3 of Crossroads Magic
The eggs were ready just as my slice of toast popped up. I dropped the toast onto the plate in front of my chair, then slid the eggs onto each plate.
Ghaliya didn’t make any comments about the poor meal. Instead, she used the salt and pepper liberally, then picked up her knife and fork with a barely concealed eagerness. She’d eaten a mouthful and was loading her fork again by the time I moved my books out of the way—onto the floor in the corner behind me—and sat down.
Ghaliya finished before I was half-way through my single slice of toast and egg. She put her hand to her stomach and held still. It wasn’t anAhh! That was good!expression she was wearing.
Her face turned greyish white as I watched. I put down my knife and fork, alarmed. “Ghaliya?”
She swallowed, her throat working. “Bathroom?” she croaked.
“Through the bedroom.” I pointed.
She jumped up, nearly overturning her chair, and ran.
I chewed my lip, worry making my gut twist. Any appetite I’d had was gone. I could hear her retching, and wanted to rush into the bathroom and wipe her face, and put a damp cloth on the back of her neck…all the usual mothering things one would do with their child.
But two years of silence was a barricade that kept me in my seat.
I ate the last of my egg and toast, because I didn’t want it to go to waste.
A few minutes later, Ghaliya returned to the table. Beneath the blue hair, which was damp and plastered to her forehead, her face was milk white, where it wasn’t discolored by smeared makeup. She was moving normally enough. She’d taken off her jacket.
I studied the two lines of intertwining rose garlands running up her arms, and underneath her tee shirt.
The tats weren’t a full sleeve. They were…well, if there was a tasteful way to get tattoos, this was probably it. The garlands and roses looked like…
I sat back, as I realized where I had seen them before. The garlands were the same as the white plaster molding that had run just underneath the banister railings in our house. The house we’d both once lived in.
Only Ghaliya’s roses were red.
Ghaliya sat down slowly and carefully.
I waited.
She put her knife and fork together and pushed the plate away from her. Not far, because there simply wasn’t that much room on the table. Then she looked at me. “I’m pregnant.”
She burst into tears. There was enough room on the table for her elbows, and she buried her face in her hands and wept, her shoulders jerking with the power of her sobs.
Screw the two years. I moved my chair around beside hers, and took her in my arms. Ghaliya wrapped her arms around my waist and wept even harder.
Chapter Two
I gave Ghaliya the slice of pecan pie and a clean fork. “Eat itslowly,” I told her. “You have to keep something down.”
“Nothing stays down,” Ghaliya said. But she took the fork and scooped the corner off the slice of pie, anyway.
I filled the saucepan with water and put it on the front hotplate, put the dirty dishes in the sink—I’d deal with them later—and the French press on the table. Ground coffee was in the little cannister in the fridge door. Every few days, at work, I would fill a baggie with coffee from the massive twenty-pound cannister and tuck it into my apron pocket. I barely considered it pilfering, when I compared it to the wholesale, systematic theft some of the other staff at the diner conducted. The only reason the small mountain of disappearing resources and food didn’t alert Deborah or the owner, Ashwin Sosa, was because the staff had been doing it for so long that the rate the diner used up supplies and food looked normal.
I sat back at the table. I’d run out of things to do and didn’t want to launch into dishwashing just yet. My gaze met Ghaliya’s. She was clearly waiting for me to speak. She probably wanted to measure my reaction to her news.
I sighed. “You can’tgetpregnant,” I pointed out.
Ghaliya had been eighteen when the second of two gynecologists had backed up the first’s opinion; she had a hostile womb. No child she ever conceived, if she managed to conceive at all, would ever be bought to term.
Ghaliya had changed, after that. Our beautiful, strawberry blonde, outgoing daughter, who had bubbled with plans for her life, had withdrawn. From everyone. She stopped playing soccer. Stopped studying. She had dumped her boyfriend and her friends.
And less than a year later, when I had moved out of the house, she had chosen to stay with her father.
I’d always figured she blamed me in some way for her barren state. Iknowshe blamed me for the divorce, because she had told me so, just before she’d told me to go to hell, two years ago.
