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I swear that if Grandma Lucy were living in the days of the Salem witch trials, she would have gotten herself hanged. There was something mystical, almost unnerving about the way she sat there listening while I told her all my troubles. Told her why I came out to her farm. I hadn’t even been this forthcoming before with Reginald.
“So he hit you and made you fall, and that’s when you got in the car and drove away?” she asked.
“He didn’t hit me.” I was quick to correct her. “It was an accident.” The word fell flat on my lips.
She nodded, her eyes so perceiving.
Ashamed, I looked away.
“And he doesn’t want you to keep this child?”
My abdomen felt hard, like I’d eaten something rotten. Nobody warns you about all those minor discomforts of pregnancy like indigestion. I stared at my midsection. “He didn’t want to. But then last week he changed his mind. Said we could keep her.”
“But you have reservations now.” The observation materialized out of nothing. I never told her that.
“I don’t feel right about bringing up a daughter in such a volatile home.” There. I said it. Admitted that Chris’s temper is actually a problem. Too big of a problem for me to safely deliver a helpless, innocent little girl into our mess.
“But you love your daughter and don’t want to give her up.” Grandma Lucy didn’t have to phrase it like a question. She already knew without being told.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Tried to remember what I ate to make my entire digestive tract harden up like a cement snake. “I can’t put her in danger.”
Grandma Lucy stroked my hand. I wondered if it was the goat lotions they made there that kept her skin so soft.
“So you’ve decided to leave your husband then?” There was no judgment in her tone, not a hint of that condemnation you buried me in time after time.
I shook my head. “Whenever I think I can walk away, he apologizes and I go back.”
There again. That constricting in my belly. Maybe I did need to go to the doctor. Maybe I injured myself when I fell. I wouldn’t admit the full truth to Grandma Lucy, but I was sure she already knew. I reconstructed the scene in my head enough times to remember how it went. I didn’t trip in the entryway. Chris knocked me over. I still don’t think he meant to. Angry as he could get, he would never try to hurt me. But he did. It was more like a push, not a punch or a slap, but what’s the difference?
My husband struck me. He reached out and knocked me over in his anger. He crossed the line I said I would never allow him to cross. The line that said I should leave.
Only now, I wasn’t sure I could. In fact, I was pretty positive I couldn’t. I could see his tears in my mind. Recall the anguish in his voice, the tenderness. How many times had he apologized to me already? How many times had he promised to change? How many times had I tried to forgive him?
I could say that I was going to leave, but I was like a relapsing addict. Addicted to my husband, broken as he was. And on top of that, there was so much guilt. Guilt because a godly wife would never make her husband lose his temper like that in the first place. Guilt because my husband hadn’t committed adultery (at least not as far as I knew), so according to the strictest interpretations of Scripture, I had no justification for leaving him. Guilt because if I could have forced my stubborn heart to submit to my husband’s will more readily, we wouldn’t have found ourselves in this impossible predicament.
I winced.
“Are you uncomfortable? Would you like to trade chairs?” Grandma Lucy asked.
“It’s not that,” I told her. “I think it must be something ...” I stood up quickly. Instinctively. Hot water gushed down my leg like I just peed my pants, only I knew I hadn’t. I stared down at myself. “What is that?”
Grandma Lucy squeezed my hand reassuringly. “It’s your baby. It seems like today is the day the Almighty wants to introduce you to your little girl.”