37

“Buenos días, Jenny.” Irma’s face appeared before me, blurry and unstable. She was smiling in amusement. I was in the living room. Wait. Why was I sleeping on the living room couch?

When I sat up I felt a tugging on my ears. I removed the headphones and saw the CD player that contained my Rosary recording. “What time is it?”

“Nueve y media.”

“Nine thirty?” I stumbled to my feet. “Did Joe already leave?”

“Sí.” She said he was already gone when she arrived at eight.

I spotted the phone on the kitchen table and ran to pick it up. I dialed Joe’s number, only to have the receptionist tell me that he was in meetings all morning.

“I need to go down to the office, Irma.” I grabbed a granola bar from a box on the counter to keep morning sickness at bay, and told her I’d take the baby so that she and Donald could go to the park.

I pulled on jeans and a fitted, white, button-down shirt, changed Elaine’s diaper, and set her in her car seat carrier. I surveyed the living room to make sure there was nothing I’d forgotten, and a flash of brassy-colored metal caught my eye on the floor in front of the couch. The picture. I went to the couch and knelt down, the images of my family gazing up at me from the carpet. I picked up the frame, the smooth felt backing soft in my palm. Before I stood, I looked into the eyes of each one of them, from my grandfather, to Tommy, to my grandmother. I said a prayer for each one of them, then pressed the picture against my chest and asked them to pray for me, too. I stood and returned the picture to the mantle, this time faceup.

* * *

We almost ran into Joe as he dashed through the lobby between meetings. “Hey!” he exclaimed. He gave Elaine a kiss on the cheek and gave me a hug. “What are you doing here?”

“I know today’s the day you have to give an answer about joining that other firm, and since we also told Allan we’d get back to him about the house today, I wanted to talk in person.”

“Okay, sure.” He asked the receptionist to tell his paralegal to start the meeting without him, and we went into his office.

I spread Elaine’s baby blanket in front of Joe’s desk and set her on the floor with some unsharpened pencils, which she immediately used as teethers. Instead of sitting behind his desk, Joe sat in the client’s chair next to Elaine.

“I want you to take the job with the other firm.” I was caught off guard by the happiness that welled within me as I said it.

He examined me, as if to discern whether I was just saying this for his sake. “Really? You’re honestly okay with it?”

“I am. My only concern is what to do about the employees.”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Joe said. He explained that he’d mentioned the possibility of closing the firm to them and, in another amazing turn of events, every one of them would be taken care of. The head paralegal and the one attorney who worked full time with Joe would have opportunities at the new firm, another paralegal was leaving to go to law school, and a part-time attorney who’d been contracting with us was moving to another city for his wife’s job. “I just worry about Irma,” he said at the end.

“Her daughter’s housecleaning business is booming, and she needs help. I think Irma was going to have to quit soon anyway.”

Those were the final loose ends. We sat for a moment and watched Elaine play, both of us knowing that these were our last few moments as owners of a law firm.

“Do you want to call Allan, or should I?”

“You go ahead,” I said.

He went around to his desk, pulled a business card out of his wallet, and dialed the phone. We grinned at each other as we waited for the answer. “Hello, Allan? Hi, it’s Joe Fulwiler. We want the house.” They committed to the deal in a verbal handshake and made arrangements to meet that night to discuss details. We were now owners of a small suburban home.

I took a deep breath, exhaling nervous anticipation. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

He leaned forward. “Honestly, I’ve never been this happy in my life.” When he said it, I noticed something. Ever since I’d known Joe, an anxiety had always clung to him. Even when we were on vacation, or when he was relaxing after work, if I observed him closely enough, I could see that he was still possessed by the ghost of the boy who’d never gotten over being poor. But now the ghost was gone.

* * *

I dropped Elaine back at home just in time to make it to my doctor appointment. Dr. Wolfe swept into the room and did his trademarked move of grabbing the stool and sitting in a single motion. “So, what’s the contraception decision?”

“Okay,” I stared at the floor, trying to remember the script I’d carefully crafted. “There is, there is a—something I’ve been thinking about. . .” Oh gosh. This talking about religion thing was harder than I thought it would be. After more hemming and hawing, during which the tension level in the room doubled as I used up second after second of the busy doctor’s time, I finally looked up and spat out the words: “I am converting to Catholicism. In six weeks, actually. I’m going to become Catholic.” I hoped all that religious talk didn’t make him too uncomfortable.

“Okay. . .” he said, that pen still poised.

I had hoped he’d extrapolate what that meant, but evidently I needed to spell it out. So I just had to say it. “I’m not open to using contraception. Can you work with me on this?”

It took him a moment to process what I’d said. “The standard treatment is Coumadin, and in many cases Coumadin for life—”

“But can you work with me on this? Can we put our heads together and figure out a different kind of treatment plan?”

He didn’t throw up his hands and cry, “Oh, whatever am I going to do with this religious nut job?” as I had imagined he would. He didn’t scoff, or look at me like I had just started drooling on myself. Instead, he simply replied, “Okay. Okay, sure, I think we can come up with something.”

He said he’d need some time to think about alternative treatment plans and did a quick exam to check my lungs and examine my legs for DVT symptoms. After we shook hands and said goodbye, he rushed to the door for his next patient. As I was gathering my purse, he poked his head back in the door and said, “Oh, and congratulations.”

“The baby?” It seemed like an odd time to congratulate me on that, since he already knew, but okay. “Thanks!”

“No, you mentioned that you were becoming Catholic soon. Congratulations.”

After I left I drove out of the parking lot in silence, trying on this new image of myself as Catholic. Now that I had told Dr. Wolfe, someone else—who was neither Catholic nor immediate family—knew. For most of my life, my identity had been wrapped up in atheism. Now it was as if I’d accidentally slipped on the wrong team’s jersey.

Before I went back to the house I stopped by the pharmacy to get one last refill of Lovenox on our current insurance. The insurance that we’d get with Joe’s new job would fully cover my shots, but the co-pay was a few dollars higher, so I thought I’d get one more round at thirty dollars before the new plan kicked in.

Next to the counter at the pharmacy was a rounded mirror with a sweeping view of the waiting area. The reflection showed the line of people waiting to pick up prescriptions, their figures stretched and distorted by the mirror’s curves. The third woman back had shoulder-length reddish-brown hair, was starting to show a new pregnancy, and she believed in God. That woman was me.

As I looked at the mirror, I tried to internalize this new image of myself. Where was this woman going? What would her life be like tomorrow, next year, ten years hence? Joe and I always had our futures planned out to the last detail, our spreadsheets with our twenty-year goals being linked to the ten-year and five-year spreadsheets, which corresponded to our monthly to-do lists. Now it was all blank. I used to believe that I could control my way into happiness, or at least amass enough distractions that it would feel like something close. Now I had none of my illusions of control, but more happiness than I’d ever known before.

It was my turn at the pharmacy counter. I strolled to the front of the line and spelled my last name. After the young clerk retrieved the white bag, he frowned at his computer. “You know this is like nine hundred dollars, right?”

This again. “I know. I thought it was. It used to be. But now it’s only thirty.”

He typed some more, ran back to consult with a manager, and returned to the computer. “No, ma’am, I’m sorry. It’s always been nine hundred. Do you still want it?”

“Just look up the last order, the one from last month. You’ll see that that one was thirty.”

He clicked away at the keyboard. Stopped. Clicked some more. Moved the mouse around. Clicked again. “You must have gone to a different pharmacy for that one.”

“No, it was here.”

He looked from me to the computer screen, then back at me again. “Ma’am, there is no record of that transaction.”