2
Mark
October 1993
Mark turned off the alarm on the clock radio within a nanosecond of the newest Celine Dion song blaring from the speaker on top—they loved her up here. He missed his Alan Jackson, truth be told, but when in Rome.... He rubbed a hand over his eyes and looked over to make sure the alarm hadn’t woken Mae.
Dolly’s Donuts had to be hot and ready by six in the morning Monday through Saturday, which meant the donut fryers clocked in at three a.m. He really needed to get to bed earlier, but that thought only emphasized why he continually stayed up too late. Despite the pride he’d taken in turning off the alarm before it woke her, he rolled onto his side and slid up against her smooth back, closing his eyes and loving how perfectly their bodies fit together. He nuzzled her neck, and she snuggled backward into him, a mewing kitten-like sound escaping those perfect lips. He was suddenly very awake.
“I’ve got to get to work,” he whispered into her ear, hoping she’d convince him that he could stay in bed another ten minutes.
“Mmmmm.” She didn’t turn around to face him.
What he wouldn’t give to stay just like this all day. Even if all they did was lie nestled together, warm in their bed: enough world for just the two of them. After another minute, he accepted the inevitable, kissed her neck, and began to pull toward his side of the bed—it would be freezing when he stepped out from under the covers. Their tiny apartment was heated by a single radiator in the living room, which meant the bedroom was left to the influence of a very cold fall. Mae rolled over to face him before he moved away, lifting her hand to trail her finger down his forehead and over the bridge of his nose. When she rested her finger on his lips, he kissed it and could just make out her responding smile in the dark. Her hair looked like mist floating around her head in the minimal light cast by the streetlight outside. “You ’ave to go?” she asked.
The accented words rolled off her tongue. “You know I do. It’s a good job.”
After blowing out his knee on the rodeo circuit when he was nineteen, Mark had convinced Mom that it would be worthwhile for him to get a degree in agricultural management. If generational ranching families like theirs wanted to make it into the new millennium, it wasn’t enough to just know how to raise and sell cattle. The University of Wyoming, in Laramie, was close enough for him to work the ranch on weekends and come home for summers. When his final year at U of W came into view, he met with a counselor about study-abroad programs. The rest of his life was going to be spent on the ranch, and before that happened he wanted to live somewhere else. It was the only part of the world outside his home state he was ever likely to see. Mom eventually agreed to a two-semester program offered in Ontario—at least he wouldn’t have to cross any oceans or learn a different language.
Mark had arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, in time for winter classes. He made friends with people from all over the world, ate his fries with gravy, and went to clubs on the weekends. He’d gone home for the summer and then arrived back in Hamilton in time for his last semester of school—he’d walk at U of W in the spring. He’d met Mae at a club his very first night back—fate, pure and simple. He’d never brought a girl home, but what he thought was going to be a one-night stand turned into a whole new life. A couple of weeks later, Mae got kicked out of her friend’s apartment, but she had been pretty much staying at Mark’s place anyway, and they stayed up all night, tangled up in each other and making plans. The next day Mark dropped his classes and applied for a work permit—he couldn’t work on a student visa. They found a cheap apartment the same week he got the bakery job. He planned to finish up school once his permanent residency was straightened out, but for now he wanted to enjoy a life that was nothing like the one he’d lived up until now. Mom didn’t know about dropping out of school yet. She knew about Mae and the new apartment, though, and had plenty to say about that. He’d bring her up to speed once he figured out how to explain it in a way that wouldn’t lead to nuclear war.
“I wish I didn’t have to go.” He pulled Mae tightly to him. Finding a job hadn’t been easy; employers were leery of immigrants, but he told himself every morning as he walked through the dark streets that he wouldn’t be frying donuts forever. And going home to Mae every day more than made up for the insecurity he sometimes felt being so out of his element. Mae hadn’t found work yet, but she was looking.
Mae smiled, her green eyes twinkling in the bit of light filtering around the blanket hung over the window as a makeshift curtain. “You can stay ’ere with me. I won’t tell.”
He leaned in and kissed her. “I’ll be back at noon. Maybe we can take a nap.”
“A naked nap?”
Mark had never known a woman like Mae Gérard; there certainly weren’t any like her in Lusk, Wyoming. She was bold and sexy and unapologetic about both. She also had this amazing ability to live in the moment and know what she wanted. That she wanted him, a farm boy from Wyoming, made him feel as though he could fly. This was how the other half lived—the city people with apartments instead of acres and paychecks instead of cattle sales where the proceeds had to stretch for twelve months. He kissed her and pulled back. “I’m going to hold you to that.”
She smiled at him and raised herself up on one elbow. “There is something I need to tell you, Mark. I ’ope it will make you ’appy.”
“If it makes you happy, it will make me happy.”
“It makes me ’appy. I tink.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You’re not sure?”
She didn’t answer but shifted a little bit, bunching the pillow under her head. “I’m going to ’ave your baby, Mark.”
Brakes and squealing tires sounded in his mind. Surely, he’d misunderstood. It had sounded as though she’d said . . . “What?”
“I’m pregnant.”
They’d been together only a couple of months—the best months of his life, to be sure—but they talked about their future in vague terms because the present was so all-encompassing. And they’d been careful. Really careful, because getting Mae pregnant wasn’t part of any of the new plans he’d been making. This changed, literally, everything.
“You’re not ’appy.” She started to turn away, and he took hold of her shoulder, pulling her back to him.
“I’m happy, Mae, so happy. I’m just . . . surprised. But happy surprised. Ecstatic surprised!” He smiled to prove it and kissed her freckled nose. “This is amazing, Mae. We made a baby!”
My mother is going to kill me.