Dad’s face was slack with his second gin and tonic in the low lights of the Elks Lodge. “Don’t you want something to drink, babe?” he said.
It was 1982, and Sam and I were in Condon for the weekend. We’d come out to the Elks for dinner and drinks with Mom and Dad, Leanne and her husband, and Brad. All of us, like grown-ups.
“I’ll have another water,” I said. All the week before, back in Eugene, I’d walked gently, held the kindest thoughts. I might be pregnant. Now, here with my family, I felt like I had a special secret.
Leanne looked at me and tipped her head to the side, like a question. Me not having a beer. She was out for the first time since her second daughter, Shannon, had been born. “It’s hard,” she’d told me earlier. “Leaving her for the first time.” Part of her always turned in the direction of her girls.
I leaned in toward her, close enough to whisper. “We’ve been trying.”
My period was a few days late. The timing was right, I was almost sure. But since stopping the pill, my cycle hadn’t followed an exact schedule, and my old sense of knowing when I was ovulating had faded.
I didn’t tell Leanne my worries about how Sam and I would afford a baby. Didn’t speak of my secret standoff about who would stay home.
The blood came a few days after that visit to Condon. At first, the disappointment took over. So different from the relief I’d felt when I was a girl and waited to bleed. So different from the relief when I thought I might be pregnant with the cowboy. Maybe getting pregnant wouldn’t be as easy for me as it had been for Leanne.
As the days went by, the disappointment flowed away with the blood. Questions stepped into the empty space. Why did I think we could have a child when we could barely afford to pay our bills? What had happened to the girl who wanted a career? How could I justify all that college, the loans I still paid for each month, the hard work I’d put in at the job I loved if all I wanted was to stay at home with a baby? Did I want a baby if I couldn’t stay home with it like Leanne, if I couldn’t have everything be picture perfect?