Family and Other Accidents by Shari Goldhagen

Author:Shari Goldhagen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385517683
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2006-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

all the words

to “thunder road”

It wasn’t the best method of family planning. Three months after her thirty-sixth birthday, Mona unceremoniously stopped taking the pill. She didn’t discuss it with her husband. Jack always waved away the topic when she brought up children, saying the time wasn’t right, that they had their careers to think about, their lifestyle. But at his firm’s company picnic last summer, Jack dove into the pool when a junior partner’s son fell in. The boy in his arms, Jack emerged, water rolling off them in sheets. As Mona watched her husband try to calm the child, she’d had to look away, tears in her own eyes—a picture of what they could be.

Jack was forty-one, and they’d been together almost fourteen years. Mona knew he would never think the time was right. It was easier, she figured, to ask forgiveness than permission.

But she doesn’t get to ask for either. Sitting on the white paper of an examining table, Mona doesn’t realize she’s pregnant. Next to her, Jack can’t stop yawning and black stubble seasons his cheeks. He’d held back her red curls while she puked the last three nights, and still put in his fifteen-hour workdays. He’d insisted on taking her to the doctor, assuming she has food poisoning or stomach flu.

“Sometimes birth control is less effective because of an antibiotic,” the physician says. “Is there a chance you might be pregnant?”

Right then Mona knows she is, even before she pees in a cup to prove it. Jack studies a diagram of the female body where blue and red lines depict arteries and muscles, but he flexes tapered fingers and shifts his square jaw; he realizes she’s pregnant, too.

“It’s a possibility,” Mona says to the linoleum floor.

“You did this on purpose, didn’t you?” Jack asks flatly when the doctor leaves so Mona can get dressed. He doesn’t sound angry or even surprised, just disappointed. “Without talking to me.”

Mona intends to lie, to say the pill is never a hundred percent effective, that even the doctor says so, that it probably was the antibiotic she took last month for strep throat, but instead she just nods, tears in the folds of skin between her eyes and nose.

“I wanted to talk to you,” she says, but feels herself starting to whine and stops.

Jack hands her a stiff tissue from a box next to glass cylinders of cotton swabs and tongue depressors. Closing his eyes, he rubs his eyebrows like he does when the computer crashes or his brother calls with some new problem.

“I really wanted to talk about it,” Mona says, wiping her lips. “But you never let me.”

“Let’s not do this here.” He puts a gentle hand on her back, takes a deep breath. “Wait until we’re home.”

But they don’t discuss it. He drives to their condo in the high-rise where Oprah Winfrey lives, stopping on the side of Lake Shore Drive so she can vomit while the October wind blows her long hair everywhere. Then he goes back to his office in a different high-rise farther down LSD.

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