Juliet’s Answer by Glenn Dixon

Author:Glenn Dixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

* * *

A couple of days after I’d seen Rick and Claire on her back deck, Claire came over to watch some television. Outside, on my own back patio, a purple twilight hung above the trees. Claire seemed in good spirits. She lounged on my black leather couch and draped her legs casually across mine. On my flat-screen, the strident cello opening to Game of Thrones had just begun. The wheels and cogs of that imaginary world flickered across my living room.

“Glass of wine?” I offered.

Claire held up her hand to stop my pour. “Two ounces only,” she insisted. I’d bought some Valpolicella from the fields outside of Verona, and I splashed it into her long-stemmed glass. She left it on the coffee table and leaned back. She loved Game of Thrones.

I considered telling her about the letter, but the show had already started and she was engrossed. She stretched out across the couch. I sipped at my wine, but I noticed that she didn’t touch hers. Claire had to work the next day, and even before the end of the episode I could see her eyelids growing heavy.

“Enough?” I asked.

“Sure. Maybe we can leave the rest for later.”

She untangled her legs and righted herself. She still hadn’t touched her wine.

I walked with her to my front door and watched her slip on her shoes. She leaned in for a hug to say good night and that’s when I felt it. Her stomach was as hard as a fist and I knew.

She was pregnant—Claire was pregnant—and I definitely wasn’t the father.

I closed the door behind her, went back upstairs, and downed her glass of wine. I felt like I was plunging down in an elevator, that someone had just cut the cables, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

About an hour later, I texted her. My hands were shaking. “I may be going crazy,” I wrote, “but I have to ask: Are you pregnant?” I stopped for a moment, then added, “Is it Rick?” Rick, the renovations guy. I couldn’t think of anyone else who it might be. She spent most of her time with me.

She texted back immediately and said, “No and NO.” She used capital letters. And for a moment, I breathed a great sigh of relief.

She texted again. “Walk tomorrow?” she wrote.

“Okay,” I tapped back. “How about in the morning?”

Claire and I had walked together hundreds of times over the years, but there was never to be a walk like this one. She was pensive when she came over, and we’d barely made it to the river, just a few hundred yards, when she said, “Okay, here’s the thing. I am pregnant. I didn’t want to tell you by text.”

I couldn’t breathe.

“You knew I had to go for some tests. I told you that.”

She had told me. She had some medical appointments for something else entirely. I waited. She didn’t make eye contact with me. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead. “I went in for the tests,” she said, “but I came out with an unexpected result.

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