The Bad Boy's Wife by Karen Shepard

Author:Karen Shepard
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

October 1989

Hannah said he was going to have to cut out the jokes about pregnant women. Cole had no idea what she was talking about. He asked why, and she stared at him until he smiled, and then she smiled with him.

She told him in October. She said she’d known for weeks, but she’d wanted to be sure, so she’d waited for the doctor’s test. He hadn’t even known she’d gone to the doctor.

He told her he’d quit with the jokes, and he knew it was a miracle, and it was what he’d been after her for a while about, but, he said, poking at her between the ribs, she couldn’t tell him she was going to be beautiful, because she just wouldn’t be. Pregnant women; they just got fatter and fatter. You didn’t do it for the looks.

“What do you do it for?” she asked, quieting his hands against her still-flat belly.

He took in the feel of her small hands on his bigger ones. He took in the softness of her low belly. “There’s something inside you that the two of us made,” he said. He leaned down and ran his tongue under her upper lip. She shivered. That always got her. He smiled. “It’s that simple,” he said.

That night, they’d had good sex. Having sex with her pregnant was even better than when they’d thrown away her diaphragm a year ago and started trying. He imagined she was softer, fuller than before. When he came, he felt like he couldn’t be deeper inside her. He wondered what it felt like for the baby.

Lying there afterwards, her leg slung across his, he’d remembered trying, years ago, before he’d met Hannah, to get his degree at the community college back home. He’d shown his father his first English paper, and his father had said, “This is good. Who wrote it?”

His father had an old back injury. When he bent to pick up something, he genuflected. He used his knuckles to rise from the table.

He’d woken her up. “Again?” she’d said, laughing. “Already?”

“Are you scared?” he’d asked.

“About miscarrying again?” she asked.

He hadn’t been thinking of that. “Yeah,” he said.

“Sure,” she’d said. “I’m scared about everything. Aren’t you?”

“Shit, no,” he’d said. “Kids. They can’t be any harder than horses.”

* * *

Two months later it was Christmas Eve, and they were at her parents’ place with friends and cousins, uncles and aunts, and they were going to make their announcement, and he was fighting that feeling that he got when a horse wasn’t behaving and he couldn’t figure out why.

Pell, her father, was a lawyer, a kind man with gray hair and a stoop to his walk that he managed to make regal. His face was a plain of ridges and divots. It made Cole think of training surfaces after a day’s work. He tried to remember that before Pell had been a lawyer, he’d run a construction company. He tried to remember that at some point Pell had been someone he could’ve talked to.

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