The Honey Queen by Cathy Kelly

Author:Cathy Kelly [Kelly, Cathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary, Contemporary Fiction, Literary
Amazon: B00CGOHX5I
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Peggy knew it in her bones long before her brain allowed itself to accept the possibility. She was pregnant. You’re pregnant, you know you are, the little voice in her head said to her reflection in the old-fashioned bathroom cabinet in her green tiled bathroom. The face in the mirror did not turn around and say, Don’t be ridiculous! You’re imagining it. You’re imagining that your breasts are larger and feel tender, and you’re imagining that it has been almost exactly six weeks since your last period.

She’d worked it out many times in her head: her night with David had occurred mid-cycle, the most fertile time for a woman. Four weeks ago.

The face in the mirror looked the same as usual, except for the fear in her eyes.

It’s stress, she told herself. Periods are often late if the person is stressed. And starting a new business is stressful.

She sat with her calendar and worked out the dates. No matter which way she worked it out, she’d made love with David in precisely the most fertile segment of her fertility cycle. And her cycle was as reliable as the Angelus bell tolling before the television news at six every evening.

No matter how often she had silent conversations with herself, mind racing over every other possibility, she always came to the same conclusion. She was pregnant.

If the breast tenderness and the two-weeks late period hadn’t been enough to tell her, waking early every morning needing to throw up was the final giveaway. She’d hoped that this sickness might be a long-running bug, because surely nobody got morning sickness this early? But a few hours on the Internet told her that morning sickness and its arrival or otherwise was as varied as babies themselves.

When the nausea and the dry retching were finally over, she’d step glumly into the shower and try to wash away the way she felt. This never worked no matter how much grapefruit Body Shop shower gel she used. It was one of her few treats and now she couldn’t even enjoy that. Pregnancy did that to people, she knew: made scents they loved suddenly smell dreadful.

She didn’t have many indulgences, she thought tearfully. Nice shower gel and plants to brighten up the cottage. Ferns in the bathroom and kitchen, pansies in the living room and a small, grocery-store orchid in her bedroom. They helped, but they couldn’t make the house beautiful. Her little rented cottage was stuck defiantly in the 1950s. From the aqua-coloured fittings in the bathroom – complete with black-and-white flooring, naturally – to the gingham curtains – red – in the kitchen, it was like living in some crazy offshoot of Mad Men. The kitchen and the bathroom were cute and her bedroom was absolutely adorable with a tiny balcony that looked out over a handkerchief of a garden, helpfully covered in gravel. But the rest of the house could be a little depressing, especially the living room with the orange tweed couches and the

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