The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls by Ursula Hegi

Author:Ursula Hegi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

* * *

Late one evening Silvio and I meet at a rathskeller with Luzia The Clown and The Whirling Nowack Cousins. When Luzia orders Bratkartoffeln mit Speck—fried potatoes with bacon—the waiter says it’s too late to prepare warm food.

She scowls. “Nothing will come between me and my Bratkartoffeln.”

“I’ll get you whatever you desire.” The runt winks at her and slips the waiter a ticket. “I used to work for a famous Zirkus, very prestigious—”

“You are embarrassing yourself,” says the giant cousin, voice low as if it came from his toes.

“—and I got them whatever they desired … Not some mud show like this.”

“Tell me more about your prestigious Zirkus.” Silvio leans toward him. Sets his hook. He has an instinct for ausfragen—asking—until nothing is left.

“I have a fiancée,” the waiter hints.

“Congratulations.” The runt sighs and tosses him another ticket, plants his elbows on the table, stretches his jaw forward till his flushed face is a hand’s width from Silvio’s. “This prestigious Zirkus had a dozen big cats and a dozen teams of horses and a dozen—”

“I’m sure those dozens and dozens are more prestigious than our animals.”

“You want any? I’m good at bartering. They have so many animals … I can go to them.”

“What for?”

“For you. Barter.” The runt’s voice turns lazy. “If that’s what you want.”

Silvio shakes his head, dazed. Usually he’s good at spotting an upcoming crisis, takes it out of its wild spin, freezes it, till he can resolve it. But not now. “Barter what for what?”

“For what you want to … offer.”

As Silvio blushes a deeper crimson, I see the heat between those two that I’ve mistaken for hostility.

“Labor,” the runt says. “I’m talking about physical labor.”

Luzia and I glance at each other, and I bite my lip to keep from laughing. She coughs into her fist.

“Whose labor?” Silvio demands.

“Not mine,” says Luzia The Clown.

“Macht Platz!” The waiter yells at us to clear space as he advances with Luzia’s Bratkartoffeln mit Speck.

“Admit it,” I say to Silvio.

He flinches. “Admit what?”

I let him wait. “That you two enjoy fighting.”

“Only about Bratkartoffeln,” the runt explains. “Silvio is mad I didn’t get him any.”

Luzia perches her delicate hand on the giant’s broad wrist, and it’s then that her sadness merges with the giant’s sadness, igniting more bliss than two people can possibly generate. He closes his long eyelids because what he sees is for him alone: Luzia on her bed in his arms, toes just up to his thighs, lips against his throat. A low rumble of his laugh. “You are a beautiful man,” Luzia murmurs, and it doesn’t matter if her voice comes from his longings or from their future.

You are a beautiful man. It’s in the giant’s step when he walks with her from the restaurant; it’s in the way he extends his elbow in case Luzia wants to walk arm in arm. But before she can, the runt slows in front of her so that she has to bump into him.

“I didn’t mean to push you,” she tells the runt.

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