Business was steady but not booming, and I spent most of my time thumbing through the used books. There were Agatha Christie mysteries and westerns by Louis L’Amour, along with a good-sized selection of books by best-selling authors. There was also a donation box, and while I was there, a woman who’d come in for coffee and a biscuit dropped off a small crate of books, almost all of them romance novels. As I riffled through them, I thought to myself that if I’d had less romance in August, I wouldn’t be in the mess I was in right now.
The shop closed at three during the week, and after Gwen and Aunt Linda locked the doors, my aunt took me on a longer, more extensive tour of the village. It took all of fifteen minutes and didn’t change my initial impression in the slightest. After that, we went home, where I hid out in my room for the rest of the day. As weird as the room was, it was the only place I had some privacy when Aunt Linda was home. When I wasn’t half-assing my way through my schoolwork, I could listen to music, brood, and spend way too much time contemplating death and my growing belief that the world—and especially my family—would be better off without me.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of my aunt either. She had short gray hair and warm hazel eyes, set in a face deeply lined with wrinkles. Her gait was always hurried. She’d never been married, never had children, and sometimes came across as a little bit bossy. She also used to be a nun, and even though she’d left the Sisters of Mercy almost ten years ago, she still believed in the whole “cleanliness is next to godliness” thing. I had to straighten up my room daily, do my own laundry, and clean the kitchen before she got home in midafternoon as well as after dinner. Fair enough, I suppose, since I was living there, but no matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to do it right. Our conversations about it were usually short, a statement followed by an apology. Like this:
The cups were still damp when you put them back in the cupboard.
Sorry.
There are still crumbs on the table.
Sorry.
You forgot to use 409 when you cleaned the stovetop.
Sorry.
You need to straighten the covers on your bed.
Sorry.
I must have said sorry a hundred times the first week I was there, and the second week was even worse. I bombed yet another test and grew bored by the view when I sat on the porch. I eventually came to believe that even if you stuck someone on a fabulous tropical island, the sight would get old after a while. I mean, the ocean never seems to change. Whenever you see it, the water is just there. Sure, the clouds might shift around, and right before sunset the sky might glow orange and red and yellow—but what fun is watching a sunset if there’s no one to share it with? My aunt wasn’t the kind of woman who seemed to appreciate such things.
And by the way? Pregnancy sucks. I was still sick every morning and sometimes it was hard to make it to the bathroom in time. I’d read that some women never got sick at all, but not me. I’d barfed forty-nine mornings in a row and I had the sense that my body seemed to be going for some kind of record.
If there was a plus side to the barfing, it was that I hadn’t gained much weight, maybe only a pound or two by mid-November. Frankly, I didn’t want to get fat, but my mom had bought me the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and as I reluctantly thumbed through it one evening, I learned that a lot of women put on only a pound or two in the first trimester, which made me nothing special. After that, though, the average weight gain was about a pound a week, right up until delivery. When I did the math—which would add twenty-seven more pounds to my smallish frame—I realized that my six-pack abs would probably be replaced by a keg. Not, of course, that I had six-pack abs in the first place.
Even worse than the barfing were the crazy hormones, which in my case meant acne. No matter how much I cleaned my face, pimples erupted on my cheeks and forehead like constellations in the nighttime sky. Morgan, my perfect older sister, never had a pimple in her life, and when I stared in the mirror, I thought that I could give her a dozen of mine and still have skin that looked worse than hers did. Even then, she’d probably still be beautiful, smart, and popular. We got along okay at home—we were closer when we were younger—but at school she kept her distance, preferring the company of her own friends. She got straight A’s, played the violin, and had appeared in not one but two television commercials for a local department store. If you think it was easy being compared to her while I was growing up, think again. Toss in my pregnancy, and it was pretty clear why she was far and away my parents’ favorite. Frankly, she would have been my favorite, too.
By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I was officially depressed. That occurs in approximately seven percent of pregnancies, by the way. Between barfing, zits, and depression, I’d hit the trifecta. Lucky me, right? I was falling further behind in school and the music on my Walkman grew noticeably gloomier. Even Gwen tried and failed to cheer me up. I’d gotten to know her a little since our first introduction—she came to dinner twice a week—and she’d asked me whether I wanted to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. She’d brought over a small television and set it up in the kitchen, but even though I’d practically forgotten what a TV looked like by then, it wasn’t enough to entice me from my room. Instead, I sat alone and tried not to cry while imagining my mom and Morgan making stuffing or baking pies in the kitchen and my dad in the recliner, enjoying a football game. Even though my aunt and Gwen served a meal similar to what my family usually had, it just wasn’t the same, and I barely had any appetite.
I also thought a lot about my best friends, Madison and Jodie. I hadn’t been allowed to tell them the truth about why I’d left; instead, my parents had told people—including Madison’s and Jodie’s parents—that I’d gone to live with my aunt in some remote place because of an urgent medical situation, with limited telephone availability. No doubt they’d made it sound like I’d volunteered to help Aunt Linda, being that I was such a responsible do-gooder. Lest the lie be discovered, however, I wasn’t supposed to speak with my friends while I was gone. I had no cellular phone—few kids did back then—and when my aunt went to work, she would bring the cord from the home phone with her, which I guess made the limited telephone availability part as true as the urgent medical situation part. My parents, I realized, could be just as sneaky as I, which was a revelation of sorts.
It was around that time, I think, that my aunt began to worry about me, though she tried to downplay her concerns. As we were eating Thanksgiving leftovers, she casually mentioned that I hadn’t seemed particularly chipper lately. That was the word she used: chipper. She’d also eased up a little on the tidiness thing—or maybe I was doing a better job of cleaning, but for whatever reason, she hadn’t been complaining as much recently. I could tell she was making an effort to engage me in conversation.
“Are you taking your prenatal vitamin?”
“Yes,” I answered. “It’s yummy.”
“In a couple of weeks, you’ll see the OB-GYN in Morehead City. I set up the appointment this morning.”
“Swell,” I said. I moved the food around my plate, hoping she wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t really eating.
“The food has to actually go in your mouth,” she said. “And then you have to swallow it.”