TEN WEEKS

I wrote this one a couple years back for one contest or another.  Let me know what you think. 

I’ll post chapter 3 of  “Terminal A” later this week.

by Jerry Donaldson

about 1,200 words

The young couple sat side-by-side on a bench near the little park’s wrought iron gates. In the 1910s, when the park was young, a watchman opened the gates in the morning and shut them at sundown. Horse carriages and Ford runabouts traveled the narrowed cobbled drive on warm afternoons, through the lawns and gardens and around the small lake with its splashing fountain. Nowadays the big gates were chained shut, and cars were not allowed inside the park.

“Heather,” he said to her, “can we talk more about this tomorrow? It’s a big problem we need to discuss carefully.”

“It’s a problem? I’m pregnant and it’s a problem?”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant! I just want things to be nice and easy between us today.”

“And I’m not being nice? Not being nice and lady-like?” She turned to look straight at him. “Well, I want to discuss it now!”

The pale sun slipped behind clouds, and the chill of late autumn reasserted itself. He shivered a bit as he zipped up his leather jacket. A dark-haired young woman passed the bench pushing a stroller.

“You think she’s happy?” Heather said. “A new mum, all happy, contented and warm? Well, where’s her husband, her big strong man? Why isn’t he here with his wife and baby? He’s at home watching sports on television, I’ll bet.”

“I think you’re being a bit unreasonable.”

“Unreasonable? Well then, I guess I’m just an unreasonable bitch who won’t see things your way. That’s what you really think of me, isn’t it?”

He pulled a white silk scarf out of the hip pocket of his black skinny jeans and wrapped it around his neck. Then he removed his glasses and polished them carefully with a tissue.

“What I think,” he said finally, “is that you’re angry. We didn’t plan to be in this place, but we are. And we need to carefully decide what to. Just not today.”

“Maybe I should just say, ‘Oh, Josh, I don’t know what’s right any longer. You have to think for both of us’, and then let you make all the decisions.”

At that he winced. The line was from Casablanca. Their favourite movie. It had been playing at the student union building the evening they met, and they’d watched it with a group of friends. Later, he’d walked her back to her dorm, and at the front door he’d kissed her. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” he’d said, and then turned and walked away, bound for his own room off-campus. There was even fog drifting across the quad. Pretty corny, really, but she’d liked it.

That was five years ago, and now she was pregnant.

“Listen Heather, since we’ve been together we’ve never talked about children, or marriage, or where we thought we might be heading. There’s a lot we need to discuss.”

“What ‘we’ are you talking about? I’m the one who’s pregnant.”

He bristled a bit. “I’m the father, not an anonymous sperm donor. And, I have to say, if you’d stayed on the pill this wouldn’t have happened.”

“You bastard! You shitty bastard! It sure didn’t stop you having sex with me, did it? You’re just a typical guy! Birth control’s the woman’s problem, isn’t it? Well that’s bullshit! Bullshit!” She turned and sat with her back to him, hunched over with her hands stuck deep in the pockets of her duffel coat.

He reached for her shoulder. “Don’t!” she said, shaking his hand away. “Don’t touch me!” He withdrew his hand, and after a few moments he could see by the rise and fall of her narrow shoulders that she was crying. Minutes passed in silence.

He spoke first. “Heather, it’s just that it freaks me out. A few years ago I was in school and now I’ve helped create a new life. How can I be responsible for that? It’s all too, you know, grown-up.”

Her voice was small. “So how do you think I feel?”

“Except that you’re angry with me, I don’t know how you feel.”

She turned to sit squarely on the bench, dropped her feet to the ground, and sat staring at them.

“Look, I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she said. “It’s probably hormones, I guess. I sure don’t feel like myself today. I always expected I’d be a mom one day, but not like this. How can this be the right time? I’m only 24 and baby wasn’t in my plans.”

“Have you told your mother?”

“No. I’m only ten weeks or so, so I can still consider all the options, including abortion. I doubt if having mother’s input would make process that any easier.”

“Don’t you mean ‘we’?

“What? What do you mean?”

“We. You and me. Considering all the options.”

She thought for a moment. “I don’t know that I do mean ‘we’. You haven’t been very helpful so far. Why shouldn’t this me my decision? It’s my body.”

“Well then, how exactly do I fit in? It’s me Heather, me.”

She turned toward him. Her eyes were red from crying. A clear drop hung from the end of her nose and her face was red. She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“Charming,” he said.

“Sorry. Do you have a Kleenex?” He found a package of tissues in the pocket of his jacket and handed it over.

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“Are we going to be a couple?” she said. “Get married, have two-point-five kids and live in a townhouse in Pickering?”

“I don’t know.”

The woman with the stroller came by again, travelling in the opposite direction. They watched her go by.

“It’s a lot of work,” he said. “You have to be right into it, I guess.”

“Raising kids?”

“Yeah.” There was a pause, and then he continued: “I never told you my dad and I went for beers once, and after a few he told me if he had it all to do over he wouldn’t have had children.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It was weird. I told my Uncle Jeff about it later, and he laughed. He told me that nature equips us to deal with whatever is going on at the different stages of our lives. So, something that’s easy at 15, 20 or 25 might seem completely out of the question at 50.”

“Like high school?” She’d made a joke. He looked at her; she was smiling wanly.

“Yeah. I doubt if I’d survive grade 11 now,” he said. “What Jeff meant, was that Dad felt differently about children when he and my mother decided to have my sisters and me. He wanted us.”

“That makes sense.”

“Heather, I don’t know. How can someone change his mind? What if that happens to me?”

“I guess you have to get older and find out,” she said. “What about Uncle Jeff, then?” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Does he have children?”

“No, he doesn’t. He was married once, but not for very long. Now he lives in a converted barn near Newmarket and restores old tractors. It’s his thing.”

“I remember now,” she said. “You told me once about Uncle Jeff and the tractors. Not many women want to live with old tractors and tractor parts all over the place, I guess.”

“No,” he said, “Probably not. Or maybe that’s something else a person changes her mind about over time.”

The sun emerged briefly from behind the clouds, riding low in the late-afternoon sky. And then it was gone for good behind the row of three-story frame apartments across the street from the park. Soon it would be dark. And now it was definitely cold.

“It’s getting late, and I’m freezing,” she said. She stood up and dusted the seat of her coat. She looked down at him sitting on the bench, and she extended her hand. He took it and rose to his feet.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go home and have some tea.”