The Virgin’s Baby

2. Aspen

2

ASPEN

Lubbock, Texas – May 9th

The sun blazed down on me as I made the long walk to the post office to check my mail. A warm breeze made the afternoon seem hotter than it had been the day before.

Lubbock wasn’t exactly paradise, but it was the only place I’d ever lived. Somehow, I’d never gotten used to the oppressive heat, but I had learned how to dress for the summer weather. Shorts and a cotton T-shirt along with flip-flops made it bearable. My thick dark curls had to be pulled up into a high ponytail to keep it off my neck.

Climbing up the stairs of the post office, I passed one of my professors.

“Afternoon, Aspen. It’s a nice day today, don’t you think?” Professor Sampson asked me. She’d been one of my favorites in last semester’s classes. Natural gas engineering seemed easy when she was teaching.

Stopping to chat for a sec, I said, “It’s a pretty nice day for Lubbock. But wouldn’t a tropical beach be a heck of a lot better on a day like this?”

Nodding, she agreed. “I bet it would. Did you make any summer plans?”

“Work, work, and then some more work,” I said with a laugh. I didn’t have the funds for any kind of vacation. “How about you?”

“Me and the hubby are going to Cancun in June. We’ll be there a whole week.” She waved her hand in front of her face to fan it. “I can’t wait to get there.”

“And you’ll probably hate leaving there too,” I added with a smile. I knew I would’ve hated to.

“Most likely,” she said with a nod. “Well, I better let you get to it then. Bye, Aspen.”

“Bye.” I made my way to the door. Opening it, I felt a burst of cool air waft over me as I walked in. Taking my time so I could cool off before making the hot trek back to the apartment I shared with another girl, I wandered around the large building.

A USPS poster advertising their latest stamps drew my attention. Birds were the theme: pretty little birds on tiny branches that made me smile.

I wasn’t your ordinary twenty-three-year-old college student. Little things made me happy. I wasn’t into partying either, unlike so many of the people at school here.

Even though I was approached to pledge at a few different sororities, I never had an interest. It was important to me to not just make good grades, but to make great ones. Living with a houseful of hormone-crazed girls sounded like poison to me, a surefire way to kill my chances of successfully gaining a master’s degree in petroleum engineering.

Box 954 was just to the right of the poster. Tapping in the combination, I opened the small box to find it filled with letters. It had been a week since I had checked the mail.

One envelope in particular made me anxious. My bank statement.

My bills weren’t high, but my part-time job didn’t pay well at all. With my half of the rent, electric, water, and cable totaling five hundred dollars a month along with an average hundred spent on food each week, usually a whopping fifty bucks was left to be deposited into the college fund account my father started for me.

That bank account had slowly dwindled after four and a half years of college. I used it exclusively to pay for classes, books, and other things I needed for school. It had been six months since I had the courage to open a statement to see what was left.

Peeking around the busy post office, I decided not to open the envelope for fear I might burst into tears in front of these people. I stuffed it into my bag and headed back to my apartment.

I looked at the rest of the mail as I walked home. Three credit card offers were tossed into the first trash can I passed. Dad had counseled me to never get a credit card. He said you can end up paying double—even triple—the amount for something when you figure in all the interest.

There was also an invitation to join the Lubbock First Baptist Church. I looked sourly at it; it was the eighth missive this year. My father had been a member of that church, an infrequent attendee, but still a member. And Dad made me go along with him on most of those occasions. I just wasn’t a fan of sitting and listening to anyone talk on about a book.

It confused me that so many people had different interpretations of what the words in the Bible meant. Why would anyone need another person to decipher the written words to them?

I didn’t need it. And I didn’t like to waste an hour or two listening to anyone do such a mundane thing.

Tossing that letter into the next trash can along my walk, I thought about how no one from my father’s church had reached out after Dad died in an oilfield accident. No one came around at all. Not even when I was forced to leave our house because of foreclosure. Not even when Dad’s truck and my car were repossessed.

All Dad had in his bank account when he died was a couple of thousand dollars. The bank let me have it after a month of waiting. I paid our bills for that month and bought some food, but that was it; there wasn’t any more money coming in after that.

I had to find a job—a thing my father tried so hard to keep me from doing. He wanted me to go to school and focus completely on my education. And I was successfully doing that up until my third year of college, when Dad was killed by an exploding oil well. Afterwards, things changed for me.

He’d made contributions to my college fund with each paycheck. I wouldn’t have had a problem at all if he’d survived. But he didn’t, and here I was.

With no mother in the picture, I was all alone. I had no memories of her. She left my father before I’d turned a year old—and she never came back.

While working evenings at a nearby Dairy Queen, I walked to and from my childhood home until the bank came to lock it up. Luckily, my coworker Margo needed a roomie, and she let me stay in her little one-bedroom apartment.

During that time, I made her couch my home and tried not to get in her way. Eventually, together we made the move into a two-bedroom, splitting the bills. It worked out okay. She and I got along well enough.

Arriving to the front door, I held onto the only piece of mail left: the bank statement. Pausing a beat before opening the door, I looked up and said, “Please let this be good news.” I didn’t care for church, but I did believe in God.

The door flew open, and Margo nearly ran into me as she walked out. “Whoa! Aspen, I didn’t know you were right here.”

I stepped to the side. “Yeah. I went to get the mail.” I held up the envelope. “My college bank account statement has come in, and this time I’ve got to see how much is left. I can’t throw it away without looking at it. Not with next semester’s classes coming up in a few months.”

Clucking her tongue, she started walking away from me. “Didn’t you say that you needed about twenty grand for them?”

“Yeah,” I muttered. I was fairly positive I wouldn’t see anywhere near that amount left in the account.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.” Unlocking the chain from her bicycle, she hopped on. “I’ve got a double shift at the Queen today. And afterward, I’m going out with a couple of girls. If you want to join us, you’re more than welcome, Aspen.”

She knew what my answer would be before I even said it, “No thanks.” I walked into the small apartment, not loving the fact that it felt just as stifling as outside.

We only used our air conditioning at night when we slept, and it was turned off as soon as we got up. Being poor meant not using any unnecessary anything. That included electricity, food, water, and even shampoo and soap.

My life changed so drastically after Dad died. He’d made great money in the oilfield, but the thing about working in that field is that the people tended to buy a lot of things on payments.

Sure, he had a very expensive four-wheel-drive truck. And that truck had hefty payments that couldn’t be made without his income. Everything was that way. One by one, I lost it all, even the furniture that filled our three-bedroom brick home. Everything had been financed; nothing was paid for. I found it a bit hypocritical of my father to tell me never to get a credit card when he financed everything he’d bought.

Flopping down on the couch, I stared at that envelope for a long time before finally opening it.

Okay, let’s just do this.

The first page greeted me and thanked me for being a loyal customer of Friend’s Bank in Lubbock, Texas.

My cell rang, and I stopped what I was doing to pull it out of my pocket. Flipping it open—I couldn’t afford a smartphone—I answered, “Hello?” The writing on the miniature screen was too small for me to read without my reading glasses, a pair I’d picked up at the dollar store a few months back.

“Aspen, hi,” my boss said. Mrs. Pepper had always been very good to all of us. She didn’t pay well, but she was very nice to everyone who worked for her.

She didn’t call me often. I immediately assumed she called to ask me to come into work even though I wasn’t scheduled.

“Did you need me to come in, Mrs. Pepper? I’m not busy. I can if you need me to.”

“Um…no,” she hesitated before going on. “You see, Aspen, I’ve got some news. I’m telling every one of you girls who work here about this today. Since you’re not scheduled to come in, I didn’t want to make you walk down here to hear what I have to say.”

My heart was sinking. This news was not going to be good. “Thank you for that consideration, Mrs. Pepper. So, what’s this news you have for us?”

“You remember my son, Gerald, right?” she asked.

I barely recalled his name. “Sure, I do.”

“Well, he and his wife just had triplets,” she went on.

Maybe she’s taking a little vacation. “Oh, wow. Well, congratulations on becoming a grandmother,” I offered. Things didn’t seem so glum then.

“Thank you, Aspen,” she continued. “So, you can imagine how hard things are going to be for him and his wife with three brand new babies, right?”

There’s that sinking feeling again. “Right.”

“And they live outside of Dallas. That’s a pretty good ways from here. A bit too far for me to keep up with this place.” She cleared her throat readying herself to hit me with the news I now assumed was going to be very bad.

“Okay,” I whispered, knowing the wind was about to be knocked out of me. “And just what does that mean, Mrs. Pepper?”

With a huff, she told me exactly what that meant. “Okay, here it is. I’ve gotta go out there tomorrow. I’ve already talked to a realtor who is going to put the building on the market and sell it for me. I’m closing down the Dairy Queen effective at nine o’clock tonight. I’m sorry, honey, I am. I’ve already written each of you glowing letters of recommendation. It’s all I can do. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” was all I could say. “Can you send mine with Margo, please?”

“I will,” she said happily like she hadn’t just messed up my world. “Good luck, Aspen. I’m sure you’ll be fine. You’ve got that great education going for you. Don’t sell yourself short. Apply for the jobs that you need that degree to get, honey.”

“K. Bye.” Flipping my phone closed, I went ahead and looked at the second page of the bank statement. “Fifty-six dollars and thirteen cents.”

Fuck my life.