Father of Her Nephew

Chapter Five: Roadblock

It was Ruby who found the clinic, practically and quietly, the same way she handled most things that needed handling. She showed Rita the address without commentary and asked if she wanted company and Rita said yes without hesitation.

They took the bus. They sat side by side with their shoulders touching and did not talk much. Outside the window the city went about its ordinary business, indifferent and continuous, and Rita watched it and turned things over in her mind and could not find a solid place to stand on any of it yet.

"You don't have to decide anything today," Ruby said at one point. "We're just going to talk to someone."

"I know," Rita said.

"Whatever you decide," Ruby said, and then stopped, and Rita looked at her. Ruby's jaw was tight. "I'm here. Whatever you decide, I'm here. I just want you to know that before we go in."

Rita looked at her little sister, twenty years old and studying for a degree she was getting because Rita had decided she would, sitting on a city bus on a Thursday morning to hold her hand through something she had not asked for, and she thought about their parents and about the accident and about how it had just been the two of them since Ruby was eighteen and she was twenty-two and somehow they had held each other together through all of it.

"I know," Rita said again. "Thank you."

Ruby bumped her shoulder. "Stop thanking me. It's annoying."

The clinic was quiet and clean and the woman at the front desk was professional without being cold. Rita filled out the forms and sat in the waiting room and stared at a framed print on the wall that was meant to be soothing and Ruby sat beside her with their arms pressed together and scrolled through nothing on her phone just to have something to do with her hands.

Rita's name was called.

She went in. She came back out. She sat down next to Ruby and picked up her bag and said, "Let's go."

Ruby looked at her. "Are we —"

"Outside," Rita said quietly. "I just need to be outside."

The street was cold and bright and Rita stood on the pavement and breathed it in and Ruby stood next to her and waited.

"I couldn't do it," Rita said.

She had gone in knowing what the appointment was for, clear-eyed and practical, because that was how she approached things that scared her — you face them directly and you make the sensible decision and you move forward. She had sat in the chair and listened and answered questions and the whole time she had been very calm and very certain.

And then something happened that she had not planned for.

She had looked down at the leaflet in her hands and she had thought, with a clarity that arrived from nowhere and everywhere at once, about her mother. About the way her mother used to hum while she cooked. About how Rita had her mother's hands, wide palmed and capable, the kind of hands that were built for holding things.

She had thought about being held.

And she had stood up, and she had thanked the woman, and she had walked back out to the waiting room.

"I couldn't do it," she said again. Her voice was steady. She was not crying. She was just standing on the pavement in the cold telling her sister the truth. "I know it doesn't make sense. I know the timing is terrible and I don't know who he is and I can barely afford my half of the rent. I know all of that."

Ruby was watching her carefully, saying nothing.

"But I think—" Rita stopped. She pressed her lips together for a moment. "I think I would like to be a mother. I think I would be good at it. And I think—" Her voice dropped slightly. "I think this baby deserves a chance, even if I'm scared out of my mind."

Ruby was quiet for three full seconds.

Then she stepped forward and put her arms around her sister and held on and Rita closed her eyes and held on back.

"Okay," Ruby said into her shoulder. "Then we figure it out."

"It's going to be hard," Rita said.

"Everything worth anything is hard," Ruby said. She pulled back and looked at her, eyes bright. "We've done hard before."

Rita looked at her sister's face, so certain, so steady, and something in her chest that had been pulled tight for three days finally loosened.

"I don't know his name," she said. Almost a whisper.

"I know," Ruby said.

"I don't know how to find him."

"I know that too," Ruby said. She picked up her bag from the pavement and looped her arm through Rita's, turning them both toward the bus stop. "But right now we're going home, and I'm going to make you that soup you like, and we're going to sit on the couch, and we're going to figure out one thing at a time."

Rita let herself be steered. She looked up at the pale winter sky and thought about her mother's hands and about the small, impossible thing growing quiet and certain inside her.

One thing at a time.

She would spend the next several weeks believing that was enough.

She did not yet know that time was not something she had in the abundance she assumed.

~

Leaving was easier than she expected.

Rita handed in her notice on a Monday, two weeks after the clinic, and her manager at the club looked at her with the particular unsurprised expression of a man who had watched many women walk through that door and eventually back out of it.

"You sure?" he said, leaning back in his chair.

"Yes," she said.

He shrugged. He slid an envelope across the desk with her final payment and that was the end of four years. No ceremony. No speech. She picked up the envelope and walked out through the back and stood in the alley behind the building for a moment and breathed in the cold air and felt something she could not immediately name.

Not regret. Something quieter than that. The particular feeling of closing a chapter that had cost her more than she let herself count.

She took the bus home and did not look back.