“The pregnancy is farther along than you think,” the doctor said. “About nine weeks.”
I stared at the flicker on the screen.
Nine weeks took me back to a Sunday when Warren had burned the first batch of pancakes and insisted on making a second. We ate them standing at the kitchen counter because he’d spilled batter on both chairs. Later, when it started to rain, we went back to bed.
I’d been picking over my memories for weeks, trying to decide which ones I could still trust. That Sunday was one I’d left alone.
“Is there a heartbeat?” I asked.
The doctor turned up the sound.
I went home with a crease down the middle of the ultrasound picture because I’d folded it with shaking hands.
Warren picked up on the fourth ring.
“Grace? Did something go wrong with the transfer?”
For a second, I couldn’t remember what he meant. Then I realized he was talking about the money.
“I was at the hospital this morning.”
“What happened?”
I heard the old Warren in those two words. He used to speak that way when I woke him in the middle of the night and said I didn’t feel right. He’d be fully awake before I finished the sentence.
“I fainted. They ran some tests, and—”
In the background, Priya said something about the blue mugs.
The blue mugs were his. He’d left them behind in our kitchen. Apparently he’d bought more.
“Give me a second,” he said, and I heard a door shut. “Okay. What did the tests say?”
“I’m pregnant, Warren.”
Nothing.
Then, “How far along?”
“Nine weeks.”
He was quiet long enough to count backward.
“Are they sure?”
“About the pregnancy or about when it happened?”
“Grace.”
“What are you asking me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Can you give me a minute to think?”
I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead. “I have a follow-up on Friday. I’d like you to come.”
He said he’d call me back. I put my phone beside my plate at dinner and carried it with me when I went to brush my teeth.
By Friday, I’d stopped taking it into the bathroom.
At the appointment, I told the receptionist I was expecting someone. She put a visitor sticker beside my paperwork so I could hand it to him when he arrived. At the end of the appointment, I peeled the sticker off the clipboard and threw it away myself.
That evening, I called again. The number had been disconnected.
I wrote to him at the address where his final divorce papers had been delivered. I put a copy of the ultrasound inside, along with my number and the date of my next appointment. The letter came back with a forwarding sticker and a stamp that said REFUSED.
I stood over the kitchen trash with it for a long time. Then I slid it into the drawer where we kept the spare keys.
Six months later, when my daughter was born, the first thing I noticed was the little mark by her left eyebrow. I traced the air above it with my finger. I’d done the same thing to Warren once, when we were seventeen and lying side by side on the grass behind his parents’ house. He’d caught my hand without opening his eyes.
The nurse asked what name she should put on the bassinet.
“June,” I said.
That was the month when Warren and I used to start leaving the windows open at night. I liked being able to hear the trains from our bedroom. And on our last good Sunday, while he was scraping pancake batter off the bottom of a chair, he’d said, “If we ever get a girl, what about June?”
I kept the name. There were days I resented him for making it so hard to tell her where it came from.
By six, June wanted to be a drummer, a veterinarian, and the person who got to push the button that opened the bridge downtown. She wanted the bridge job most, but only if she was allowed to bring a dog.
She also wanted to know her father’s name.
She asked on a Tuesday while I was trying to get a piece of toast out of the toaster. I turned it upside down over the sink and told her, because I’d promised myself I would the first time she asked.
“Warren Hale,” I said.
“Does he live in Chicago?”
“I don’t know where he lives now.”
“Have I ever met him and I just forgot?”
“No, honey.”
She picked up a crumb from the counter and ate it.
“Okay,” she said. “If I ever meet him, will you tell me it’s him?”
“I will.”
I imagined having time to prepare for that conversation. I thought I’d know where it was going to happen and have a chance to talk to Warren first.
Instead, we had it in front of a bakery case while a woman asked us to move so she could see the muffins.
It had been raining all morning. June and I had stopped for cinnamon rolls after a library visit, and she was trying to talk me into getting the one with the most icing.
“That one has hardly any,” she said, standing on tiptoe to point. “I don’t even know why they put it out.”
Someone behind us laughed.
I turned because I knew the laugh.
Priya stood a few feet away, shaking rain off an umbrella. Warren was beside her with two coffees in his hands. His coat was open, and his glasses had fogged at the edges. He looked like someone I’d passed a hundred times on the street. Then he took off his glasses, and I knew exactly how much time had gone by.
“Grace,” he said.
June turned around.
He looked down at her and opened his mouth. Whatever he meant to say seemed to catch in his throat. He took one sharp breath and put both coffees down on the ledge beside him. One tipped. Priya caught it before it went over.
“Mom,” June said, slipping her hand into mine.
“June, this is Warren Hale.”
She looked at me first to make sure she’d heard right. I nodded.
Then she looked back at him.
“Do I say hi?” she whispered.
“You can if you want to.”
“Hi,” she said.
Warren’s eyes went to the mark at her eyebrow. Up close, it was a little darker than his. I knew because I’d compared it to his photograph the week she was born. I’d never told anyone I did that.
“Hi, June.” He said her name slowly. “How old are you?”
“Six. I’ll be seven in May.”
He closed his eyes.
Priya was still holding the coffee she’d caught. “Warren,” she said. “Is this the baby from the phone call?”
I looked at her. For seven years, I’d pictured her in that room with the blue mugs, assuming she hadn’t heard a word.
“You knew I called?” I asked.
“He told me you said you were pregnant.” She looked at Warren, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, she went on. “He told me you called him back later and said you’d lost the baby.”
June’s hand tightened around mine.
“Let’s get your cinnamon roll,” I told her.
She pointed at the one she wanted. I paid, and we took it to the far end of the bakery, where there was a bench and a high window she could look out of. I could still see Warren in the glass. He hadn’t moved from the ledge.
I broke open the roll and gave her the soft half.
“Was she talking about me?” June asked.
“Yes.”
“Did he think I died?”
“I don’t know what he thought, honey. We can ask him another day, if you want.”
She pulled a strand of dough loose with two fingers. “Can you stay here till I finish?”
I sat down beside her.
It took her a while to eat. I watched buses pull up outside and let people off, and when she asked me what our library books were about, I read her the back of every one.
By the time we left, Priya had gone. Warren was waiting under the awning with his hands in his coat pockets.
“Grace, my mother told me you’d lost the baby,” he said.
“You just let Priya believe she heard it from me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I knew what she’d say if I told her the truth. She’d tell me to call you and hear it from you.”
June was leaning against my hip. I could feel the warmth of her cheek through my coat. I wanted to ask how many times in seven years he’d come close to calling me. I could hear myself asking it, and then I could hear all the ways he might answer.
“I sent a letter,” I said instead. “It came back refused.”
“Where did you send it?”
“The place on Astor Street. Where your divorce papers went.”
“That was my mother’s apartment.”
“It had your name on it.”
“She was forwarding everything to me.” He rubbed at a spot on his sleeve where the coffee had splashed. “Do you still have it?”
“Yes.”
June lifted her head. “Mom, can we go home now?”
I took her hand. “Yes.”
Warren stepped aside to let us pass. He didn’t ask for my number, and at the time I was grateful.
That evening, after June went to bed, I took the letter out of the drawer. I’d kept it in the envelope all those years, behind two keys to a car I’d sold. I opened it and unfolded the picture. The thermal print had faded so much I had to tilt it toward the lamp to find the small shape I’d once been able to see with my eyes closed.
Someone knocked at the front door.
It was Warren. His hair was damp again, and he was carrying a brown envelope with a split along one side.
“I went to see my mother,” he said. “She kept saying she’d done what I asked her to do. I told her I never asked her to turn away a letter from you. So she showed me what she thought I meant.”
He held out a single sheet of paper.
I knew his handwriting before I read a word. He’d written the date at the top and underlined it, the way he used to on lists we left for each other on the refrigerator.
It was the day I told him I was pregnant.
“Mom?” June called from the stairs.
I put the paper down and went to see what she needed. She’d come looking for water. I filled her cup, tucked her back in, and sat on the edge of her bed until she let go of my sleeve.
When I went back downstairs, Warren was still on the porch. I picked up the letter and read the first line.
Mom, if Grace contacts you about the baby, please deal with it for me.
Then I looked at the bottom of the page. There was a second note beneath his signature, written in ink I recognized from a hundred birthday cards.
Warren, I went to the appointment. I saw her come out with the picture.
Margaret had written the date beside it.
It was that Friday. The day I’d left a visitor sticker waiting for him.
