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I heard the swing creak as she pushed herself off and started to rock it slowly with one toe.
“How’d you find out?” she asked curiously.
I took a sip of my coffee, loving the bitter taste as it slid down my throat.
“I was at the house” —I gestured to the house behind me— “working on some final stuff that we had to work on. I was already living here, doing repairs in my spare time. But since the bathroom was still in disrepair, she chose to live at her apartment until we could get it fixed.”
Harleigh made a moaning sound from her seat.
I grinned and looked back over at her. “It’s not one of those stories…at least…not yet.”
She made a sound in the back of her throat and went back to drinking her coffee. Though I couldn’t see her face since the particular seat she’d chosen was in mostly shadows, I knew that her eyes were on me.
“Since I was paying her medical bills, she’d had all the paperwork for her OB/GYN sent to the new address. I went out to check the mail the day that I found out and found a couple of letters that were confusing to me. Something called a ‘quad screen’ that kind of scared the crap out of me. Another was some results from her gestational diabetes test. It said that they’d been trying to reach her by phone and couldn’t. Anyway, after I couldn’t get ahold of her by phone, I got on Google and started to research some of the things on the paper that were highlighted as abnormal. When I got to one that was what they considered a ‘dormant condition’ unless both parents carried the gene, or whatever it’s called…” I paused. “Another thing that caught my eye in the notes that were sent in the mail was a thing called RH. Have you ever heard of that?”
“Yes, why?” she wondered.
“Well, about a month or two before Vanessa wound up pregnant, there was this blood drive at work, and we got to talking about how we were both O negative. We jokingly said if something happened to either one of us, we’d be able to donate easily.” I shook my head. “Anyway, I started to research that on Google, too and found out that with both of us having the same blood type, the baby should’ve been the same blood type, too. Both of us had a negative RH factor. Only, the paperwork that I was reading said that the baby carried an RH positive factor, and that she would have to receive some injection so that if for some reason her baby’s blood would be introduced to her blood, her body wouldn’t try to fight the baby as a ‘foreign body’ or something or another by producing antibodies. Which got me to thinking…how did our baby get a positive RH factor?”
“Oh, shit,” she murmured. “Shit, shit, shit.”
I was already nodding my head. “Exactly. So I went over there, papers in hand, and asked her, point blank.”
Lightning streaked across the sky once more.
“Yep,” I snorted at the look on her face. “That’s exactly what I thought, too.”
She shook her head, her face a mask of confusion. “Whhhhhy? Doesn’t she know from soap operas and books that keeping that secret rarely works?”
My lips twitched. “I’m not sure, honestly. But yeah…she was surprised that I’d found out. Honestly and truly, she looked so flabbergasted that I’d found out that she didn’t know what to say.”
“And what happened next?” She leaned forward and placed her empty coffee cup on the edge of the railing, then turned back more fully to me until she was practically sitting sideways in the swing. She was staring at me through the triangle the chains made, and her elbow was resting on the arm of the swing, her chin in her hands.
If I could’ve taken a picture right then, I would have.
Just so I could remember what she looked like right then in that moment in time.
“I forgot that we were supposed to go out on a double date with a buddy from work,” I said. “So I’m standing there, hands on my hips, pissed as hell, trying to have a conversation with her in her hallway when I hear the booted footsteps of someone on the stairs. But we’re in such a heated argument that neither one of us stopped our discussion. I asked her who she’s slept with instead of me, and I hear a sound out of a man’s throat clear from behind me. I whirl around, and there’s our friend, standing there like he’s been poleaxed.”
She slaps her hand against her forehead. “And that’s when you realize that she’s slept with your friend!”
I began nodding. “Yes, exactly. The look on his face confirmed it, paired with the ‘son of a bitch’ that came out of her mouth.”
