I hadn't even known to want it. I'd driven up Route 23 in September with a rental car, a dog in the passenger seat, and the wedding china of a woman I'd stopped being in the back of the trailer, and I'd told myself, in the small, flat voice I'd been using on myself by then, that this was the part of my life that was going to be quiet. I'd told myself I was going to live in my parents' house. I'd told myself I was going to open a small practice. I'd told myself I was going to be no one's, and that no one's was going to be enough, because the alternative had been the brownstone in Boston, the lamps the decorator had picked, and the dinners with a woman who clasped her hands at the front of her waist, and anything was going to be better than that.
Anything was going to be better than that.
I hadn't known the version of better that was waiting for me.
I hadn't known I'd been waiting for it.
Some things you didn't get to plan for. Some things came up on you on a porch with a bath towel slipping at your chest and a yellow lab running circles in another person's grass. Some things came up on you in a kitchen with a man on your counter, bleeding from a feral cat, and your hip against the back of his hand. Some things you owed it to yourself to see through.
I had seen this one through.
I was standing in the kitchen of a house I hadn't lived in eight months ago, in a T-shirt of the man I had married three weeks ago, with the coffee he had poured for me cooling in the mugwith the chip in my hand, and the river running past the back fence the way the river was always running past the back fence.
Some things you came home for.
Some things came home for you.
The knock came at six-twenty.
I knew the knock.
I had known the knock since the third grade. It was three even raps a beat apart, the kind of knock you did with the knuckle of your middle finger when you were a woman in a hurry. I went down the hall in my socks. I had the door open before I'd checked the peephole.
Audrey was on the porch.
She was in scrubs.
The scrubs were the navy ones she wore on labor and delivery days. There was a small dark spot on the right thigh that I recognized as the kind of thing scrubs picked up on labor and delivery. Her hair was in a knot at the back of her head that had loosened in the way Audrey's hair loosened over the course of a twelve-hour shift. She didn't have lipstick on.
She didn't say anything.
She stepped through the door and wrapped both arms around my neck.
"Audrey."
She didn't answer.
"Audrey, what's wrong?"
She didn't answer.
I got my arms around her back and held on. She was shaking a little against my shoulder, the small shake of a woman who had been holding something through the back end of a shift and haddriven across town in the early light to set it down. Moose came down the hall, sat at our feet, and looked up at her the way he had been looking up at her since he was a puppy.
"Audrey. You're scaring me."
She pulled back.
She had the wet shine along the bottom of her lashes that I hadn't seen on her since the morning Moose had been missing. She drew a breath. She didn't look at me.
She reached into the chest pocket of her scrubs.
She pulled out a pregnancy test.
She held it out to me.
I took it.
The line was the line.
