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“She knew.”
“Everybody knew but me.”
“Yuri ordered the flowers this morning.”
“Who is Yuri?”
He don’t answer. Of course he don’t. He just looks at me. And I’m standing there in his T-shirt with his ring stuck on my finger, and my heart is trying to come out my mouth, and I’m trying to figure out how to say it like a grown woman.
I don’t figure it out. It just falls out.
“I’m late.”
* * *
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t blink. Nothing. It’s like I said it to a statue.
Then, real quiet: “What?”
“I’m late. Like, a week.” And now I’m talking fast, and I can’t stop. “I thought it was finals. I thought it was stress. I didn’t wanna say nothing till I knew for sure, and I was gonna get a test in LA, but every time I went in the CVS, Misha was standing right there by the condoms, looking at me, and I just couldn’t, Sasha. I couldn’t buy a pregnancy test in front of Misha…”
He turns around and walks out.
I just stand there.
I hear him go down the stairs. The front door. His voice outside, low. A car starts. Gravel. Gone.
Did he just… He left? I tell this man I might be carrying his baby, and he gets up and leaves?
I’m about to go out there and cuss him all the way down to the ocean when he comes back up the stairs and leans in the doorway again, exactly how he was. Same arms. Same face. Like he never moved.
“Misha’s going to CVS,” he says.
“Misha’s here? I thought Misha was going to Oakland!”
“Friday.”
“Oh my God.”
* * *
Twenty-two minutes. He timed it. I watched him time it on his phone like it was a hostage situation.
Misha comes back with a CVS bag in each hand, sets them on the bathroom counter without one word, and leaves. I look in the bags.
Eleven pregnancy tests. Eleven. Every brand they got. The cheap ones. The digital ones. The ones that say Early Result in big pink letters. And a pack of Twizzlers.
I don’t know what the Twizzlers are for. I’m scared to ask.
I look at Sasha in the doorway.
“Get out.”
“No.”
“I’m not peeing on a stick with you standing there!”
He leans on the doorframe and folds his arms.
