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Lincoln looks around. Amy has enlivened the room with several hanging pictures and a bookcase of her bottle collection, but the narrow space only admits light from that one window in back. The mood is funereal. “Can I sit?” he asks. He’s feeling shaky, both from the weight of his cause and the blundering way it’s played out so far. He gestures to a wood chair, where there’d be no risk of transmitting the stain on his pants.
Amy nods grudgingly.
Lincoln sits, takes a deep breath. First he says, “I’ve been offered a job in New York, with Malcolm House.”
Amy perks up. “Really? Congratulations. That’s nice. That’s what you’ve always wanted.”
“Yes, right. Well, here’s the thing.” As he prepares to deliver his plea, Lincoln balks. Amy looks so cool, determined, unyielding. Get on with it, he urges himself. “I know this is sort of out of the blue,” he bumbles, “but I really only realized myself this morning.” He stares at her, then blurts, “I was hoping you would come with me.”
Amy sits sharply back, looking stunned and pained, as if she’d been hit by a telephone book. “Why?” she demands.
Lincoln has coached himself to avoid the L word—too abrupt, too weighted. Words are too easy. “Because we should have this adventure together.” He takes another deep breath. “I know you think we’re a bad mix, but that’s not true. We’re a great team.” (Did he really say that?) “I mean, I’ve never felt smarter, never felt more alive than when we were working on your book. I never felt more engaged.” (Stop him! He’s out of control!) Lincoln blinks, resets himself. “Buford’s right—I do think too much. And at the time, I didn’t realize what was happening, because I was so addled with ambition. But it wasn’t the book, it was you.”
Amy rocks on the sofa, her gaze goes blank.
“Come with me,” Lincoln urges. “You deserve New York, too.”
“Sumbubbabitch,” Amy mumbles.
Lincoln sits back. “What did you say?”
“Sumbubbabitch.”
“I gave you that.”
“So?” Amy glares at him. “It fits. Why can’t I use it? If anyone has a copyright, it’s the old man on the work crew.”
Lincoln thinks: What else from my blather has stayed with her? You toss these things out and think they drop into a black hole, but then something catches. “No problem,” he says. “I was just...” He stops himself.
“Anyway, I like that word,” Amy says gently. “It fits.”
In the slight mellowing of her tone, Lincoln catches a hint that her intransigence may be weakening. Five years of failed marriage has taught him that this is his tiny window. He gets up from the chair and sits beside her on the sofa. He puts his arm around her shoulders and rubs his forehead against the mussed hair on the side of her head. “I’ve missed you,” he whispers.
“You don’t know,” she says quietly.
“Yes, I do,” he insists. “I want to be with you.”
“You don’t know,” Amy repeats. “I’m pregnant.”
“Pregnant?”
“You know—with child.”
Lincoln stares, dumbfounded. “Me?”
“Of course you, you idiot. You’re the only man I’ve slept with in the last year.”
This is coming too quickly. Lincoln’s faculties are overloaded. “But how? You said you were on the pill.”
“It turns out the pill is not infallible. Well, maybe I missed a few days back when I was in a tizzy to finish the book. My gynecologist warned me, but who ever thinks of it?”
His mind galloping, Lincoln nonetheless manages to do the crude math. Around five months. “You don’t look pregnant,” he says, as if that were determinative.
“Not when I’m bundled up.”
Lincoln melts into the sofa. “Holy shit.” The words come out in feeble puffs. Pregnant. Lincoln remembers the efforts he and Mary went through when they were trying to start a family—counting days, checking temperatures, visiting doctors. Nothing worked. Now, this. Just at the moment of his triumphant departure. Is Chicago like quicksand? The harder you struggle to get away, the more it sucks you in?
Amy says, “I wasn’t going to tell you.” She stares at him, alarmed, then reaches over and touches Lincoln’s left arm. “Oh, I should never have told you, John. You should see your face.”
