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Blue knew him well, and it didn’t take her long to see this was one fight she couldn’t win. “Wait in the hall,” she said.
“Not on your life.” He ripped open the box.
“I just went.”
“Go again.” His hands, usually so nimble, fumbled with the directions as he tried to unfold them.
“Turn around,” she said.
“Stop it, Blue. We’re getting this over with right now.”
Wordlessly, she took the box. He stood there watching her. Waiting. Finally, she got the job done.
The directions said to wait three minutes. He marked the time off with his Rolex. It had three dials, one of them a tachometer, but all he cared about was the slow sweep of the second hand. As it inched its way around, a dozen thoughts he couldn’t sort out—didn’t want to sort out—tumbled through his head.
“Isn’t the time up yet?” she finally said.
He was sweating. He blinked and nodded.
“You look,” she whispered.
He picked up the stick with clammy hands and studied it. Finally he raised his eyes and met hers. “You’re not pregnant.”
She nodded, expressionless. “Good. Now go away.”
Dean drove around for a couple of hours and ended up on a back road. He pulled the truck off to the side of the crumbling asphalt and got out. It wasn’t even ten o’clock. Today would be a scorcher. He heard the sound of moving water and followed it into the woods where he came to a creek. A rusted oil drum lay on its side in the water along with some old tires, bed springs, a smashed highway pylon, and some other junk. It didn’t seem right, people dumping their shit like this.
He waded in and began dragging it out. Before long, his sneakers were waterlogged, and he was covered in mud and grease. He slipped on some mossy rocks and got his shorts wet, but the cold water felt good. He wished mountains of litter clogged the creek so he could spend all day here, but before long, the water ran free again.
His world had caved in. As he climbed back in his truck, he couldn’t get a deep breath. He’d take a long walk when he reached the farm and straighten out his head. But he didn’t make it that far. Instead, he found himself turning into the narrow lane that led to the cottage.
The sound of the guitar drifted toward him as he got out of the truck. Jack sat in a kitchen chair on the porch, his bare ankles crossed on the railing, and the guitar cradled to his chest. He wore three-day stubble, a Virgin Records T-shirt, and black athletic shorts. Dean’s muddy socks had collapsed around his ankles, and his feet squished in their sneakers as he approached the porch. The familiar wariness shaded Jack’s eyes, but he kept playing. “You look like you lost a pig-wrestling contest.”
“Anybody else here?”
Jack strummed a couple of minor chords. “Riley’s riding her bike, and April’s gone for a run. They should be back soon.”
Dean hadn’t come to see them. He stopped at the bottom of the steps. “Blue and I aren’t engaged. I picked her up outside Denver two months ago.”
“April told me. Too bad. I like her a lot. She makes me laugh.”
Dean rubbed some caked mud from between his knuckles. “I saw Blue this morning. A couple of hours ago.” Now his stomach was giving him trouble, and he tried to suck in some more air. “She thought she might be pregnant.”
Jack stopped playing. “Is she?”
A bird called out from the tin roof. Dean shook his head. “No.”
“Congratulations.”
He stuck his hands in his clammy pockets then pulled them out again. “These pregnancy tests people buy…You have to—Maybe you already know this. You have to wait three minutes to get the results.”
“Okay.”
“The thing is…That three minutes while I was waiting…I had—I had all these thoughts running through my head.”
“I guess that’s understandable.”
The steps creaked as Dean came up onto the edge of the porch. “Things like how I’d go about setting up medical care for Blue. Whether I trusted my attorney to handle child support or if I should have my agent do it. How to keep it out of the papers. You know the drill.”
