Monday, Monday: A Novel by Elizabeth Crook Page B

worked on the books at the hardware store and went home exhausted to fall on the sofa and watch TV with her parents, fearing that the ease and contentment of everyone around her was only based on their ignorance of a secret she wouldn’t be able to keep for long. Already she felt like a moral outcast. Her mother was helping to plan a neighborhood party for later in the summer, and Shelly promised she would go to Luling and pick out the watermelons herself. But she had no idea what her life would be by that time. The people who loved her now might not love her as much then.
    She called Billy and asked him to take her back to Austin on Thursday. He was working that day, he said, but he could take her on Friday.
    This time he parked on the Drag, and said he would meet her back at the truck in an hour. She walked to Sabine Street in a hurry, and was ushered into the doctor’s office.
    He told her to take a seat and looked at her curiously. He was a balding man with a nice manner. “You don’t have to answer this, but I have a suspicion that you’re not married.”
    “The test came back positive?” She knew by the look on his face.
    “Yes, my dear. It did.”
    He asked if she wanted to talk. She sat in the chair and looked at him and tried to manage her thoughts. But everything had gone sideways. She tried to stand up and the room became dim.
    “Sit for a minute,” he told her. “Take some deep breaths.”
    She stayed for nearly an hour, and cried, and admitted she wasn’t married, and that she didn’t know what to do. He offered to put her in touch with the sisters at the Home of the Holy Infancy, a Catholic home for unwed mothers on Nueces and Twenty-sixth Street. She could live there until she had the baby. The sisters would arrange an adoption.
    But Shelly had seen the home—an imposing brick building—and had seen the pregnant girls out for walks and the sisters pushing baby strollers. She had felt sorry for the girls, and now could not imagine being one of them. And she wasn’t interested in giving the baby up for adoption.
    After a while she dried her tears, paid the bill, walked to the art building on campus, and climbed the stairs to the studio. When she didn’t find Wyatt there, she left him a note in his mailbox. “Can you meet me on Sunday in the parking lot of the Nighthawk on South Congress? I’ll be in my mom’s station wagon. I need to talk to you about something.”
    She didn’t attempt to hide her swollen face from Billy. He had been waiting a while when she climbed back into the truck. “I’m expecting,” she told him flatly.
    “Expecting what?”
    “A baby.”
    The truck sat idling.
    “Just drive,” she said.
    “God, Shelly.” After a minute he said, “Can I ask who the father is?”
    When they were on the highway, she said, “He’s married.”
    “Oh. Man.”
    “And I love him. And I don’t know what to tell him. He has a baby already.”
    “He doesn’t know you’re expecting?”
    “I have to come back on Sunday and tell him.”
    “Oh God, Shelly. Is he going to leave his wife?”
    “No.”
    “But what about you?” He waited. “Do you think you could … you know. Have an abortion?”
    “No.”
    “I mean, I know it’s against the law,” he said. “What about giving the baby up for adoption? A lot of people want kids.”
    “I couldn’t give it to strangers.”
    “What is your father going to say?” Billy had always liked her father. His own father was drunk all the time.
    “I don’t know. And my mom. I don’t know who to worry about most.” She was most worried about Wyatt.
    “Worry about yourself,” he said.
    “And the baby,” she said.
    “What about Spain, or wherever it was you were going?”
    She stared at the road.

 
    11
    IN THE RAIN
    Friday night she lay awake staring at the darkness. Storms threatened on Saturday. Thunder rumbled in the distance, the skies grew dark in the afternoon, and the evening came without any change in the color of