Mary got Phil his last beer and got one for herself.
“You shouldn’t drink,” Phil said to her.
Mary poured her beer down the sink and got a Coke instead. “God. Who told you?”
“You shouldn’t, you know. Or smoke.” Phil lit one himself and crumpled the empty pack.
Mary sat down beside him again and waved the thick air away. “It’s the same, just being in here. I’m serious. Did you talk to Russell?”
Phil frowned. “Who’s Russell?”
“So you didn’t talk to him.”
“I always wanted a son.” Phil sighed, his eyes pooling with tears. “Now it’s too late.”
Mary pointed at his beer. “I’ve lost track. How many is that?”
“It’s all right,” Phil said, and rose stiffly to go. “I’m done for tonight.”
She helped him with his coat, a denim jacket so filthy it seemed weighed down by dirt. He had the cowboy hat but no scarf, and she took her own and wrapped it around his lanky neck, tucking the ends into the jacket. “Straight home, all right? It’s cold. Call when you get there.”
Mary left the bar and returned under a full moon to the apartment over the shoe store. Curtis was working at his easel in her old bedroom, and Russell was asleep. She couldn’t explain how Phil had known-although, in hindsight, she recognized that this might not have been so; his words were ambiguous. Mary made cocoa for herself and Curtis and told him her news.
Curtis sat beside her on the sofa and put his arms around her. “A baby,” he said happily; and yet he did not look at her as he said this. “How did it happen?”
“I think in the usual way,” Mary said.
“We were careful, were we not?”
“There’s careful and there’s careful,” Mary said.
They agreed that they would wait a week to see how they felt. That night, in bed with Curtis, Mary thought about Phil. He hadn’t called, but she had not really expected him to. She saw him walking home through moonlight to the run-down house he shared with his cats, across a field of snow as blue as radioactive milk. She saw him lying down in the snow, and then the wind began to push snow over his body, until only the tips of his shoes were showing, but they were her mother’s shoes, and it was her mother under the snow. Then she woke up and realized she had dreamt this.
Curtis said that he wanted to marry. His desire did not seem completely sincere, but under the circumstances Mary wondered how it could have been. In any event, it seemed to Mary that they should at least try. It surprised them both how easy this was to do-no blood tests, just a few papers to sign. Curtis made the necessary phone calls, and on a Tuesday they drove to city hall in Minneapolis and got in line. After, Mary planned to call her parents, and then the two of them would drive back to Twig; she would work in the bar that night, and Curtis would get back to painting.
Curtis dressed in a dark suit-coat and jeans, and Mary wore the blue wool dress she had worn beneath her choir robe in college. She had no flowers, though many of the other women in the waiting room were clutching small bouquets at their waists. Each couple had a number, and every few minutes a clerk with a clipboard would appear through a door behind the desk to call the next couple in to take their vows.
“This is crazy,” Curtis said.
“It isn’t exactly what I planned for my life either,” Mary said. She was holding their number, thirty-six. The couple they had just called was number thirty-two. “On the other hand, it seems I’ve planned very little.”
Curtis looked like he was about to cry.
“I can’t,” he said helplessly. “Not to either one of us.”
Mary took his hand, threading their fingers together. “I know,” she said.
They left the building and returned to the car. “Don’t do it,” Curtis said, his knuckles white on the wheel.
“Don’t?”
Curtis took a deep breath. “I don’t… believe in it,” he said.
“No one does,” Mary said.
They drove out of the city and stopped at an Ember’s for lunch. Her circumstances made it difficult for Mary to know what to order; already the hunger had begun, a force like possession, and yet she now knew this would come to nothing.
“I’ll go with you,” Curtis said finally.
“Who’s asking?” Mary said.
The clinic was in St. Paul -a small white house on a residential street with baby strollers left on the porches and brightly colored plastic toys strewn in the yards. Mary parked her car and walked around the block twice before stepping onto the porch. Inside, a dozen women sat on plastic chairs. Some were very young, and had brought their mothers with them. Seeing these women, Mary wished she could have, too, but of course this was impossible-her mother was, after all, adopted, and under different circumstances, might not have been born at all. Mary gave her name at the desk.
“Where are the demonstrators?” she asked. On a stool by the front door Mary had seen a pile of leaflets, weighted down with a stone.
The woman looked at the clock on the wall, then back at Mary. She was spooning yogurt from a cup and had tucked a pencil behind one ear. “I think he usually goes to lunch at one o’clock.”
Someone, a nurse or doctor, examined Mary and told her to come back in two weeks. This seemed like a long time, but Mary didn’t see how she was in a position to argue. Outside, a single demonstrator patrolled the sidewalk, a bald man wearing a sandwich board and mittens. One eye looked at her, while the other did not; the second one was glass.
“This isn’t the answer,” he pleaded.
“Fuck you,” Mary said.
Spring came early to Twig, and the next two weeks brought storm after storm to the little town. Mary moved back into her old bedroom, with its window looking out over the street above the shoe store and its sign, a single boot with an upswept toe, creaking in the spring wind. It was clear that things were over with Curtis-that, when the time came, they would not emerge together on the far side-but in these two weeks of wind and rain, they became a couple again, in a way they had never been before. They were tender and affectionate with one another, and when she came home each night from the Norway, Curtis made her something to eat and then said good-night to her at the door of her bedroom, as if they lived in different towns.
On the eleventh day, a Saturday, Mary returned from the Laundromat and found Curtis sitting on the sofa, clutching his eye. She thought he might be crying, but when he pulled his hand away she saw the green-and-purple bruise, and the cut along the ridge of his cheekbone, a line of blood dried black. The eye itself was uninjured.
She sat beside him and touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “What happened?”
“Russell did it,” Curtis said.
Mary tried to imagine this but couldn’t. She wrapped some ice cubes in a warm dish towel from the laundry basket and held it to his eye. “I didn’t know he knew how to hit. Where was this? Outside somewhere? Or here in the apartment?”
Russell had hit him with his radio. Mary folded the laundry while Curtis iced his eye. Their things were still mixed together, and she sorted them into separate piles of neatly folded clothes on the old trunk they used as a coffee table. She had always done it this way, but as these piles accumulated, they became something more.
“I thought I’d go back home,” Curtis said.
“That’s probably best,” Mary heard herself say. “I’m sorry, but could you please do it now?”
In the morning he was gone, and two days later Mary drove herself to the clinic. How terrible, she thought, to be twenty-two, and already have the worst thing of her life to remember. Then she imagined a strongbox, like a small safe, and she took this idea and placed it in the box. Afterward, she rested an hour on a cot, drank the juice and nibbled the cookies they gave her, and then got back into the Citation. They had told her not to drive after the abortion, but no one actually checked on this, and she drove halfway to Twig before she stopped to vomit in a field of broken corn.