Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [138]
“Thus concludes the reading of the Holy Word,” Reverend Emmett said. “We will now sing hymn fourteen.”
The little organ wheezed out the first notes and Ian let go of Rita’s hand. But she didn’t draw away. Instead she looked directly into his face as they stood up, ignoring the hymnal he held before them.
“Listen,” she said in a low voice. “I think I might be pregnant.”
He had already opened his mouth to start singing. He shut it. The congregation went on without them: “Break Thou the bread of life …”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” she said. And then she whispered, “But I intend to be glad about this, I tell you!”
What could he say?
“Me, too, sweetheart,” he said.
They faced front again. Stammering slightly, he found his place and joined the other singers.
That was in July. By September, she was having to leave the waistband of her jeans unsnapped and she wore her loosest work shirts over them. She said she thought she could feel the baby moving now—a little bubble, she said, flitting here and there in a larking sort of way. Ian set a palm on her abdomen but it was still too early for him to feel anything from outside.
She bought a book that showed what the baby looked like week by week, and she and Ian studied it together. A lima bean. A tadpole. Then finally a person but a clumsily constructed one, like something modeled in preschool. They were thinking of Joshua for a boy and Rachel for a girl. Ian tried the names on his tongue to see how they’d work in everyday life. “Oh, and I’d like you to meet my son, Joshua Bedloe …” His son! The notion brought forth the most bewildering mixture of feelings: worry and excitement and also, underneath, a pervasive sense of tiredness. He told Rita about everything but the tiredness. That he kept to himself.
Now it seemed the household was completely taken over by women. Rita’s batty mother, Bobbeen, spent hours in their kitchen, generally seated not at the table but on it and dangling her high-heeled sandals from her toes. With her crackling, bleached-out fan of hair and snapping gum and staticky barrage of advice, she seemed electric, almost dangerous. “You’re insane to go on working when you don’t have to, Rita, stark staring insane. Don’t you remember what happened to your aunt Dora when she kept on? You tell her, Ian. Tell her to quit hauling other folkses’ junk when she’s four and a half months gone and all her pelvic bones are coming off their hinges.” But she didn’t actually mean for Ian to say anything; she didn’t leave the briefest pause before starting a new train of thought. “I guess you heard about Molly Sidney. Six months along and she phones her doctor, says, ‘Feels like somebody’s hauling rope out of way down low in my back.’ ‘Oh,’ her doctor says, That’s normal.’ Says, ‘Pay it no mind,’ and the very next night guess what.”
She could recite the most bizarre stories: umbilical cords kinked off like twisted vacuum-cleaner hoses, babies arriving with tails and coats of fur, deluges of blood in the lawn-care aisle at Ace Hardware. If Rita’s two married girlfriends were around they would tut-tut. “Hush, now! You’ll scare her!” they’d say. But their own stories were nearly as alarming. “I was in labor for thirty-three hours.” “Well, they had to tie me down on the bed.” Serenely, Rita circulated with the coffeepot. Ian retreated to the basement, where his father was repainting the family high chair. “Women!” Ian said. “They’re giving me the chills.”
“You want to close that door behind you, Ian,” his father said. “It was paint fumes caused your cousin Linley’s baby to have that little learning problem.”
In October Ian started building a cradle of Virginia cherry—a simple slant-sided box without a hood because