Chapter 5: Raspberry
I looked at that ultrasound for a long time. Eight weeks, maybe nine. A little gray bean.
Here’s what I felt, and I’m not proud of all of it. First, a hot, ugly flash of how dare she. Then, right behind it, something colder and clearer: that baby didn’t do anything. That baby was going to have a father who said I still want to marry you to another woman while holding its picture in the rain.
“Jake,” I said. “Do you hear yourself?”
“I made a mistake, I know, but we can…”
“You found out your girlfriend is pregnant, and the first thing you did was come here to ask me to keep the wedding date.” I kept my voice low. Priya’s neighbors had kids. “That’s not a mistake. That’s who you are. I just didn’t want to see it.”
“Nine years, Em.”
“I know. I was there for all of them.” I took my grandmother’s ring off my finger. It came off easier than I expected, like it had been waiting. I held it out and he took it automatically, the way he took everything. “Give her the respect you never gave me. Be there for that baby. And don’t come back here.”
I closed the door. I locked it. I slid down it and sat on Priya’s floor with Biscuit in my lap until the sun came up.
That was six weeks ago.
People ask me if I regret the money. Thirty-one thousand four hundred dollars. My dad paid part of it back to Grandma, and I’m paying the rest, a little every month, which feels right. Jake’s family never offered a dime. Patricia sent me one text: I hope someday you’ll understand I was only trying to protect everyone. I didn’t answer. I understood fine.
My mother came to my new apartment two weeks after it happened with a casserole and swollen eyes. She sat on my secondhand couch and said, “I was wrong. I was so scared of you being hurt that I helped him hurt you.” I let her hug me. We’re not all the way back. But we’re on the road.
And on November fourteenth, my wedding day, I went to Magnolia Hall anyway.
Tessa called me the week before. The date was paid for, she said, and nonrefundable, and it was a shame to waste it. She had an idea.
So we threw a party. Not a wedding. Priya called it an un-wedding, and it stuck. Forty people who loved me, who’d called and brought groceries and sat with me on the bad nights. My dad. My mom, holding my hand under the table. My grandmother, who flew in from Tucson and wore the dress.
Not the whole dress, she’s four-foot-eleven. She had the veil made into a wrap and wore it over her shoulders like a queen.
Dez the photographer showed up off the clock and took pictures for free. In my favorite one, I’m standing at the head of a long table in a simple blue dress, laughing at something my grandmother said, holding up a glass. Biscuit is under the table with a bow tie.
And the cake was raspberry.
When Tessa brought it out, she leaned down and whispered, “Not lemon, I hope?”
“Never liked the lemon,” I said. “I always preferred raspberry. I just never said so.”
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. For nine years, I said yes to things I didn’t really want, because it was easier, because the plans were already made, because everybody was already invited.
People in the comments will tell me I should have stayed. That every couple has bumps. That thirty-one thousand dollars and nine years and a grandmother’s dress were too much to throw away.
But I didn’t throw anything away. I got it back.
All of it. Starting with me.
