Summer Rental (16 page)

“How could you know?” Ellis said sympathetically. “I mean, you guys lived together for a year. We all thought it was the real deal.”

“Yeah, he fooled even me,” Julia agreed. “And you know I never liked any other guy you dated before. My gaydar is usually pretty accurate.” She
glanced over at Dorie. “I really am sorry, honey. Do you want to talk about something else?”

“It’s okay,” Dorie said, trying to smile through her tears. “Don’t mind me. I’m just hormonal. I cry all the time. I cried this morning when I realized we were out of Frosted Flakes.”

“I’ll get another box,” Julia said. “Promise.”

“Are you sure you still feel like talking?” Ellis asked. “It’s getting late, and I know you must be emotionally exhausted.”

“No, I’m all right,” Dorie said, brushing bread crumbs from her tank top. “It feels good to finally talk to somebody about all this. I’ve had all these secrets bottled up inside me. It just felt like I was going to explode if I didn’t tell somebody about the baby.”

“You didn’t want to tell Willa?” Ellis asked. “I mean, she’s your only sister.”

Dorie shook her head. “Willa! I love her, but bless her heart, you guys know how she is. She’s so bossy. She’d tell me I’d chosen the wrong obstetrician, the wrong hospital. The wrong man, for sure. She’d be dragging me to La Leche meetings and I don’t know what all. And she’d for sure rat me out to Mama. And I can’t handle any of that right now. I need time to process, to figure it all out.” She sniffed. “I need this time at the beach with you guys, I really do. I need August like I never needed it before.”

“You got it,” Julia said. “We’re here, and we got your back.”

Ellis went to the sink and began rinsing out the wine glasses. “Listen, Dorie,” she began, “when does school start back?”

Dorie grimaced. “Don’t remind me. The week after Labor Day. Teachers report back the Thursday before, for preplanning.”

“That’s only a little over three weeks,” Julia pointed out. “Are you sure you’re up to going back to work at Our Lady of Angels? Especially with Stephen working there too?”

“I’ve got to,” Dorie said dully. “I signed a contract. Anyway, I need the money, and I’m gonna need the medical benefits, at least until after the baby comes.”

“Doesn’t Stephen have the same medical benefits?” Ellis asked. “Wouldn’t you be covered under his policy, assuming you didn’t go back to OLA?”

“I don’t know,” Dorie admitted. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m not quitting my job. I love teaching the girls, I really do. The money’s not great, but that’s not the point.”

“It will be, if you’re going to be a single mother,” Julia said. “Don’t forget, you’ll have to pay for day care, and a hundred other things. And what about a place to live? What will you do about the house? Do you think Stephen will let you keep it?”

Dorie clapped her hands over her ears. She rocked back and forth in her chair. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she singsonged. “I just freakin’ don’t know. I only know I hate Stephen. Hate. Hate. Hate.”

“I hate him too,” Ellis said, yawning.

“I hate him more than both of you,” Julia declared. “I know. Let’s fire up the van, drive over to his place, and key his car.”

“No,” Ellis said, taking up the challenge. “Let’s egg his house and TP it.”

“Or key the car, egg the car, and TP his house
and
his car,” Dorie countered, getting into the spirit of things. “Remember when we did that to Amber Peek, senior year, after she started spreading rumors that Julia was pregnant right before Christmas break?”

“I just remember my daddy made me pay for a whole new paint job for that piece-of-crap Tercel of hers when we got caught,” Ellis said.

“It was worth it though,” Dorie said. “Amber Peek. That lying bitch.”

They were both looking at Julia now, waiting for her to chime in with her own diatribe against her mortal enemy, Amber Peek.

“Good old Amber,” Julia said. “She was a bitch, and a sneak, and I’m glad you guys screwed up her car. But she wasn’t lying. Not that time. I really was pregnant, you know.”

17

Ellis and Dorie sat back in their chairs, too stunned to speak.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Julia said shakily. “I wanted to tell you. But my mother was so mortified … so … ashamed. She made me swear I’d keep it a secret. I almost told you, that night after her funeral, back at the house, but I couldn’t do it. Not in her house. Not after I promised.”

Finally Ellis picked up the discarded deck of cards. She began laying out a hand of solitaire.

“Why tell us now?” she asked.

“I need to,” Julia said. “I’ve needed to tell you for a long time. But I was afraid of what you’d think of me.”

“Oh, Julia,” Dorie said softly. “Julia.”

Ellis wrinkled her brow. “But … you didn’t even have a boyfriend your senior year.”

Julia grinned the old Julia grin. “Not one you guys knew about. You wouldn’t have approved. He was an army Ranger, stationed at the air base at Hunter. We met at an oyster roast. He asked me out, I went. He was cute, even with those awful haircuts they made the guys get, and I could tell he was totally smitten.”

“Did he have a name?” Ellis asked, annoyed, all these years later, that Julia had managed to conceal such a huge secret.

“Jack,” Julia said. “His name was Jack, he was twenty years old, and the thing I liked best about him was that he was a good half-a-head taller than me—which sealed the deal. I mean, I was six feet tall, so there weren’t a lot of guys out there that I could look up to. We went out exactly four times before we had sex.”

“He forced you!” Dorie cried. “Raped you?”

“Nope,” Julia said. “He was nice. Horny, but nice. I wanted to. I was eighteen years old, and I’d decided I didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. After all,” she said, nodding at Dorie, “you’d already done the deed, the summer before we were seniors. And as far as I knew, Ellis might never pop her cherry. So I just decided to go for it.”

“And?” Ellis said, trying to decide how she felt about being regarded as a potential nun.

“He was sweet,” Julia said, her face softening at the memory. “Although I don’t think he had a hell of a lot more experience than I did. There were no fireworks—but then again, no nightmares, either. Anway, you know that crap we used to hear about how nobody ever gets knocked up the first time they do it? Turns out, it really is crap.”

“You had unprotected sex, with an army Ranger?” Dorie said, her eyes widening. “You could have gotten AIDS. Or syphilis.”

“It wasn’t totally unprotected. He had a Trojan, although as it turned out, it must have been a really old Trojan. I didn’t get an STD. I just got pregnant.”

“Oh. My. God.” Ellis swept the cards into a pile. “Julia, how did you manage to keep it secret? We never had a clue. Ever. Not even when Amber Peek started running her mouth.”

“The baby?” Dorie guessed. “At Christmas, when you had your appendix out? That’s what really happened?”

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Julia said. “When I missed my first period, I didn’t think anything of it. You guys remember, I never had normal periods. But when I skipped my second one, I knew. But I just couldn’
t bring myself to tell my parents. It would have killed them. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. The last day before Christmas break, right after my chemistry final, I’d gone to the bathroom. My stomach was killing me. I was so damned ignorant, I just thought that was part of being pregnant. I didn’t tell you guys, I didn’t tell anybody. I was bleeding. There was so much blood, I was terrified. I remember, I bought a Kotex from the vending machine in the bathroom, and I went straight home.”

“You were hemorrhaging?” Ellis asked.

“The bleeding slowed down after a while, but I had these godawful cramps,” Julia said. “I was curled up in bed and Mama just happened to walk by my bedroom door. She heard me moaning and crying, came in, and I was in so much pain, I couldn’t even speak. But I had a fever, like 102 degrees, and then she saw the blood on my sheets, and she freaked out.

“Loaded me in her Cadillac and carried me straight to the emergency room at Saint Joseph’s, where the doctor, who just happened to be a woman in Mama’s Bunco club, had to break the news that her daughter, still dressed in her Catholic girl’s school uniform, was not suffering from a ruptured appendix, as Mama insisted, but rather, that I had an ectopic pregnancy.”

“You could have died,” Dorie said solemnly.

“Right at that moment, I wished I had,” Julia said. “If you’d seen the look on Mama’s face when I had to admit that yes, I really was pregnant. It was like she’d been punched in the stomach.”

“What … what did they do?” Dorie asked. “I’m sorry, I know this is hideous to ask, but I can’t not.”

“It’s all right,” Julia said, shrugging. “After all, I made you bare your soul, didn’t I? Anyway, they did laparoscopic surgery. Right before they sent me home from the hospital, the doctor, Mama’s friend, came in to see me. She told me the embryo had attached itself to the wall of my fallopian tube, which caused the tube to rupture, and that it never would have been a viable pregnancy. She also gave me a prescription for the pill, bless her heart.”

“What about your parents?” Ellis asked. “How were they with it?”

“As far as Daddy knew, I really did have my appendix out,” Julia said. “
In the car on the way home from the hospital, Mama just told me she was disappointed in me. Jesus! Disappointed! Talk about a guilt trip. It was ten times worse than being screamed at or punished.”

Dorie shuddered. “I don’t want to think about how Phyllis would have handled that when I was eighteen. I don’t even want to think about how she’ll handle my pregnancy now, and I’m thirty-five and haven’t lived at home in fifteen years.”

“Mama said that it was Our Lady of Angels who intervened on my behalf and saved my life. I really could have bled out and died, probably would have if she hadn’t barged into my room. Mama pointed out that she wasn’t even supposed to be home that afternoon, she was supposed to go Christmas shopping, but something made her decide to cancel and stay home. Every year after that, right up until she got too sick to leave the house, she went to Mass in the chapel at OLA on December twelfth, the anniversary of the day I went to the hospital, to leave a wreath of flowers on the statue of Our Lady.”

“Your mama was a saint,” Dorie said, shaking her head. “I hope you know that.”

“I do,” Julia said, her lower lip trembling. “You don’t know how much I miss her.”

Ellis raised her wine glass in a toast. “To Catherine Capelli. God rest her soul. And to hell with Amber Peek!”

Julia raised her own glass, and Dorie, lacking one, raised her Fudgsicle stick.

*   *   *

Later, after they’d pushed a sleepy Dorie off to bed, Julia and Ellis went back to the kitchen to clean up. By unspoken agreement, Julia put away the dishes and Ellis swept the floors. “I’m turning in,” Julia said finally, draping the dish towel over the back of the kitchen door. “All this emotional upheaval just wears me out.”

“Can you stand one more question? I swear, after this, I won’t bring it up again,” Ellis said.

“I think I know what you’re gonna ask. Jack, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Ellis said. “Did you ever tell him? Or even see him again?”

“No, and no. He got shipped off to paratrooper school at the end of October, right around the time I missed my first period. He wrote me a couple times, and I wrote back once, but we were just kids. He wanted me to come see him, but I had school, and anyway, in my case, absence didn’t make the heart grow fonder. As for telling him about the pregnancy—no, I never did. I couldn’t even really admit it to myself, let alone him. I was all about denial.”

Ellis touched Julia’s shoulder lightly. “That was a hell of a secret to keep all these years. Does Booker even know?”

“No,” Julia said sharply. “I told you, aside from my mother—and that bitch Amber Peek, who only found out because her cousin happened to be in the emergency room with a broken wrist the night I was there—nobody knew.”

“Will you tell him now, since you’ve told us?”

Julia sighed. “Probably. He wouldn’t care so much about the pregnancy thing, Booker’s been around. The thing is, he wants kids. And I’m not even sure I can have a baby.”

“Oh yeah,” Ellis said, her eyes widening. “What does your gynecologist say?”

“I’ve never really asked,” Julia admitted. “At the time, they told me lots of women get pregnant and have babies after having an ectopic pregnancy, even with only one good tube, like I have. All these years, it’s never really been an issue. I had a great career, I’d seen my mother drowning in babies and diapers, and I told myself that was never gonna happen to me.”

“But now?”

“Who knows?” Julia said lightly. “Anyway, I really am going to bed now. G’night, Ellie-Belly.”

When Julia was gone, Ellis wandered aimlessly around the house. She put the deck of cards back in their box, pushed chairs under the dining room table, straightened sofa cushions. She tried the television again, but the cable was still out. She got out her phone for the first time in hours, checking to see if she had any e-mails or missed calls.

Nothing. She’d halfway been hoping for an e-mail from Mr. Culpepper. She smiled at the memory of his last message, and wondered again just how old Mr. Culpepper might be. Not that it mattered.

It was late, well past midnight, but she was oddly restless. The bookshelves by the fireplace were full of paperbacks. She trailed her fingertips across their spines—mostly romances, mysteries, and thrillers. She chose a battered Kathleen Woodiwiss paperback,
The Flame and the Flower,
smiling at the memory of how she and Julia had swiped Julia’s mother’s copy of the same book. They’d been what, thirteen? They’d taken the book out to the Capellis’ boathouse and read it by flashlight, giggling over the smutty parts.

Ellis went upstairs and put on her pajamas. The air in the room was hot and still. She turned on the ceiling fan and dialed down the thermostat on the window air-conditioning unit. She climbed into bed, and switched on the old-fashioned white hobnail glass lamp on her bedside table. Its shade was yellowed and coated with dust, and the
bulb threw off a tiny, tired glow of orangish light. Not that it mattered. She was too keyed up to settle down with a book. She turned off the light and willed herself to sleep.