Standing beside a table tucked in the darkest corner of the bar, Brooke was certain she was about to be sick. She clutched her pen, pressing it into her pad as she tried to ignore the rolling, twisting queasiness in her gut. The symptoms had come out of nowhere, and her first thought was that she probably ate something that didn’t agree with her. She thought about asking to go home, but couldn’t afford to leave work—it was Friday night and the place was packed. It would be her best tip night of the week.
Located in Pioneer Square, the Market had opened a year ago. It wasn’t the cleanest or fanciest place to work—it was dingy and dim, catering less to Seattle’s rampant hipster population and more to the blue-collar, grease-under-their-fingernails crowd. But the owner was nice enough and didn’t try to get Brooke to sleep with him, which in her experience, was an anomaly. In her twenties, she used to apply for jobs at more upscale bars and restaurants, but when she interviewed and the owners saw her list of experience at biker bars and intermittent stints at Applebee’s, they always passed on hiring her. Now thirty-nine, Brooke had accepted a career as a cocktail waitress, taking pride in the fact that after aging out of the foster care system at eighteen, she’d never taken another penny from the state. At times, she worked two, sometimes three different jobs in order to stay afloat, which was fine by her. It could be worse, she always told herself. She could not have a job at all.
Brooke wove her way to the servers’ station at the bar and quickly punched in a ticket for her newest table—two double Jack and Cokes. She turned around, ready to walk the floor and check on her other customers, but then the gorge rose in her throat and she ran to the women’s bathroom, hand over her mouth, barely able to shut the stall door behind her before she was over the toilet and heaving.
What the hell? she thought as she was finally able to stand up, wiping her lips and chin with a handful of toilet paper. She mentally reviewed what she’d eaten that day: a bagel with the last of the cream cheese, and a double cheeseburger off the McDonald’s dollar menu on the way to the bar. It was likely the burger that did it, and Brooke immediately vowed to never again eat a fast-food meal.
She exited the stall and then stood in front of the sink, cupping water in her hand and washing out her mouth as best she could. Smoothing her black curls, she wiped away the mascara smeared beneath her eyes and applied a fresh coat of red lipstick, then popped three Altoids. The door swung open, and her coworker Tanya entered.
“Hey,” Tanya said. “I just delivered your order to table twelve.”
“Thanks,” Brooke said, turning to look at Tanya, a short black woman with a heart-shaped face, a multitude of shoulder-length slender braids, and an enormous rack. “Tits equal tips,” she liked to claim, completely unashamed to exploit her sexuality to make money.
“No problem,” Tanya said, taking a minute to glance in the mirror. She reached into her tight, blue V-necked T-shirt and adjusted her breasts for optimal cleavage exposure. She looked over at Brooke and frowned. “You okay? You look like hell.”
“Think I ate a bad burger,” Brooke said. “I’m fine, now.” After making her ill, her nausea had vanished.
“Hopefully not the kind of burger where you wake up with a baby nine months later,” Tanya said with a grin. Her teeth glowed white against her dark skin.
“Oh, god, no,” Brooke said, but something inside her dropped a few floors at what Tanya’s joke implied. A pregnancy scare was not what her relationship with Ryan needed. They’d met a year ago, when he was newly separated and living on his own, and twelve months later, he had yet to pull the trigger on making the end of his marriage legal. This bothered Brooke less than it might have someone else—when she’d told Tanya about his circumstances, her coworker shook her head and made clucking sounds to indicate her disapproval: “Girl, that man has more baggage than a European vacation. You need to cut him loose.”
But the truth was, Brooke was happy with how things were. Ryan didn’t push her to move in with him and she didn’t ask him where their relationship might be headed. Instead, the two simply kept each other company. They went out for dinner a few times a week, always ending up at his beautifully furnished downtown apartment, which overlooked the glittering lights of Elliott Bay, where they had the kind of passionate, mind-numbing sex that felt as necessary to Brooke as taking a breath. They kept things simple. Uncomplicated. Which was exactly how Brooke liked her relationships to be.
On the days she didn’t see Ryan, she’d read the books she checked out from the library or binge-watch Scandal or House of Cards on Netflix. She’d go to the grocery store, noting the other shoppers with their big carts piled high with family-size bags of chicken breasts, pot roasts, and bulk packages of hamburger and boxes of macaroni and cheese—purchases that promised loud and happy meals around a dining room table, parents bribing their children with the reward of ice cream if they ate at least three forkfuls of green beans. The kinds of meals Brooke had never had. She’d stand in the frozen food aisle, watching these scenes play out, finding herself wishing that she, too, had grown up with a mother to nag into buying Double Stuf Oreos, Doritos, and pouches of sugary juice. She wished for any kind of mother other than the one who’d given her away.
“See you out there,” Tanya said.
Brooke watched as Tanya spun around and headed back out the door, then a moment later followed her. As she worked the rest of her shift that night, Brooke tried to forget what Tanya had suggested. But after the bar closed and she sat at a table, tallying up her tips, she couldn’t help but count backward to the last time she’d had her period—five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight weeks. She was late. Panic flooded her body in a cold rush, causing her skin to sprout goose bumps.
Calm down, she told herself. It could be anything. It could be stress. It could just be her, being irregular.
But even so, after she said good-bye to Tanya and Fred, the bartender, she drove toward her studio apartment on Capitol Hill, a voice inside her head reminding her that she was never irregular. She was on the Pill, but there were a few times this summer when she’d forgotten to take it and had to double up the next morning. If she was carrying Ryan’s baby, she had to know. And so, on her way home from the bar, she stopped at a twenty-four-hour Walgreens and bought two early-detection pregnancy tests, along with a box of saltine crackers and a six-pack of ginger ale, in case she started to feel queasy again.
As she made her way back to her car, Brooke thought about the night Ryan first came into the bar and sat down at one of her tables with a group of his employees. Brooke had found herself doing a double take when she saw him, appreciating the strong angles of his jaw—the ruddy, lined map of his face. He had light brown hair, brown eyes, and a mischievous smile that hinted at a good sense of humor. She was attracted to him immediately.
“Can I get you another drink?” she asked him after he’d already had two. She lifted her eyebrows and put one of her hands on her jutted-out hip.
“No, thanks,” Ryan said. “But when can I buy one for you?” The line could have come off as cheesy, but he spoke the words with such confidence, she found herself laughing and giving him her number.
They went out the next night she had off from work. From the beginning, he was up front about the fact that he and Michelle were still married, but only in name. “Before I finally left, we hadn’t slept in the same bed for five years,” he told her on their first date. He took her to the Metropolitan Grill, a landmark restaurant where the steaks were legendary, and the bottle of wine Ryan ordered cost more than Brooke’s monthly grocery budget.
“That’s awful,” Brooke said, wondering why people bothered to get married at all, if fifty percent of those couples ended up hating each other, fighting over who got to keep their CD collection.
“She wants everything,” he continued. “Half of our retirement and half the business, plus child support and spousal maintenance. I’d have to pay her seven figures to buy her out, then close to ten thousand a month. I’ve worked too hard for too long to just hand it all over to her.”
“I don’t blame you.” Brooke knew that other women might be bothered by Ryan discussing his almost-ex on their first date, feeling like it was in bad taste, but Brooke didn’t mind. In fact, she appreciated knowing exactly where Ryan was coming from. It made her certain he wouldn’t ask more of her than she was able to give.
As their dinner progressed, Brooke learned that Ryan was forty-five, and the owner of one of the largest contracting firms in Seattle, running multiple crews on various important construction projects around the city. She admired the fact that he was self-made—that he hadn’t been handed his company, he’d built it on his own, from the ground up. He was driven and passionate. She told herself her attraction to him didn’t have anything to do with his money—though as they began to spend more time together, she had to admit that she enjoyed the luxuries it afforded them. They never drank anything less than a hundred-dollar bottle of champagne, and he hired an Uber to drive her back to her apartment at the end of the night if she didn’t have her own car there. She liked the way that he laughed; she liked his handsome face and strong body—musculature chiseled by long hours of physical labor. He told her he was mesmerized by the combination of her black hair and violet eyes; he said her pale skin felt like silk. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he always whispered when he slowly stripped her clothes from her body, and Brooke let herself believe him. The way he kissed her felt like a form of worship, and the intensity of their lovemaking—the escape it gave her—surpassed anything she’d ever experienced before. She couldn’t get enough.
Still, he was married, and his very expensive divorce lawyer advised him to keep their relationship on the down-low, and not to introduce Brooke to his sons, for fear that Michelle would find a way to use Brooke against him in court. All of this was fine with Brooke. She never planned anything for more than a few weeks ahead.
A pregnancy would change all of that. A baby would change everything.
Brooke found a parking spot on the street near her building and quickly made her way into the old brick house that had been converted into six small studios. Once inside, she headed down the dimly lit stairwell and unlocked the door to her basement unit. Clutching the Walgreens white plastic bag, she flicked on a lamp and kicked off her shoes, looking around the place she had lived in for the past five years. The room was a perfect square, painted the palest shade of yellow Brooke could find to help brighten it. Her bed, which was really just a queen-size mattress and box spring on the floor, rested against the wall opposite the door, and her tiny kitchenette was to her left. All her clothes were in an old dresser she’d found at Goodwill for ten bucks; she’d painted it periwinkle blue to match the blankets and fluffy pillows on her bed. Over in the corner was the bathroom, a space barely big enough to fit a stall shower, toilet, and sink, which was where Brooke immediately headed, taking one of the pregnancy tests with her.
She opened the box, carefully reading the instructions, which told her she should perform the test first thing in the morning. It was almost three a.m. Does that count? she wondered, and then decided she didn’t care. She needed to know if she was pregnant, and she needed to know now.
She took the test, washed her hands, and left the bathroom, only to pace in the other room. Please, please, please, she begged God, or the Universe, or whatever powers were out there. Let it be negative. Brooke had promised herself that if she ever did get pregnant, it would be only when she was completely secure in her decision to bring a child into the world. Her baby would never think she wasn’t wanted, which was the only conclusion Brooke had ever come to about herself. Why else, after four years spent raising her, would her mother have given her up?
Her gut clenched, as it always did when she allowed herself to think about the woman who brought her into the world. She remembered the musty scent in her mother’s car, the pitch-black nights, and the cold, hungry mornings. She remembered crying. She remembered being scared and alone.
And there it was—her mother’s voice inside her head, playing like a record with a needle stuck in a groove: I’ll be right back. You wait here. Cloudy images of her mother’s silhouette, walking away. Brooke, wanting to be good, but being scared enough that her teeth ached. Her heart thudded so hard inside her chest that she worried it might explode.
“Damn it,” Brooke muttered, angrily wiping her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. She had more important things to worry about than some stupid girl who left her daughter alone in a car, then left her altogether. A person like that didn’t deserve her tears. Where had her father been all of that time? Why hadn’t he taken better care of them? Was he someone her mother had loved, or was getting pregnant with Brooke an accident with a stranger, just the first of her many mistakes?
She told herself that none of that mattered now. There was no changing any of it. She returned to the bathroom and grabbed the test from where she’d left it on the edge of the sink. Negative, negative, negative, she chanted inside her head, as though she could somehow manifest her desired result. But when she looked down, all she saw was the bright blue plus sign in the middle of the white plastic stick.
Shit. Brooke’s shoulders slumped as she fell back against the wall. After a moment, she straightened, then tossed the test into the garbage. She decided to take the other one, too, just to be sure the results were the same. That there hadn’t been some kind of mistake.
Three minutes later, Brooke had her answer. There was no doubt about it. She was pregnant. And she had no idea what to do.
