Just A Little Bit Pregnant

No traditional family photos were on display, but two framed photographs from news stories and three press awards crowded the bit of wall that showed between file cabinets.

Someone down the hall dropped something large and metallic. The resounding clatter drowned out all the other noises, but Jacy didn’t notice. Like anyone accustomed to living with a large, noisy family, she was good at tuning the rest out. Surrounded by the clutter of her crowded cubbyhole, she was intent on her story.

The chaos and demands of Jacy’s job soothed her. After a miserable night she’d plunged into work that morning the way an Olympic swimmer dives into a pool—with the abandon and discipline of total commitment. She knew who she was here at the paper, what she wanted.

It wasn’t a major story. Yesterday a man died of stab wounds. In a city like Houston, death was as commonplace as births, weddings and brutality. But honor required Jacy to treat every article as if it were destined for the front page—no slacking, no skimping.

As soon as she finished the story she sent it, with a few swift keystrokes, to her editor’s desk for approval. Her chair creaked as she leaned back in it.

Damn, she was tired. She slipped her sandals off and pulled her legs up onto the chair under the gauzy cover of her loose sundress. Jacy had figured out a couple years ago that an unstructured dress was the coolest thing she could wear in the summer, and she seldom put anything else on from June to the end of September.

She laid her head on her upraised knees for a moment, and sighed. It was close to seven o’clock and she’d been on her feet nearly all day, after getting precious little sleep last night.

“Hey, what are you doing, sleeping on the job?” a cheerful voice asked.

Jacy raised her head. “One of these days,” she observed, “that cheeriness is going to get you killed.”

Nannette Tompkins grinned and held out a folder. “Records said you wanted this, and I offered to trot it up to you. You have any more of those chocolate-covered raisins?”

Jacy sighed as she took the folder from her friend. Nan was cute. There was no other word for it. She was short and curvy, with frizzy red hair, freckles and a smile to rival the young Sally Field’s. “I’m not up for chitchat now, okay?”

“That was obvious from the moment you showed up this morning, growling at everyone. Which is why I offered to bring this file up.” She came around to Jacy’s side of the desk and opened the bottom drawer. “You talk and I’ll listen.”

“Go away, Gidget.”

“Insults roll off me like water. Oh, here they are.” She retrieved what was left of Jacy’s stash of chocolate-covered raisins. “Now,” she said, sitting in the one extra chair the tiny office boasted, “tell Mama what’s wrong. It has something to do with that hunk of a cop you went out with a couple months ago, doesn’t it?”

“Nothing’s wrong.” Since Nan was as shrewd as she was cute, Jacy had little hope of being believed.

Both of Nan’s eyebrows went up. “Okay.” She tossed a few raisins into her mouth, tilted the chair back and propped her feet on Jacy’s desk. “Nothing’s wrong. You’ve just got the world’s worst case of PMS and felt like reading some obituaries and it’s pure coincidence that the one Records sent you belongs to Rasmussin’s wife.”

Jacy flushed. “Dammit, Nan, you had no business—”

“I care,” Nan interrupted, and for once there was no smile on her round face. “Whether that gives me a right to snoop or not we can argue about later. Now tell me what’s up.”

Jacy sighed, leaned back in her chair and opened the folder. “I’m pregnant.”

Nan’s feet came down with a thud. “You’re what!”

“You heard me,” Jacy muttered. The folder held two sheets of the slick, smeary paper used in the microfilm machine at the morgue, and a glossy photograph. One of the sheets was a copy of an article from a few years ago. The other was an obituary.

“It’s his? Rasmussin’s?”

“Yeah.” Jacy scanned the article. It read:

Three people were killed today when a westbound car crossed the center lane of the Central Expressway and crashed head-on into oncoming traffic.

“Have you told him?”

“Yeah.” The article added that the driver of the westbound car had been drinking and was ruled dead at the scene. His victims hadn’t been so lucky. One hemorrhaged to death before the ambulance arrived. The other died at the hospital during emergency surgery.

Allison Rasmussin was the one who died in surgery.

“Well? What did he say?”

Jacy took out the photo and tossed the folder on her desk. “He wanted to know why I thought it was his.”

Nan used some words that would have gotten Gidget’s mouth washed out with soap.

Jacy smiled for the first time. “Look,” she said, feeling the strain of the long day settle around her, “I know you mean well, but I need to sort some things out before I talk about it, okay?”

If one of the cubs from the city-hall beat hadn’t stuck his head in the door, looking for Nan, Jacy might not have prevailed. But between the rumor of a city councilman’s arrest for driving while intoxicated and Jacy’s smiling plea for time, Nan was persuaded to leave.

Jacy’s smile faded as soon as she was alone again. She looked at the picture in her hand. It was a duplicate of the one on Tom’s desk, she realized. Allison Rasmussin still smiled shyly out at the world from it, a delicate Dresden lady in a blue-and-white checked dress.

A pretty woman, Jacy thought—not beautiful, or especially striking. Just pretty. Had she been as delicate as she looked? Had she gone to college, drunk beer, crammed for exams, entered a profession? What had she dreamed, longed for, resented?

Had she loved her husband as much as he still loved her three years after her death?

When Jacy’s phone buzzed she dropped the picture on top of the folder, relieved to be dragged away from a subject she kept worrying like a sore tooth. But the interruption wasn’t quite the change of subject she’d hoped for.

Her boss was ready to see her now.

Jacy took a deep breath, trying to clear her weary mind. Tabor wasn’t going to take the news of her pregnancy well.

Theobold Tabor was over sixty but didn’t look it, though the deep grooves along his cheeks suggested his scowl was a frequent fixture. He had long, bony arms and legs, and skin the color of the polished teak cane that leaned against the desk where he sat. Back in the sixties some Klansmen hadn’t approved of the series of articles he’d done on civil rights. They’d taken a baseball bat to his knees.

Jacy respected Tabor more than any other journalist on the face of the planet, and she liked him almost as much as she respected him. At the moment, though, she was considering using his cane to hit him over his very hard head. “It’s none of your business,” she repeated.

“None of my business? You come prancing in here, tell me you need to take maternity leave in a few months and expect me to leave it at that?”

Well, no, she hadn’t expected him to “leave it at that.” That’s why she’d been dreading this discussion. In an office full of professional snoops, Tabor could have won an award, hands down, for being the nosiest. Especially with his friends. “My maternity leave is your business,” she said. “The name of my baby’s father isn’t.”

Indignation faded into sorrow on Tabor’s long face. “I thought we were friends.”

“We are, but—”

“You can’t trust me?” He put the question quietly. With resignation.

Oh, he was good, all right. Jacy rolled her eyes. “You already gave yourself away when you asked if the ‘sorry so-and-so’ was going to marry me.”

“A perfectly reasonable question.”

“I am not going to cater to your medieval ideas by telling you his name. You have no shame. You’d probably call him and tell him he had to marry me or something.” Jacy shuddered. That was all she needed—having Tabor and Tom both telling her she had to marry for her baby’s sake. She’d have to leave the state to get any peace.

“The man should be willing to give his baby a name,” he said firmly.

“I’ve got a name to give my baby. James. I may not know where it came from, but it’s a perfectly good name.”