Flowering Judas(65)

“Did she have reason to?” Gregor asked.

Darvelle shrugged. “She thought I was low class. I was low class. Nobody in my family had ever had anything, and nobody was ever going to have anything unless it was me. But she didn’t like me, and she did one of her stupid Charlene things and tried to say that Chester had to give me up if he wanted—I don’t know what, exactly. If he wanted to come home If he didn’t want his family to disown him. Except that I can’t see Charlene disowning any of her children. She’s more the stainless-steel umbilical cord type.”

“That’s an image,” Gregor said.

“Yeah, well,” Darvelle said again. “Anyway, Chester thought he was madly in love with me, but he didn’t want to be separated from his family. That would be understandable, you know, if he loved them, but he didn’t seem to. He seemed to just be worried that he’d never get back with the money. So he came up with this idea that we should get married.”

“And he thought that would help him out with his mother? When his mother didn’t like you?”

“He thought his mother would never give up a grandchild,” Darvelle said. “So his idea was that we should say I was pregnant and that we had to get married, and then even if Charlene didn’t like me, she’d put up with me, because she’d want to be near her grandchild. The problem was that I wasn’t pregnant and I wasn’t going to get pregnant. That was one of the big rules of my life. I didn’t just practice safe sex, I damn near married it. That’s what happened to most of the girls I went to high school with, do you know what I mean? Knocked up and knocked out. I had no intention of having it happen to me.”

“But you told Charlene Morton you were pregnant? What did you think was going to happen when the months went by and you didn’t have a baby?”

“Chester said we’d be married by then and we could just say I’d had a miscarriage,” Darvelle said. “Oh, I know. It’s completely ridiculous. But I was eighteen and I was being stupid, and I went along with it. Chester gave his family the whole story, and then we were invited over for dinner. I kept joking that Charlene was going to poison my soup, but I don’t know if I really was joking. Anyway, we went over there. And I—um, I—well. I wore a little costuming, if you know what I mean.”

“Something under your dress to make you look pregnant?”

“Exactly. And I went over there, and it didn’t work out the way Chester had expected. Charlene was not warming up to the idea of a grandchild. Or at least she wasn’t warming up to the idea of me and a pregnancy wasn’t going to change that. So we had this really uncomfortable dinner and then we left and that would have been the end of it. Except Chester had a better idea.”

“What idea was that?”

“Chester thought that the pregnancy wasn’t going to be enough, but an actual child would be. So at first he tried to convince me to get pregnant for real. And, like I said, I wasn’t having any. Especially not in that situation. I mean, God, can’t you see it? First he talks me into getting pregnant, then I get pregnant, then Charlene wears me down, then he dumps me, then there I am, in exactly the same position my mother was in when she was my age.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Not the best scenario.”

“No, it wasn’t. And when he finally accepted the fact that I wouldn’t do it, he came up with something else. He said he knew where we could buy a baby.”

“What?”

“I know. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that’s what he said. He said he knew where we could buy a baby, and that it wouldn’t be cheap, but it wouldn’t be as expensive as I’d think. And I just blew up. I mean, being pregnant would have been a disaster, but he was talking about jail time—I mean, it’s not legal to sell babies, right? I thought he was out of his mind. So we had this huge enormous fight. And that was the last time I really talked to him.”

“This was what,” Gregor said, “right after the dinner? The next day?”

“Maybe two or three days later.”

“And was that the last time you saw him?”

“Oh, no,” Darvelle said. “We didn’t go out or meet up or anything after that, but we were taking a class together again. English Composition. The one they make everybody take. So I saw him in class toward the end of the week. That was the last time I saw him before he disappeared.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No, not really. He came up and tried to talk to me before class, but I didn’t want to and finally he went away. I don’t know what happened to him after that. I know Charlene is always saying that he disappeared on whatever date it was, but we don’t really know that, none of us. That was the last time I saw him. I think Charlene talked with him on the phone the next night. And that was it.”