"Morning, Ellie!" yelled Mr. Jenkins, waving at her from the pharmacy, located just behind and above the cashier area.
"My name's Eleanora," she said under her breath, smiling cheerfully and waving back. He couldn't hear her from behind the high plexiglass wall that separated the store from the prescription drugs. He'd been calling her Ellie since the day she'd accepted the job, and she didn't have the heart to correct him anymore. His ears turned bright red whenever she did, so she could tell he didn't mean to keep making the mistake.
"Morning, Eleanora," said Kristin, Eleanora's coworker and Mr. Jenkins's youngest daughter.
"Hey, hot stuff," she said, smiling at the sweet-natured redhead. She reminded Eleanora a lot of Evie, and since Kristin was her only real friend in the area, she meant a lot to Eleanora.
"One of us is hot stuff," said Kristin, dropping her eyes to Eleanora's breasts, which strained against her simple light-blue turtleneck shirt, "but it ain't me!"
Eleanora looked down at her chest, noticing how her breasts spilled a little over the cups of her bra, creating two crests of extra boob. She groaned. Further evidence that she needed to lay off the rich dinners.
"I think I need to go on a diet."
"Bet Tom doesn't mind," said Kristin, winking at her friend. "Hey, Dad asked us to restock the feminine hygiene supplies. You want to do it? Or should I?"
"I don't mind," said Eleanora, grabbing the big box of tampons and pads from the counter. "You can work the register."
"Want to have lunch later? We could swing over to the deli and grab sandwiches?"
Eleanora grinned and nodded. "Sure. Sounds good. But stop me if I order anything but Tab and salad."
She headed over to aisle four and knelt on the floor with a price gun, her easy exchange with Kristin making her mind segue to Evie's latest letter from Hong Kong. Evie had definitely made the right choice for her life. She liked working for Mr. and Mrs. Holmes and had definitely fallen in love with the children she was minding. She'd also fallen in love with Hong Kong, which she described with childish delight in every letter-the food, the language, the people, so different from those at home.
Evie had also fallen head-over-heels in love with Van. Not that Eleanora was surprised, but part of her wished she'd been there to see the process of Van and Evie truly falling for each other. And in such a romantic place too. Evie gushed about the harbor lights at night, the clubs where Van took her dancing, and the posh hotel suite where she stayed with him one night a week. She reassured Eleanora that he was taking good care of her, and Eleanora believed her, laughing and crying as she read each letter. She laughed because she was happy for Evie, and cried because she missed her cousin so terribly.
For someone who'd had relatively little family in her life, Eleanora longed for family in an increasingly painful way. She wished that Evie and Van could meet her and Tom for dinner on the weekends, or that when she had big news, she could run to Evie's house and burst into her kitchen to share it. She grieved that she was so alone in the world and that Tom, in standing up for their marriage, was now as alone as she. Where would they go for holidays? What would they tell their children when they asked about aunts, uncles, and grandparents?
Tears welled up in Eleanora's eyes, and she looked down at the tampon box in her hand, running the price gun over the box, and placing it listlessly on the shelf. Her eyes lingered on the box, widening as a thought came together in her head at an alarming speed, bearing an extremely alarming meaning.
Ripping the tampon box back off the shelf, her heart rate tripled as she held it in her trembling hands.
She hadn't bought tampons since December. Since before she had met Tom. Because-oh my God! How did I miss this?-she hadn't had a period since then.
Letting the box drop from her shaking fingers, she counted back. She'd had her period in December, right? Right. She and Evie had been on the same cycle, and she remembered Evie commenting happily that they wouldn't have their periods on New Year's Eve . . . which meant she'd gotten it just before meeting Tom. And she'd met Tom, let's see, one, two, four, six, ohmygod, almost nine weeks ago.
Nine weeks without a period.
She didn't notice that her hands had somehow drifted to her belly, covering it protectively as she put other details together in her head-her occasional dizzy spells, her expanded waistline, her overflowing breasts.
"But we were careful," she whispered. "He always pulled out. Always."
Except, Eleanora was a bright girl, and she knew-as well as anyone else-that even if you were supercareful about pulling out, there was always that small chance that a swimmer or two could get away.
Her eyes welled with tears as she flicked her glance to the nearby pregnancy tests, stood up, and plucked one from the shelf. She hid it under her sweater and beelined for the bathroom, avoiding Kristin.
After she'd peed in a cup, dripped three drops of urine into a test tube, added a chemical included in the test, and shaken it up, she set it back in the test holder and hid it under the sink, in the back corner, behind the extra toilet tissue. In two hours she'd know for sure.
But as she walked back into the store, headed for aisle four, her heart already knew. She was pregnant with Tom's baby-with their first child-and though she was frightened on one hand, her heart swelled with the sort of love she'd reserved heretofore for Tom. A baby that was half him and half her, and all theirs. It was so marvelous, so amazing and miraculous, she gulped over the growing lump in her throat, biting her lip to keep from giggling or crying.
A little Elizabeth, she thought, kneeling back down on the floor. Or a little Barrett.
She'd never met anyone named Barrett, but it sounded very grand, and it seemed only right that their child should be named after Elizabeth Barrett Browning. After all, their mutual love for her poetry had lit the fire of passion between them from the very beginning.
She sat back on the pharmacy carpet, placing her hands tentatively on her still-flat abdomen, and summoned Tom's favorite words by Browning, which he shared with her frequently: You were made perfectly to be loved-and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long.
Yes, thought Eleanora, gently rubbing her tummy. I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long, little baby.
She felt a bewildering, joyful burst of happiness bubble up inside her, spreading from the very depths of her heart to the tips of her fingers and everywhere in between.
She and Tom were going to have a baby.
***
On his lunch break, Tom opened his checkbook, as if waiting a few hours before looking at it again would somehow make a thousand dollars magically appear.
It didn't.
The balance read exactly as it had earlier in the day, after he'd paid their rent and January bills: $708.27. That's what they had. That's all they had.
Tom, who had never lived in the real world, had thought that five thousand dollars would last for months. But he hadn't counted on deposits for the phone, water, and electric service. He hadn't anticipated that even the cheapest furnishings would cost over a thousand dollars, with extra for delivery. How could he have known that when Eleanora complained of sinus pressure and he told her to see a doctor, that it would end up costing over two hundred dollars for the visit and her prescription antibiotics? Not to mention the cost of clothes and groceries, shampoo and deodorant, snow shovels and garbage bags and someone to tote the garbage away. It all cost something. And it added up so quickly, it made Tom's head spin.
The reality was this: living on one thousand dollars a month was only possible if there were no unforeseen expenses, no unpleasant little surprises. One doctor's visit, or transmission problem, or long-distance phone call, could bury the month.
He took a deep breath and sighed, closing the little bankbook and shoving it back inside his desk. It worried him that they had no savings, no recourse should an unexpected expense suddenly appear. And living in Weston didn't exactly afford Tom lucrative opportunities to make more money. It had hurt his pride a little when Eleanora decided to go back to work. Not that he didn't respect women in the workforce-he did. But the women of his social class didn't work much anyway, and they certainly didn't work once they were married. It shamed him that he and Eleanora found themselves in a circumstance wherein her small income was actually helpful.