“I might get better reception back here,” he said, pointing to his phone.
“You sure will.” Mom still wasn’t over his food comment.
Mina grinned at him as he disappeared, his slippers leaving soft footfalls on the carpet.
“I swear,” she said, sitting back on the couch. “Years of marriage, and it’s like he still hasn’t figured out that I’m touchy when it comes to weight. There are just some things you don’t say to a woman.”
Mina pressed her lips together. There were some things you didn’t say to a man, either, but she’d said them to Chet.
“Sometimes,” she whispered, “we say things we don’t mean.” And sometimes there’s a big cost. “Dad was actually being sweet to you, Mom.”
She smiled a bit. “So he was.”
Her dad had turned on the TV back in his room, and the murmur of it imitated the muddled noise in Mina’s heart. It wouldn’t quiet itself.
“So what’s wrong?” Mom asked.
It wouldn’t do to avoid the question. She’d come over here for that tender love and care, so why not admit it?
But it was the lingering shame of displeasing her mom with her behavior that made it hard to speak right now. Her parents had raised her to be a good girl, and Mina had been wondering about how they would react to her sleeping with another man outside of a committed relationship. It’d been bad enough with Michael.
Yet hadn’t her mom told her she was independent? Hadn’t she sounded as if she respected that, too?
Mina realized that, like Chet, she needed to put her family matters in order once and for all if she was going to go forward.
She steadied herself, then said, “I’m pregnant, Mom.”
The moment her mother put her hands over her mouth and her eyes lit up, Mina broke open with a tiny sob she’d been holding back ever since things had gone to hell with Chet.
“Oh, sweetie!”
Mom hugged her, rocking her back and forth as the tears really started to come.
Pregnancy hormones. But crying was also profound relief, a load off of Mina’s shoulders.
“When are you due?” Mom asked, looking at Mina, wiping the tears from her daughter’s eyes, even as she cried herself.
“In about four months.”
“And…Chet? I assume he’s…”
Mina could only nod while her mom stroked the hair back from her face. She was sobbing now, an obvious signal that things were not going well with the father.
“What happened?” her mom asked softly.
It felt good to have an ally, and Mina told her almost everything—about the night Chet had found out about his illegitimacy, about how they’d gotten together, then closer and closer, until she’d dropped the news on him.
She almost expected her mom to say something about how Mina needed to stop picking guys who didn’t deserve her, but instead, she got something else altogether.
“So when are you two going to patch this up?”
The surety in her mom’s tone made Mina look up and say, “You’re not going to give me ‘the talk’?”
“Like the one you got last time?”
Mina nodded.
Her mom tucked Mina’s hair behind her ear. “Sweetie, Michael was an engaging guy, but he was one of those slackers. There are little details that reveal everything about a man, and when I saw how he loved to be waited on hand and foot and how he disengaged from the family to sit here and watch TV while we’d sit out on the porch with each other… Well, that spoke volumes.” She shook her head. “Chet felt real, though. A mother knows these things.”
Mina almost started crying again.
“Have you talked to him at all?” her mom asked, saving her.
“No. I’ve wanted to call him, but…I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
Mina held up her palms. “What if he’s always going to be angry with me for not trusting him?” Sorrow pushed up through her chest, making her words tangled. “I wouldn’t be able to stand it. It’d be concrete evidence that he never cared that much in the first place. He’s already put me aside, even though he promised to always take care of the baby.”
Mom held Mina’s face in her hands. “Your child deserves every chance you can give him or her. You’ve got to talk to Chet.”
“I know. It’s the most important thing in the world to do, especially for the baby’s sake.” She bit her lip, as if it would hold back everything else she wanted to say, but it didn’t work. “Among other matters, children should never feel as if their parents didn’t want them.”
Empathy changed her mother’s expression. She was obviously thinking about the circumstances of Mina’s birth.