“You think so?” she said, hopeful.
I felt like a heel as I took her hands. “I know so.”
I saw her relax, so I gave her a hug, then said a quick prayer for God to forgive me for the lying snake that I had become.
29
Paula
I MISSED MY HUSBAND SO much. When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to say, “Neither date nor time is promised, so treasure each day like it’s your last.” I wished that I had listened to those words. I wished that I had not fought over such trivial things. I wished that I hadn’t pushed my husband into the arms of another woman—if I actually had. But most of all, I wished that I had taken my husband’s heart condition seriously. Maybe if I had made sure he kept up his doctor’s visits, they would’ve detected that his heart condition had advanced enough to kill him. Maybe they would’ve put us on notice that he had to change his lifestyle. And maybe he’d still be alive today.
But I couldn’t think like that. Steven used to always say, “Life is what you make it, and you can’t live in a world of maybes.”
As I sat on the foot of our California king bed, my mind drifted back to the first time Steven had uttered those words to me.
I had never cried so much in my whole life. The trash can positioned at my feet was overflowing with balled-up Kleenex. I felt like I had been crying for two weeks.
“I can’t believe I let this happen,” I said for the thousandth time. “Maybe if we had just been more careful . . . Maybe if I hadn’t been over to your place all the time . . .”
Steven had been pacing back and forth in front of me. “It is what it is. And we can’t live in a world of maybes now.”
“I just can’t see myself struggling with a kid.”
He looked sternly at me. “Paula, you didn’t do this alone, so you’re not going to go through this alone.”
His words were so comforting to me and hammered home what a great guy he was. I had never planned to get pregnant. I took my pill religiously. Shoot, I had big dreams. I had recently landed a new part in a stage play, and based on opening weekend’s sales, it looked like we were going to take the show on the road for several weeks. How could I do that if I was pregnant?
“I don’t believe this.”
“We’ve been through this over and over. I thought when I left to go home for the weekend, you were okay with everything,” he replied.
I was, but images of Steven never returning had swamped me all weekend. I kept envisioning his “I need to go back to Houston” as an excuse to leave me and our unborn child. The thought of being a struggling single mother made me sick to my stomach. When he’d walked in my house that evening, I’d burst into tears.
“I told you, everything happens for a reason,” Steven said. We were in the bedroom of my mother’s house, where I was living. Usually, she didn’t play that being-up-in-the-bedroom-with-your-boyfriend mess, but she knew about the pregnancy and knew that Steven and I had serious business to discuss.
“Being somebody’s baby’s mama was not in my life’s plan,” I admitted.
That brought Steven up short. “You’re not going to be my baby’s mama.”
He got down on his knees in front of me and said, “Hopefully, you’re going to be my wife.”
If I hadn’t been sitting down, that surely would’ve knocked me over.
“Wife?” I said. Steven had told me that he’d broken the news of my pregnancy to his parents. Of course, they weren’t happy about it, but he said, like everyone else, they would learn to get over it.
Nowhere in that conversation did he mention marriage.
He fumbled in his pants pocket and pulled out a small ring. “My mom gave me this ring. It’s my grandmother’s ring.” He held it out to me. “It means a lot to me. And I want the mother of my child, the woman I want to be my wife, to have it. I want you to have it. Please say you’ll be my wife.”
The sight of the ring made me want to cry even more. I needed a magnifying glass to see the diamond. When I had dreams of my proposal, they did not include me with a baby in my belly and a microdiamond ring.
“Steven . . . we can’t do this,” I managed to say.
“You can and you will,” my mother said, popping up out of nowhere to come stick her nose in my business.
“Mama, please.”
“No.” She walked in my bedroom and directed her attention at Steven. “I think it’s so admirable what you’re doing. Do you love my daughter?”
He looked at me and then back at her. “Yes.”
“And I know she loves you. And you two are going to do right by this baby. Bring her or him into this world with a mother and a father married and living under the same roof. I didn’t raise you any other way,” she told me firmly.