Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994

But Julie did like getting drunk, and because of this, I had Randy buy whatever she wanted, and that was almost never beer or wine. Julie wanted only whiskey mixed with a little Coca-Cola. She mixed it in favor of the whiskey, and she would drink until she couldn’t walk.

We almost always kept a full bottle of Canadian Mist in a hollow log near the little stream where we picnicked, and if we stayed there long, I could count on Julie getting drunk. I don’t know why I went along with her heavy drinking, but I do know she would have dropped me quickly if I hadn’t. And while I certainly wasn’t in love with her, I liked being with her, mostly.

Once, when Julie was sober, I showed her the patch of wild strawberries I’d discovered three years earlier. They weren’t more than a quarter mile from the woods where we picnicked, near a swampy area where few people found reason to go.

Even in the country, wild strawberry patches were rare, and this was only the second patch I’d found. It was maybe fifteen yards long and four yards wide, but held hundreds of plants. Only about three inches high, the plants grew very close together, and you had to move the leaves aside to find the strawberries. No one knew of this strawberry patch except me, and it was a secret I guarded closely.

But eventually, after checking to be certain the strawberries were ripe, I showed it to Julie. Together we sat and plucked the small, red, sweet strawberries from the plants and popped them into our mouths. Julie’s eyes widened in surprise as she tasted the first one, and she began picking them so fast I feared she would go through the whole patch.

Wanting to save a few strawberries for another day, I at last stopped her from eating, but only by promising to have Randy buy a fresh bottle of Canadian Mist. He drove to a liquor store just inside the city limits of New Castle and bought two bottles, one for our immediate usage, and a fresh one for the hollow log, though a partial bottle was already there.

Randy never charged anything extra for buying us the whiskey, and he wouldn’t buy it for anyone else. We’d been friends for several years, and I never had to ask him twice. I just told him what we needed, gave him the money, and within an hour I had whiskey in hand.

It was just a week later, with nearly all the ripe strawberries gone, but with a couple of hundred only a few days from ripening, when Julie told me she was pregnant. She told me at the worst possible time, and in the worst possible way.

You couldn’t walk through the strawberry patch without smashing a lot of plants, and the ones near the middle were almost impossible to reach. I was on hands and knees, my weight resting on the fingertips of my left hand, each finger carefully placed so it wouldn’t smash a plant. With my right hand I was reaching as far into the patch as possible, looking for ripe strawberries we’d missed. I found a couple of dozen.

Julie was sitting on the grass a few feet away, her knees drawn up to her chin. She took the ripe strawberries as I found them, eating a couple and dropping the others into an empty glass. Deciding I’d found most of the ripe strawberries within reach, I moved back beside Julie and brushed my hands together, then reached into the glass for a ripe strawberry.

I held the glass out to Julie and she took a strawberry, but rather than eating it she rolled it around in the palm of her hand, watching as it turned this way and that. Then she looked at me and said, “Jim, I’m pregnant.”

She blurted it out just like that. No warning, no softening of the blow. I guess it kind of shocked me or something, because for a time I just looked at her, wondering if she was kidding, and what I should say if she wasn’t. “I thought you were on the pill,” I finally said. “You can’t get pregnant on the pill.”

“Yes you can,” she said. “But I didn’t. I... I stopped taking the pill a couple of months ago. It was messing me up, so I stopped taking it.”

“God, why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

A thought came to mind. “Did you want to get pregnant? Is that why you stopped taking the pill?”

“It was messing me up. But I don’t know, maybe I did want to get pregnant. Is that so terrible?”

My mind seemed somehow blank, and the thoughts that came in just bounced around without staying long enough to read. Almost without realizing it, I moved back over to the strawberry patch and began looking for ripe strawberries. Julie was still talking, but the words didn’t seem to get past my ears.

I found a ripe strawberry, ate it, found another and another, popped each into my mouth, and continued to look for more. Suddenly, Julie was standing in front of me, her feet in the middle of the strawberries, a dozen delicate plants crushed beneath each shoe.

Jumping to my feet, I grabbed Julie’s arm and pulled her away from the strawberries. “What are you doing?” I yelled. “You have to be careful. You don’t know how easy it is to kill strawberry plants.”

Julie jerked her arm free and ran to the middle of the strawberry patch. There she began to kick at the ground with first one foot, then the other. Her shoes ripped the fragile plants from the ground, sent plants and dirt and unripe strawberries flying through the air. “I don’t care how easy strawberry plants are to kill,” she screamed. “I tell you I’m pregnant, and all you can do is think about your damned strawberries.”

I honestly don’t remember the next couple of minutes. When I came to my senses Julie was on the ground and I was straddling her, slapping her face, first with the palm of my hand, then with the back. Her nose was bleeding a little and both cheeks were red. The right cheek was beginning to bruise.

Even when I stopped hitting her, Julie kept screaming. She managed to pull one arm free and began flailing at me with a small fist. I rolled off her, but for a minute she kept hitting me. Then she rolled away. For several minutes neither of us said anything.

“I need a drink,” Julie said at last. “I’m going back to get a drink.”

She stood up and walked back toward the hollow log. It was a quarter mile from the strawberry patch, and I let her walk half the distance before following. Julie was already sitting down and drinking when I arrived. She hadn’t bothered to mix the whiskey with Coca-Cola, but simply turned the bottle up and drank deeply.

“You’re a bastard,” she said. “I tell you I’m pregnant, and all you do is get mad because I stepped on a few stupid plants. If you were any kind of man you’d ask me to marry you. You’d think about the baby, even if you don’t care about me.”

The fifth of whiskey Julie held was a little less than half full, but another was tucked back in the log, and I wondered if she would get to the second bottle before passing out. She drank the whiskey in long, deep swallows, coughing only a little. I could see her eyes begin to come unfocused, and hear the slur of her words.

“You’re a shombich,” she said. “But I’ll show you. I’ll shue you, by God. I’ll make you pay through the noshe for this baby.”

Julie finished the whiskey in the first bottle, and by then she was so drunk she couldn’t begin to stand up. Nor could she get the second bottle opened. A train whistle sounded in the distance, sounding lonesome. It was nearly dark. It wasn’t quite harvest season yet, but a train came through every two or three hours.

Julie finished the first bottle. She was too drunk to stand up, too drunk even to walk, but she was still conscious. I opened the second fifth and held it to her mouth, tipping her head back. She drank, coughed, choked. I let her breathe a minute, then tilted her head back again. Somewhere along the line she passed out. I poured more whiskey down her throat.