Stephen King - The Stand

“Frannie, the offer still stands. If you say yes, I can get a couple of rings and be there this afternoon.”

On your bike , she thought, and almost giggled. A giggle would be a horrible, unnecessary thing to do to him, and she covered the phone for a second just to be sure it wasn’t going to escape. She had done more weeping and giggling in the last six days than she had done since she was fifteen and starting to date.

“No, Jess,” she said, and her voice was quite calm.

“I mean it!” he said with startling vehemence, as if he had seen her struggling with laughter.

“I know you do,” she said. “But I’m not ready to get married. I know that about me, Jess. It has nothing to do with you.”

“What about the baby?”

“I’m going to have it.”

“And give it up?”

“I haven’t decided.”

For a moment he was silent and she could hear other voices in other rooms. They had their own problems, she supposed. Baby, the world is a daytime drama. We love our lives, and so we look for the guiding light as we search for tomorrow.

“I wonder about that baby,” Jesse said finally. She really doubted if he did, but it was maybe the only thing he could have said that would cut her. It did.

“Jess—”

“So where are you going?” he asked briskly. “You can’t stay at the Harborside all summer. If you need a place, I can look around in Portland.”

“I’ve got a place.”

“Where, or am I not supposed to ask?”

“You’re not supposed to,” she said, and bit her tongue for not finding a more diplomatic way of saying it.

“Oh,” he said. His voice was queerly flat. Finally he said cautiously, “Can I ask you something and not piss you off, Frannie? Because I really want to know. It’s not a rhetorical question or anything.”

“You can ask,” she agreed warily. Mentally she did gird herself not to be pissed off, because when Jess prefaced something like that, it was usually just before he came out with some hideous and totally unaware piece of chauvinism.

“Don’t I have any rights in this at all?” Jess asked. “Can’t I share the responsibility and the decision?”

For a moment she was pissed off, and then the feeling was gone. Jess was just being Jess, trying to protect his image of himself to himself, the way all thinking people do so they can get to sleep at night. She had always liked him for his intelligence, but in a situation like this, intelligence could be a bore. People like Jess—and herself, too—had been taught all their lives that the good thing to do was commit and be active. Sometimes you had to hurt yourself—and badly—to find out it could be better to lie back in the tall weeds and procrastinate. His toils were kind, but they were still toils. He didn’t want to let her get away.

“Jesse,” she said, “neither of us wanted this baby. We agreed on the pill so the baby, wouldn’t happen. You don’t have any responsibility.”

“But—”

“No, Jess,” she said, quite firmly.

He sighed.

“Will you get in touch when you get settled?”

“I think so.”

“Are you still planning to go back to school?”

“Eventually. I’m going to take the fall semester off. Maybe with something CED.”

“If you need me, Frannie, you know where I’ll be. I’m not running out.”

“I know that, Jesse.”

“If you need dough—”

“Yes.”

“Get in touch. I won’t press you, but… I’ll want to see you.”

“All right, Jess.”

“Goodbye, Fran.”

“Goodbye.”

When she hung up the goodbyes had seemed too final, the conversation unfinished. It struck her why. They had not added “I love you,” and that was a first. It made her sad and she told herself not to be, but the telling didn’t help.

The last call had come around noon, and it was from her father. They had had lunch the day before yesterday, and he told her he was worried about the effect this was having on Carla. She hadn’t come to bed last night; she had spent it in the parlor, poring over the old genealogical records. He had gone in around eleven-thirty to ask her when she was coming up. Her hair had been down, flowing over her shoulders and the bodice of her nightgown, and Peter said she looked wild and not strictly in touch with things. That heavy book was on her lap and she hadn’t even looked up at him, only continued to turn the pages. She said she wasn’t sleepy. She would be up in a while. She had a cold, Peter told her as they sat in a booth at the Corner Lunch, more looking at hamburgers than eating them. The sniffles. When Peter asked her if she would like a glass of hot milk, she didn’t answer at all. He had found her yesterday morning asleep in the chair, the book on her lap.

When she finally woke up she had seemed better, more herself, but her cold was worse. She dismissed the idea of having Dr. Edmonton in, saying it was just a chest cold. She had put Vicks on her chest, and a flannel square of cloth, and she thought her sinuses were clearing already. But Peter hadn’t cared for the way she looked, he told Frannie. Although she refused to let him take her temperature, he thought she was running a couple of degrees of fever.

He had called Fran today just after the first thunderstorm had begun. The clouds, purple and black, had piled up silently over the harbor, and the rain began, at first gentle and then torrential. As they talked she could look out her window and see the lightning stab down at the water beyond the breakwater, and each time it happened there would be a little scratching noise on the wire, like a phonograph needle digging a record.

“She’s in bed today,” Peter said. “She finally agreed to let Tom Edmonton take a look at her.”

“Has he been yet?”

“He just left. He thinks she’s got the flu.”

“Oh, Lord,” Frannie said, closing her eyes. “That’s no joke for a woman her age.”

“No, it isn’t.” He paused. “I told him everything, Frannie. About the baby, about the fight you and Carla had. Tom’s taken care of you since you were a baby yourself, and he keeps his lip buttoned. I wanted to know if that could have caused this. He said no. Flu is flu.”

“Flu made who,” Fran said bleakly.

“Pardon?”

“Never mind,” Fran said. Her father was amazingly broadminded, but an AC/DC fan he was not. “Go on.”

“Well, there’s not much further to go, hon. He said there’s a lot of it around. A particularly nasty breed. It seems to have migrated out of the south, and New York is swamped with it.”

“But sleeping in the parlor all night—” she began doubtfully.

“Actually, he said being in an upright position was probably better for her lungs and her bronchial tubes. He didn’t say anything else, but Alberta Edmonton belongs to all the organizations Carla belongs to, so he didn’t have to. Both of us knew she’s been inviting something like this, Fran. She’s president of the Town Historical Committee, she’s spending twenty hours a week in the library, she’s secretary of the Women’s Club and the Lovers of Literature Club, she’s been running the March of Dimes here in town since before Fred died, and last winter she took on the Heart Fund, for good measure. On top of all that she’s been trying to drum up interest in a Southern Maine Genealogical Society. She’s run down, worn out. And that’s part of the reason she blew up at you. All Edmonton said was that she had the welcome mat out for the first evil germ that passed her way. That’s all he had to say. Frannie, she’s getting old and she doesn’t want to. She’s been working harder than I have.”

“How sick is she, Daddy?”

“She’s in bed, drinking juice and taking the pills that Tom prescribed. I took the day off, and Mrs. Halliday is going to come in and sit with her tomorrow. She wants Mrs. Halliday so they can work out an agenda for the July meeting of the Historical Society.” He sighed windily and lightning scratched the wire again. “I sometimes think she wants to die in harness.”