Miriam Toews - A Boy of Good Breeding

Lorna laughed. “Are you happy?” she asked. He was happy, he was thrilled. It had never occurred to him that he could make a woman pregnant, especially not a beautiful woman he really loved and wanted to live with for the rest of his life. He was happy, all right.

“Yes, Lorna, I’m happy,” he said, smiling. Trying to smile. “I’m happy.” And then he added, “Are you?”

Lorna nodded. “I think so,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I am.”

“Amazing,” he said.

“The doctor told me it’s the size of my thumbnail,” said Lorna.

“Really, wow,” said Hosea. “Let me see your thumb.” She held it up and he looked at it closely. He pulled her thumb to his lips and kissed it.

“But the thing is,” she said, holding out her thumb, “the thing is, Hosea, it’s got to be different.”

“How do you mean?” Hosea stopped kissing her thumb and held her hand in his lap.

“I’m just not gonna fool around anymore, Hosea. I’m too old for that and so are you. I’m not gonna date you like a teenager or have some kind of long-distance love affair with you when I’m pregnant with your kid. Forget it.”

“Okay,” said Hosea, “I know. I know what you mean, and things will change. You’re going to move in with me and we’ll be happy, we’ll be a family, we’ll all live together right here in Algren. We have a school, there’s a park, okay? Okay, Lorna?” Hosea smiled and opened his eyes wide.

“Today, Hosea,” said Lorna. “As of today I’m living here. If you can’t make that commitment, knowing we’re having a baby, and everything else — you know we’re not kids, you know we’re not getting any younger — then I don’t know. Then I just don’t know. Basically, I think, it would just be over. I’m not gonna raise a kid with you if you can’t make one commitment. Then I might not even have it.”

Hosea let go of Lorna’s hand and reached for the front of his shirt.

“Don’t,” said Lorna. “Don’t do that. Just deal with this, okay? I don’t mean for this to be an ultimatum, Hosea, I hate ultimatums, but it’s just at that point where we have to, where you have to, make a decision. Maybe I’m just an idiot, but I thought that when you said you had stuff to talk to me about, on the phone before, that you were gonna pop the big question, ask me to marry you or whatever, at least move in with you. That’s what I thought you were going to say. So what? Were you? What did you want to talk about?”

“I just need you to trust me,” said Hosea.

“You need me to trust you?” said Lorna.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“No,” said Lorna. “You need to trust me, you need to trust yourself. I do trust you. Why the hell do you think I’m here right now? Why the hell do you think I keep coming back to you time after time? Why are you so afraid of living with me? Because it might not work out? Because I’ll become more real to you? Because you’ll not have a reason to feel sorry for yourself, all alone? Why? I don’t understand, Hosea. Is there somebody else? Are you seeing somebody else?”

“God, no,” said Hosea. “I have a plan, and it’s very important to me, and if you just wait for three weeks, it’ll be over, and my life, my whole life, will be yours, and the baby’s. Please understand, Lorna, please don’t leave me …”

“Tell me what your plan is,” said Lorna. “Tell me what it is, and we’ll see.” She moved behind Hosea and stroked his hair and rubbed his back. “Tell me,” she said. “C’mon, Hosea.”

Hosea turned around to face her and he put his hands on her waist. “I want to see my father,” he said. “I want to see what he looks like. I want to talk to him. I want to see if I’m like him at all. I want him to see my town.”

“Hosea,” said Lorna, “who is your father?”

Hosea cleared his throat. “John Baert, I think. My mother told me that, anyway.”

“You don’t mean the Prime Minister, do you?” Lorna smiled.

Hosea nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the one.”

Max and Knute said good-bye on the street with a high-five in slow motion, their hands clasped together for a couple of seconds reaching for the sky and everything else unattainable, and then they smiled at each other and went their separate ways.

When Knute got home, Dory was still up. She had her SoHo T-shirt on and Tom’s sweats and she was steaming the wallpaper in the dining room with a kettle and tearing at it with a plastic scraper.

“Mom,” Knute whispered. “What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”

“Yes, Knutie,” she said, “I made that observation myself. What does it look like I’m doing?” She hadn’t taken her eyes off the wallpaper.

“You’re gonna take out the whole wall, not just the paper, if you keep banging at it like that,” said Knute.

“Thank-you for that,” Dory said. “It might be a good idea.”

“Well,” Knute yawned, “this is kind of strange. Why don’t you go to bed and finish it in the morning? Or I could help you after work tomorrow.”

“Where were you?” asked Dory, her eyes still fixed on the wall. Knute paused and thought, To hell with it, she already knows.

“With Max,” she said. She moved the kettle closer to the wall.

“I see,” said Dory. Her lower lip started to tremble.

“Oh, Mom,” said Knute. “It’s not that big a deal.” Dory nodded and blinked a few times. “It’s really not.”

“I don’t …” Dory began.

“I know,” said Knute. “Don’t worry.” Dory looked at her and smiled, sadly, and wiped the sweat off her nose with the bottom of her T-shirt.

“Do you remember Candace Wheeler?” she asked.

“Candace Wheeler,” said Knute. “Candace Wheeler. No, I don’t. Why?” Knute already knew it would be something terrible, maybe a pitchfork through her cheek or flesh-eating disease.

“She had to have a C-section in the city,” said Dory.

“That’s too bad,” said Knute, thinking it could have been a lot worse. She wanted to go to bed. She wanted to dream of Max and their nowhere relationship before the sun rose and ruined everything.

“The baby was totally, you know, totally … stressed out,” Dory continued.

Knute smiled. “Stressed out?”

“Well, whatever,” Dory said. “Under stress, I guess is what it was, or duress. Apparently Candace’s pelvis wouldn’t open up far enough for the baby to go through, but they only discovered this after eighteen hours of hard labour. So Candace was just about dead from the pain, and then suddenly they decide to do the C-section. They thought they had given her enough anesthetic, but because they were in such a hurry to save the baby, they made a mistake with the levels and she wasn’t entirely, you know, frozen, you know, the area, and so she could feel the knife cutting her open. She was only slightly numb. She was far too weak to object, though, and, oh, Knute, it was awful. A large flap of skin, the stomach skin, was pushed aside, sort of draped up over her breasts and then it took two doctors to pry her rib cage open far enough to get the baby out. And she’s feeling all of th—”

“Mom,” Knute said. “Please stop.” Dory began to cry, and moved her finger through the condensation on the kettle and shook her head. “It’s okay,” said Knute. She sat down on the floor next to Dory and put her arms around her. Dory put her head on Knute’s shoulder and wept.

“Oh, Knutie,” she sobbed, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to make him live. I don’t know how to make him talk.”

“It’s okay, Mom.” Knute stroked Dory’s hair the way Dory used to stroke hers when she was sad or sick.

“He doesn’t talk to me, Knute. He just lies there.”