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The Last Last Time

The television in the waiting room plays the news on mute, airing footage of rioters setting cars on fire and fighting with police, but the closed-captions lag several seconds behind the images and instead narrate the previous story about the birth of twins to a celebrity couple. The discord between the pictures and words confuses you, momentarily, into thinking that the children somehow started the riot, the unrest a violent consequence of their delivery. The thought is too much for your hangover to handle. As you and your girl Mira leave the walk-in clinic, a bolt of pain dances from one temple to the next. You chalk up the reaction to lack of sleep. Stress has kept you up the past few nights, doping and coping, doing too much of one and not nearly enough of the other. Your visit with the doctor today has corroborated what two home tests and Mira’s sudden intolerance to the smell of yogurt already have — she is pregnant, a reality that scares the hell out of you, because even though she hasn’t outright said so, she doesn’t need to, you’ve been a couple for years, you’ve talked kids before. You know she wants to keep it. When she first confronted you with her suspicions a couple days earlier, you had just arrived home from your fourth job in the past eighteen months, a cashiering gig at a gas station. The three prior, in order of humiliation, were stock boy, telemarketer, and sign-spinner (a degrading occupation that involved you advertising dirt cheap cell phones for a discount electronics retailer, All-American Communications, by twirling a sign on the corner of a busy intersection dressed in an eagle costume because patriotism). On the coffee table in your apartment were the positive tests. Mira had laid them out there like Exhibits A and B. How she stood next to them, tapping her heel, running her hand across her shaved head like a neurotic, it seemed as though she hadn’t sat down all day. “Well?” she said. You blinked twice, then crossed the room and hugged her. “It’s okay. It’s fine. This is fixable,” you said. She pushed away from you. “What do you mean ‘fixable’?” The light cast by the lamp consolidated the shadows on her face, amplifying it into something resolute and terrifying, the lines of her eyebrows and cheeks and jawbone narrowing to a central point that seemed aimed directly at you. She said, “I’m not broken.”