Sheila entered the apartment announcing she needed a shower straightaway. She shed her uniform as she walked, as if she couldn’t get it off fast enough. After the shower, in reverse, she collected the bits and threw them in the washing machine before she presented herself to Webster—wet hair and clean skin.
She glowed. Though she was doctor-phobic right from the get-go, he made sure she kept her monthly appointments and took her hefty vitamins.
“Why were you so eager to get your clothes off?” he asked when they sat down to a London broil he had just grilled. “My amazing charm?”
“Geezer rubbed my belly. Usually I don’t care. My body’s not my own anymore, and that’s fine. But it made my skin crawl when he did it.”
Webster had bought candles and a tablecloth. Sheila seemed not to notice.
“Well, you can rest now.” He took a bite of steak.
For a minute, she looked around the room as if searching for something. Then she was silent. She picked up her fork but didn’t touch the meat or the baked potato or green beans.
“I thought maybe I’d paint the bedroom tomorrow,” Webster said.
Sheila lifted her glass of water and drank it straight down. She set the glass on the tablecloth. He reached for her hand and startled her.
“There’s something I want to ask you,” Webster said, and grinned.
Sheila was wary. Not smiling.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
Sheila paused, fork in midair. She put her fork down.
“What?” she asked.
Webster was silent.
“This is kind of a surprise,” she said.
“Sheila.”
“Do we have to do this now?”
Webster let her hand go. “Do what now?” he asked.
“Talk. Make plans.”
“We make plans all the time,” he said.
“We don’t make concrete plans.”
“Yeah, we do. We’re having a baby. That’s a pretty concrete plan.”
She pressed her lips together.
“What the hell, Sheila?” he said, sitting back. “This isn’t your average plan. I’m proposing to you.”
Sheila rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “It’s so good the way it is,” she said wearily. “Let’s not mess it up.”
Sheila’s skin was pink from the hot water, and her hair was flowing damp and straight behind her ears. She wore no makeup, as she did when she went out, and he felt, when he saw her naked face, that he was seeing the real Sheila.
“I’m not asking you just because you’re pregnant,” he explained.
“I know.”
“Why formalize everything?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.
He stared at her.
“See?” she said. “You want me to put this out.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Sheila, you know why.”
“That’s just it! I don’t want all these fucking rules. You’re smothering me.”
She wants a drink.
Knowing that, Webster couldn’t argue further. There was no persuading Sheila that she didn’t want a drink or that the reason she was picking a fight was her need for the booze. As much as he wanted to remind her that it was dangerous to drink with a sprout the size of his pinky growing inside her, she wouldn’t listen to him. All he could do was distract her, the way he dealt with alcoholics on tours.
“I take it back,” he said. “I don’t want to marry you.”
She glanced up. “Make up your mind.”
“I did want to, but now I don’t.”
“You teasing with me?”
“Do I look like I’m teasing with you?”
She stubbed out her cigarette, picked up her fork, and ate a bite of the green beans. Behind her head, an empty bottle of Dawn rested on a sill under a window. The dirty pots from the meal listed in the sink.
“I’ve got a tour,” he said, checking his watch.
“What? It’s Friday night.”
“A probie called in sick.”
“You mean there’s someone greener than you?”
Webster pushed his chair back. He felt something drain from his chest as he did so.
“You’re lying,” she said.
He was but said nothing.
“It’s because I don’t want to talk about getting married, isn’t it?” she asked, sipping her water.
The sight of the candles made Webster sad. Why play house?
He went into the bedroom to change. He had nowhere to go, but he put on his uniform anyway. He grabbed his radio and his utility belt.
When he emerged from the bedroom, she was blocking the front door. In her hand, she held a Tupperware container in which she’d put the rest of his dinner.
He stood ten feet from her.
“You need a fork and knife?” she asked.
“They’ve got forks and knives at Rescue.”
“Will you marry me?” she asked.
“No.”
“Please?”
“What about all the rules?” he asked. “And the smothering?”
“Fuck the rules,” she said. “We’ll make our own rules.”
“Such as?”
“We could get married on that piece of land of yours with just a few dogs for witnesses.”
“The land’s not mine.”
“Details,” she said, though he could see in the way she turned her gaze aside that she was just this minute registering the results of an equation Webster had solved weeks ago. Webster + Sheila + Baby = No Land. The land by itself was meaningless without Sheila and the baby. And he would need whatever was left of his savings to help support the three of them when the baby came. He would take twenty-four-hour shifts if he had to.
He watched her glance from the corner of the room to the floor to his face. “You can’t do this,” she said. “You’ve been saving for that land all these years.”
He didn’t remind her that she had let him pay the cop. “Hey, no rules, remember? I can do whatever I want.”
“This isn’t funny, Webster. This is serious.”
“Asking you to marry me was serious.”
She stared at him, then gave a half smile. “So where’s the ring?” she asked.
He pulled the blue jeweler’s box from his pants pocket. He hadn’t wanted her to find it while he was gone. She took it from him and opened it. It was a small diamond set flat in a gold band.
“Jesus Christ, Webster,” she said. “I was kidding.”
They were married by the minister at the Congregational church where Webster had been confirmed just before he gave up on religion. The soul was an entity he felt ambivalent about.
Webster’s parents came to the ceremony, along with Burrows and his wife, Karen. Two of Webster’s cousins drove down from the Northeast Kingdom. No one from Sheila’s side showed up, and it felt to Webster, for a moment during the service, that his soon-to-be wife was standing on air, as if she might tumble into oblivion for lack of roots. Sheila’s sister, the only relative who might have made the trip, was near her ninth month of pregnancy and couldn’t travel. Sheila didn’t seem to mind. “I wish it was just me and you,” she’d said the night before.
She wore a high-waisted black dress, which surprised Webster, who hadn’t been consulted and who’d assumed white. After the ceremony, when he complimented her on the dress—it was fluid and elegant and made her skin light up—she explained that she’d wanted to buy a dress she might be able to wear again.
“To your next wedding?” he asked.
She cuffed him with her bouquet, one his mother had picked out.
After the ceremony, the eight celebrants walked in the July sunshine to a wedding luncheon in a private room at the Bear Hollow Inn. Webster’s cousins, Joshua and Dickie, both of them farmers, had keen senses of humor, which Webster remembered from his childhood when they’d lived closer. The jokes got Burrows going, and once Burrows had had a few, there was no stopping him. Webster sat back and stroked Sheila’s arm. He liked seeing his mother laugh to the point of near hysterics. Even Sheila joined in the conversation when she could, though for minutes at a time she was eerily quiet.
“You OK?” he asked.
When she turned to him, he thought he saw tears forming at the corners of her eyes. He put his elbow on the table to shield them from the rest of the group. He’d never seen Sheila cry. His face was inches from hers. The tears frightened him.
“What is it?” he asked, taking her hand.
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
Webster thought it might be the loneliness of having no family at the service and was about to say that he was her family now. He and the bump.
“This is stupid,” she said. “I never do this. I’m just so happy.” She bent her head to his chest, as if embarrassed by emotion. He wrapped her in his arms. “I never thought this would happen to me,” she said. “Not like this. I don’t deserve you, Webster.”
“Are you shitting me?” he whispered into her ear. Sweet nothings from the bridegroom to the bride. “I’m the one who can’t believe his luck. You roll your car precisely on my stretch of road, and I just happen to be in service? What are the odds that the love of my life would do that?”
He felt her laugh.
He pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. If he glanced up, his father, who’d insisted Webster carry one in his suit pocket, would be smiling. Webster held Sheila until she’d fixed herself up. “I really do love your dress,” he said, a compliment that allowed him to pat the deliciously round contour of her lap.
“Do I have mascara all over me?” she asked.
He pulled away and scanned her face. “Right eye, just below the outer edge.”
She swept the mark away, gave the handkerchief back to Webster. She lifted the champagne glass she’d been avoiding. The gesture caught Webster’s mother’s eye.
“Oh, honey, I’ve been waiting this whole time for you to do that.” She and Sheila clinked glasses.
That night Webster and Sheila lay in bed on the first of their three nights of honeymoon. They had chosen to forgo a trip. Webster was happy enough to be in their bedroom cocoon with the prospect of two more days off. On Monday, they would shop for a car seat and a crib with the money his parents had given them as a wedding present. Tomorrow he and Sheila would decide in advance where to put the crib—which tiny part of their already tiny apartment they could carve out as a nursery. But that night they had no worries and no plans. Webster’s mother, like the church lady she was, had arranged for the inn to make up two dinners and to save the rest of the cake, all of which she handed to Sheila when the lunch was over. “A woman doesn’t cook on her wedding night, no matter where she spends it,” his mother said. Sheila hugged her for the first time.
Webster gave his mother an A+ for trying. She seemed to be their biggest fan. Then again, Sheila had something his mother wanted: a grandchild to hold.
Webster put his hands on the bump and thought: This, right now, this is my family.
Sheila drifted in and out of sleep while Webster held her.