Happy Father's Day
Bob rubbed his eyes quickly with his fists and looked back at the table.
Happy Father's Day
He let out a confused chuckle as he stared at the words. He had just come home weighed down with grocery bags, having gone shopping for Helen since she was in bed sick with the flu. She'd been throwing up all morning, and miserably asked him to go pick up eggs, batteries, laundry detergent, and a large jar of maraschino cherries, among other things, while bent over their toilet.
This wasn't like Helen's sense of humor. The words Happy Father's Day were spelled out on the small dining room table in an assortment of tableware and broken chopsticks. She must have been in a hysterical fever from the flu or something—this was just plain weird.
Slowly tearing his eyes away from the cryptic message Helen had left for him, he grabbed the jar of cherries off of the kitchen counter and headed for the bedroom.
He didn't see a light on through the crack in the door, so he pushed it open slowly, assuming his sick wife was finally getting some rest.
However, when his eyes came to the bed, he saw her seated upright against the headboard, staring blankly at the wall, her hands resting in her lap.
"Hey, honey. You're awake?"
"Mm-hmm." She replied quietly, not taking her eyes off of the adjacent baby blue wall.
"Well, I hope you're feeling better now," he said slowly, puzzled by her sudden unwillingness to look in his direction. Helen was never one to shy away from eye contact. Not even this morning from the floor of a bathroom when she asked him to go out between bouts of sickness. "I, uh... got those cherries you asked for!"
He smiled broadly and set them on the bed next to her. She leaned her head back to meet the cool wood of the headboard and closed her eyes.
"Helen, are you okay?" Bob asked, sitting gingerly on the edge of the bed.
She nodded.
Perplexed by her unsettling calm, he looked around the room for anything odd, and the strange silverware message flashed before his eyes again. He furrowed his brow and looked back to his wife.
"What was that weird message in the dining room about? Is your Dad coming to visit and you couldn't find decorations?" He joked with a soft chuckle. "What's up?"
As he asked her this, her eyes opened and she finally looked at him. She looked worried, afraid almost.
He stopped chuckling immediately as she picked something up off of her bedside table and offered it to him. A pregnancy test.
A positive pregnancy test.
Bob slowly got up off of the bed while staring wide-eyed at the small piece of plastic in his hand. He felt overwhelmed. He was ecstatic! They were going to have a baby! A family! But... why did Helen look so tense?
"Helen?" He started, still unable to separate his gaze from the two blue lines.
"Bob, I..." she trailed off, her left hand still in her lap, her right rubbing her collarbone nervously. She took a deep breath in and screwed her eyes shut, steeling herself. "Bob, I know we've only been married for a little over a year, and we haven't really talked about this kind of thing, I don't know-"
But Bob never heard what she did or didn't know. He'd dropped the test and basically jumped Helen, kissing her with more force than he'd meant to.
Helen melted into it, and all her fears of his reaction melted away, too.
Bob broke the kiss but held onto her shoulders. He looked her up and down, his eyes lingering on her stomach for a moment before returning to the small smile dancing on her face.
"Helen!" He said, a broad, toothy smile spreading from one ear to the other. "We're going to have a baby!" He paused and ran both hands through his short hair. "I'm gonna be a Dad..." he said under his breath.
"I'M GONNA BE A DAD!" He practically screamed, and Helen was sure the neighbors had heard, but before she could warn him to quiet down, he had jumped up on the bed, smashed his head into the ceiling fan, and fallen to the floor with a dull thud.
"Bob!" Helen yelped, and scrambled off the end of the bed to kneel over her husband who now laid motionless on the floor. "Bob are you okay?" She asked, sounding panicked. She shook him and rolled him from his side to lay on his back.
"Bob?" She queried again as he gradually opened his eyes. He moved his arm to feel his head where he'd damaged the fan. "Are you okay?"
"I'm perfect," he finally responded, craning his neck to smile up at his wife. He sighed and laid his head back on the carpet. "I'm gonna be a Dad."
"And a great one, too." Helen replied, unable to stop grinning. She noticed a tear roll down his cheek, and gently wiped it away. She didn't know if it was from the pain of the incident or the joy of her earth-shattering announcement, but she decided on joy.
They were going to be parents.
A/N: Thanks so much for reading! Feel free to leave a review, I love hearing from you! More to come soon. :)