June 1993

The airplane flight was exciting, traveling by herself like that. When she stepped out of the terminal, though, she nearly went right back inside again: even at 9:30 in the morning, it was already over ninety degrees. Carole wasn't sure she could handle a summer of temperatures that high. She hoped her grandparents had air conditioning. She'd only ever visited them before at Christmas and Easter.

They were waiting on the curb, her grandparents, looking as stiff and formal as her father did on his worst days. "Carole," her grandmother said, and kissed her cheek. Her grandfather nodded at her and offered her his arm.

"You probably have a lot of bags," he said gravely. He smelled like cigars, even though she knew he hadn't smoked since before Carole's youngest brother had been born. It was a familiar, comforting smell.

"Just three," she said. "And my trunk, and a couple boxes coming in the mail."

He didn't say anything else to her, but she didn't mind. Neither he nor her grandmother were big talkers. They drove the forty miles from the airport, exchanging very few words along the way.

"Are you allergic to cats?" her grandmother asked. Carole wasn't. "I'm taking care of the neighbor's house next door while she's visiting her grandchildren, and she has six."

Carole's parents never let her have animals in the house. Once they had a dog, a white fluffy Alaskan puppy, and it was the cutest thing she'd ever seen, but it shed like nothing else, and eventually her mother said they had to find it another home. She'd been sorry to see him go.

"I wouldn't mind feeding them," she said.

Her grandmother's hair was nearly white now. Carole watched it curl down her back in tendrils, escaping from her bun. "There's something about toxoplasmosis and cats and tiny little babies," she added, pushing the curls behind her ear, "but I don't remember it, exactly. We'll have to ask at the clinic on Monday when you go in for your first appointment."

Carole didn't really want to think about visiting a clinic. She still didn't feel any different than she had six weeks ago, although she had to admit that her stomach wasn't quite as flat as it had been. She could still run a mile without any trouble. When will I stop being allowed to do that? she thought, and felt a tiny thread of concern.

"I guess I do have a few questions to ask," she said, and fixed her gaze out of the window on the passing scenery, her hand resting on her belly.

Her grandparents' house was large and sprawling, like most of the ones in the neighborhood, but it was nothing compared to the house next door, where the eight cats apparently lived inside or outside as they chose. Carole watched a black shorthair and a ginger tabby wind their way between the bushes and the fence, but they didn't come any closer than that. She wanted to bend down and call one of them over, but she didn't exactly know how, and after what her grandmother had said, she wasn't sure it was safe, anyway. Toxoplas-whatsit?

"Hugh, show Carole to her room," said her grandmother, drawing the curtains. Carole thought it would be upstairs with the rest of the bedrooms, where she'd always stayed when she'd visited as a little girl. But instead, her grandfather led her through the dining room and the kitchen, past the pocket bathroom to a room on the back of the house.

Room was a matter of definition. It was more a porch, enclosed entirely in glass. For a moment, she wondered about privacy, but the room itself was so surrounded outside by hedges and flowering bushes that there was no question of anyone outside seeing in. A ceiling fan moved air around above the bed. There was only a small lamp on the nightstand, but Carole could see she wouldn't be needing an overhead light.

"It stays cooler back here," her grandfather rumbled, setting down two of her bags. "Upstairs gets pretty intolerable in the middle of the summer. Your grandmother thought you'd be more comfortable here."

"Thank you," was about all Carole could say. She set down her purse and sat on the edge of the bed. "I – suppose I'll unpack?"

He nodded. "I'll bring the rest of your things."

Carole got our her cell phone and plugged it in to charge. It was lucky her parents had let her keep it; the roaming charges would be expensive. Her mother, at least, had understood about staying in touch with her friends. It sat there, tempting her, but she ignored it.

For one desperate moment, she wished she'd packed a poster or a figurine or something, some kind of tiny ornament to make this feel like her space. But they were all in storage at her house in Dayton. She'd have to find some other way to make her mark on this strange garden room.

Her grandmother drove her down to the clinic on Monday morning. "You can take the bus yourself, if you need to," she told her, and showed her where the bus stop was. There wasn't much of a public transportation system in Dayton, so Carole was a little startled by the idea.

"I can drive," Carole said, but her grandmother shook her head.

"Not while you're pregnant, please. There are precious few things I can promise your mother to keep you safe, but that, at least, is one of them. Riding on the bus is far safer."

The building bore the sign Ursula R. Newman Memorial Clinic. They walked to the back, into the office marked Prenatal Care. Apparently there was a prohibition on smiling in the waiting room, because not one of the four other people inside showed any kind of emotion on their faces. There were two other girls sitting there, both obviously pregnant, neither of whom made eye contact with Carole.

"Don't people in Atlanta smile at each other?" she said, a little too loudly, and her grandmother stifled a grin. Carole felt immediately better, eliciting that grin from her somber grandmother.

"That could be asking a lot from girls like these," she murmured. "This is a clinic that serves low-income pregnant teens. Many of them are homeless, with no health insurance."

Carole frowned. "I have health insurance."

"Not if you don't live with your parents. On short notice, this is our best option." Her grandmother glanced around herself calmly. "It's a Catholic-run organization. No one's going to pressure you to… do anything, with your child."

The woman at the desk smiled at Carole, at least, and handed her a clipboard. "Your first visit? We have lots of paperwork for you to complete."

"Joy," Carole said, quirking an eyebrow, and the woman giggled. "It's okay. I don't mind. I filled it all out at the last place in Dayton."

"I was guessing you weren't from around here," she said. "You have a cute accent."

It was the first time anyone had suggested Carole might have an accent. She kind of liked the idea. While she filled in the boxes for name, address, birth date and race, she thought about the way the woman said the word accent, leaning on the e to turn it into an ay, and the u in the word guessing. She'd always thought her midwestern way of speaking was the ordinary way, but around here, she was the anomaly.

Last known period. Previous pregnancies. Number of live births. That gave her a chill, to think that any birth might end up... not alive. Forty weeks was a lot of time to wait for something that might not work out. She handed the clipboard back to the woman at the desk and browsed a terrible magazine for women with far too much time on their hands.

"Carole Daniels?" called the nurse.

"Do you want me to go in with you?" her grandmother asked. She wasn't smiling now.

"I think I'll be okay on my own," Carole said. She felt compelled to add, "I mean, not that I have anything to hide from you."

"All girls deserve some privacy." Her grandmother stayed where she was and opened her own magazine. "I'll be here when you're done."

Carole followed the nurse inside to the exam room and sat on the table where the nurse indicated. She waited while she took her blood pressure and her pulse and her temperature. "Fit as a fiddle," the nurse said cheerfully. "You eat your veggies, I bet."

"I run track," she said. "And I eat pretty well. But I don't care much for vegetables."

She nodded. "Well, whatever you're doing, keep it up. Take a prenatal vitamin, if you're not already."

They went over Carole's health history, which was really pretty boring - no drugs, little alcohol, no cigarettes, regular exercise, no health problems, no allergies. "Just the way we like it," said the nurse as she eased Carole down onto the table. "This stuff is a little cold on your belly."

She glopped some gel onto Carole's stomach, then ran what looked like a large electric razor across the surface of her skin. Carole heard an immediate loud whooshing noise, and then, in the midst of it all, a rapid thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. She felt a chill travel down her spine.

"Healthy and strong, just like its momma," said the nurse.

Carole held her breath. "Is that - the baby?"

"Heartbeat," nodded the nurse. "We won't be able to see anything on the ultrasound for a while, but we'll listen every time you come in. Usually we suggest weekly visits for our girls, but you're doing just fine, and you're only nine weeks; you don't need to come back until July unless you have any difficulties. Now, you'll be seeing..." She checked Carole's chart. "Irene, one of our counselors, next. She'll talk with you about how you're feeling about being pregnant."

Carole really wasn't sure she wanted to talk about being pregnant. Mostly she wanted to live through it, find the baby a nice home, and go back to her formerly quiet life in Dayton. But she figured it would be better not to rock the boat, and really, there wasn't anything wrong with talking about it. "Okay," she said, hopping down from the table, and followed the nurse back into the hallway and around the corner to a room with couches. There was a playpen in the corner and a bunch of toddler toys, and another pile of awful magazines. Carole picked one up and leafed through it.

The door opened after a few minutes. The woman who walked in had dark skin and what looked like long, fuzzy braids that brushed her shoulders. She didn't smile, but her face looked kind, and she moved in silence from the door to sit beside Carole on the couch.

"Anything good in there?" she asked, indicating the magazine Carole held. Carole made a face.

"Not really," Carole admitted. The woman chuckled. Carole wondered how she could do that without smiling.

"I hate those goddamn magazines," she said. Her voice was smooth and low. "Pardon my French. You're not going to learn anything about being a momma in those pages. Those editors just publish them to make you feel bad about yourself and want to buy shit."

Carole grinned at her. "I guess. I'm not going to be a momma anyway."

She raised a fine eyebrow. "Really? Then I think you might be in the wrong building."

"No," she laughed, tossing the magazine on the table. "I mean... I'm not keeping it. It'll be somebody else's baby. I'm just going to... like, grow it until it's big enough to live on its own."

The other eyebrow went up. "So you're, what, a marsupial?"

Carole cracked up. "Sure, yeah. I was thinking more like... a garden."

"Mmmm." The woman leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. "Okay, I could see that. Maybe a running vine. Oh, or a beanstalk?"

"I suspect it'll be closer to a pumpkin," Carole said, putting a hand on her flat belly. "And I'm trying not to freak out about it."

Her face went pensive. "Well, you're young. And you look fit. I don't think you'll have any trouble going back to your original weight, after the baby's born. You're a runner?"

"Long distance." Carole considered the words after the baby's born. She imagined a baby inside her, and what that would do to her slim frame. She tried not to grimace. "I was kind of wondering about that. When should I stop?"

"Running?" The woman shrugged. "I'm the wrong person to ask. I'm just a counselor. The doctors can tell you for sure. But my cousin's wife was lapping Coast Guard men on the track at the CG station in her 8th month."

Carole felt a surprising flood of relief. "Really?" She shifted in her seat, quelling a desire to get up and move.

"Sure. I mean, like I said, I'm not a doctor, so you'd better check to be sure, but I don't see any reason you couldn't." The woman held out her hand. "I'm Irene."

Carole shook her hand. "Carole. Daniels."

Irene nodded solemnly. "What brings you to Atlanta, Carole Daniels?"

"My parents. I mean - my grandparents live here, and my father, he told me I should come down here until the baby's born."

Irene got a sour look on her face, like she'd smelled something bad. "He sent you away?"

"Not - exactly." Carole felt uneasy, hearing it like that. "I wanted to come. It would be too weird, to be pregnant at home. My family's pretty strict, and my boyfriend..." She stopped. It hardly mattered what he thought anymore, because he'd gone away.

"What's his name?"

"Christopher." She said it carefully, like it might break her, but she didn't feel anything as the name left her lips. "He joined the Marines in February."

"Oh." Irene leaned back and let out a thoughtful breath. "So you're here with your grandparents. How do you get along with them?"

"Fine. They're nice, I guess. Kind of quiet, like my dad? I mean, I hardly know them." She stretched her legs, wishing she could walk around, but she figured it would be impolite.

"What do you suppose they think about you being pregnant? Are they strict, too?"

"I don't know," said Carole. "I don't think they're going to judge me. I mean, they're good Catholics, and I think that matters more to them than making me behave. They wouldn't treat me bad just because I'm... because I made a stupid choice."

Irene nodded slowly. Carole felt oddly exposed under her placid gaze. "You think you made a stupid choice, by having sex with your boyfriend."

Carole thought about that, but finally she had to shake her head. "No... I think I made a stupid choice by doing it without condoms."

"And you did that because you're Catholic?" Irene's expression didn't change. Carole felt another strange rush of relief, and it seemed to be connected to her words, because they poured out of her after that in a flood.

"Christopher's Catholic. I'm... I don't know what I am. I always thought I was Catholic, too, but... I'm not so sure anymore. I mean, what kind of God would ask His people to wait until marriage to have sex, and then make it so interesting?"

Irene laughed. It was such an unexpected sight that Carole had to pause and stare in fascination at her. She had a wide, expressive mouth, and straight, white teeth, and her smile completely transformed her face.

"That's a very good question," Irene said. "I've always wondered that myself."

"It just seems like a sneaky thing to do to humans," she went on. "We always said we wanted to wait, but really, it was Christopher who wanted to. He thought it would be a sin. He said it didn't matter that we were planning to get married anyway, and we had to wait until we'd actually been married." Carole huffed her annoyance. "Like God cares about a piece of paper. Isn't it what's in our hearts that matters?"

Irene didn't answer. "So what's in your heart? You love this young man?"

Carole nodded. "I really do. He's a good person, really. And I don't think I would want to marry without love, but he's going to be a great dad. I think that matters to me even more than the love part."

"And he loves you?"

"Yeah, I think so. Yes. He does."

Irene's face was calm again. "Well, Carole Daniels, you're a far cry from the girls we usually see in this clinic. I'm going to suggest you come back in a month, but you're welcome any time. There's always somebody to talk to. Here's my card; it has my hours on it. If you need anything, or if you're just wanting someone to talk to, give me a call."

"Thanks," said Carole, and she meant it.

Carole wondered if her grandmother would say anything about Irene being black, but she just shook her hand and gave her a polite smile. "Is there anything I should be feeding her?" her grandmother asked.

"Fertilizer, possibly," said Irene, completely deadpan, and her grandmother blinked as Carole choked on a laugh.

"She's an odd person," her grandmother said, after they were in the car. The shadows cast by the trees on the street made patterns on Carole's legs through the windshield.

"Yes, and I like her," Carole decided. "She didn't care for those awful magazines, either." And she understood about being a garden, she wanted to add, but her grandmother already thought Irene was odd enough, already.

"I asked about the cat litter disease. While you were in the office." Her grandmother turned the car smoothly into the driveway and parked the car in front of the garage. "The nurse said you may care for the cats as long as you wear gloves when you're handling their litter. And you should wash your hands afterwards."

Carole wasn't entirely thrilled with the idea of taking care of a half dozen of somebody else's cats, but she figured it was part of her responsibility to her grandmother in return for being her houseguest for the next eight months. "Okay," she said.

They walked through the yard to the heavy gate that led to the house next door. Carole's eyes took in the drooping willow trees, the unkempt yard, the long-ignored statuary, the murky fountain.

"Grandmother?" It felt formal to call her that, but also seemed oddly appropriate, in the midst of the wild, sprawling estate. "Can I... Do you think they'd mind if I took care of their garden, too?"

"I don't see why they'd object." Her grandmother regarded her curiously. "Were you planning to plant something?"

"Maybe. Just something small. Flowers." Not pumpkins. She kept her hands resolutely away from her belly. "Something pretty. Just to watch it grow. The weeds... they're choking the soil. It just seems a shame to have all this beautiful yard and not let it do what it was meant to do."

Her grandmother's smile was gentle. "Yes. It does."