Soon things were quiet again. Her mother had gone straight to Chris’s room and Allie could hear her cuddly-sounding sentences, then a song Tess’s mom used to sing to her, some old Irish ballad about Erin and a potato crop and a penny in the grass. The back screen door closed quietly on its spring. Allie heard her father pour himself coffee and taste it. He went upstairs a minute, came down, drank more coffee, then went outside and started up the flatbed. She could hear the steady rumble of the engine a good fifteen minutes. She got into her UFO dress and went out to the living room window. Her father was sitting in the truck cab looking straight out the windshield down at the river. He was just sitting there. Allie heard the rocking chair in Christopher’s room. It sounded sort of heavy on the floor, which meant her mom was holding little Chris in her lap, probably pressing his wet cheek to her breast. Who did she think she was, saying Allie was not going without even asking her? But gosh, how could Dad have hit her like that?

The sky was such an ugly smear of gray, it looked like it was about to get sick with rain. A shiver went through Allie’s chest and that’s where it stopped because the Warrior Girl doesn’t cry over things like this. Just then, the Suthers’ white car drove up the hill, and as its front started to level off in the driveway Allie felt things level off inside her too. Leo was in the passenger side, sitting taller than his father, and his hair had a cowlick in the back from sleeping. He glanced at the house but didn’t see her, even though she waved.

Her dad was waving too, at Leo’s father. Before Allie could move, Leo got right into the truck and she watched it and the car drive down the hill, the flatbed taking a right, Leo’s father taking a left. And all day at Beatrice’s she pondered in which direction she had to go.

As she served hot coffee and cold blueberry pie to milk truck drivers and men in suits, a few burgers to a handful of boys who whistled at her as she left them with their food, she wasn’t even there. The cosmos had presented her, Allison Marie Donovan, with the following: pretend your family is not breaking up in the rough seas and about to go under-or-take up your spear, and do something fast. So in true Warrior Girl fashion, she found herself looking to the very thing that seemed at first to be the anvil in the boat, this queasiness in her belly that the coffee and muffins and grilled-meat smells of Beatrice’s had only made worse, sending her twice to the restroom where she threw up orange juice the first time, stomach-heaving air the second. Sidney let her go home after the lunch rush, and on the walk home Allie made herself think the words: pregnant, expecting, with child. Of course she really could just have a touch of virus, and might simply be late with the moon, but her small breasts said differently. She was more aware she had breasts, that they occasionally rubbed against her uniform in a way that didn’t feel far from a cool wind hitting a bad tooth.