She was right. I wasn’t ready. Which was why I was terrified that she was pregnant. But hearing her honest opinion of me hurt.

“Glenna, don’t you love me?”

“Yes, but what’s that got to do with this?”

“I don’t feel like you do.”

“Gordon, I can’t help what you can’t feel.”

We were silent. Then Glenna said, “You know what my mother would think?”

“Since when do you care what she thinks?”

“What I think. What I was raised to think. This could be my child.”

“Our child,” I corrected her.

She shook her head, unwilling to concede that this was about me, too. I could have the blame for knocking her up, not the credit.

“I take care of those girls at Palmer’s clinic. This is different. This is me. This child is mine.”

“You mean you’ll keep it?” If she did, it might also mean that I’d never lose her, that finally she’d be mine.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Don’t I get a say?” I asked.

“You got your say. That’s why I’m—”

“Why you’re …?”

“Look, I can’t do this now. I have to fly to Palm Beach tomorrow to be with my parents. I’ll be back New Year’s Day. Can we talk then?”

“Maybe you could skip Florida?”

“I would—believe me. But my father’s making a surprise fiftieth birthday party for my mother on New Year’s Eve. I have to be there. Can’t we talk about it later?”

I wanted to tell her that I loved her, that everything would work out, that I could deal with a baby if I could only have her. “Glenna, I want to talk about it now.”

“You want and you want and you want. Maybe it’s not your fault. That’s what men do. They want. And my tit’s run dry. I need to think about this. Leave me alone.”

Not bothering to undress, she lay down, turning away from me on her side, and I waited until her breathing had the subdued rhythm of slumber before I stretched out beside her in my clothes and clasped my hands under my head, careful not to bump her, not to rile her again.

Perhaps Glenna would get her period while she was sleeping, and I could have her without changing my life, without the complications. Like survivors of any battle, we could laugh about the scare later, when we were safe, when we had our children. Sure, we could go on and on, I thought, and that’s when Glenna sat up, took her plastic packet of birth-control pills from the apple crate, and flung it at the rubber tree across the room.

Then she curled up in a ball and slept, and I spent the night gazing at the ceiling.

Chapter 26

AT DAWN, WITH only three shopping days left till Christmas, I got in line with hundreds of other young men and filed through the sleet to take my physical at Fort Hamilton. Soldiers with flashlights herded us through the darkness into a cold, cavernous building, where a bald, baggy-eyed sergeant was sitting at a metal folding table and drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup. In a weary voice, he told us to pick up our questionnaires and pencils, then directed us to the rows of benches.