“Sorry I didn’t say something sooner,” Willy sighs. “I couldn’t. People talk. Sure you don’t want a puff?” he asks, holding the joint out to me, as I sit curled up on the couch, underneath the one and only blanket that Mama ever managed to knit. “Or a sip?”

“About that,” I mumble, fiddling with a piece of unravelling yarn in the middle of a grey-scale granny square.

“Weed’s good for when you get the chemo and radiation. You won’t feel as sick. I can hook ya up.”

I reach over and snatch the joint from his hand and take a slow, deep drag. Just one. Just enough to give me the guts to say the words out loud for the first time.

“I’m pregnant.”

He plucks the joint from my hand and gives me a wild glare as he stomps to the door and tosses it into the snow. By the time he sits back down, his face is frozen somewhere between laughing and crying, while iridescent orbs and little gold sparks float and flutter around the brim of his ball cap.

“Well then.” He clears his throat and straightens his hat, like he knows it might be knocked askew by the cascading sparks and bubbles. “Maybe this is just the kick in the arse the two of us need. Maybe this is a sign —”

“If you say ‘from the Universe’ I’ll puck you in the junk.” The only blanket Mama ever knit weighs heavy on my lap, my belly. I have successfully picked apart an entire granny square, and absently tied all the loose yarn up into one big knot.

“No, I was going to say maybe this is a sign that we need to grow up and stop pissing our lives away on what doesn’t matter,” he says, taking off his hat and setting it on his lap as a shield, just in case.

Without the hat on, I can see gold sparks popping out from the middle of Gimp’s forehead, while the clear orbs shoot straight out from the top of his noggin, like one of those shitty dollar store automatic bubble makers made for kids too lazy to use their own air and effort for entertainment. I decide there’s no way my kid will ever have one of those stupid things. You want bubbles, baby? Blow them yourself. From your head. Like your Daddy does.

“What do you want to do?” he says softly.

“Build a time machine and go back to the day I figured it was okay to skip getting my Depo shot. That seems like a reasonable first step.” I stare at the yarn knot and roll it tighter so I don’t have to look at him.

“Crow, this is kinda serious.”

“No shit. Look, I don’t know. I just found out, my mother is dead, and I’m not.” A lump rises in my throat. My eyes squeeze shut, trying to lock up the tears.

His hand reaches to give me a caress of comfort, but I push it away.