Of course I was pregnant. Nature doesn’t waste such weather, so much turbulence, so much heat. I was supposed to start menstruating on the Tuesday after Klane got out of jail. I didn’t start. I had been late exactly three times in my life. Once when I had pneumonia and twice when I was pregnant. All day Tuesday I walked around the house remembering something that happened the night I slept with Robert. The rubber had come off while he was fucking me. We had laughed about it because I was also wearing my diaphragm and some new contraceptive jelly. Besides, a long time had gone by since I had Jimmy and I had begun to get careless. Maybe it was possible to keep from getting pregnant. Maybe there was a way.

So I didn’t start on Tuesday and I didn’t start on Wednesday and Thursday I began to have all the other symptoms. I couldn’t smoke. I couldn’t sleep. I was urinating all the time. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to turn. I was pregnant and that was that. I was pregnant and I didn’t have the slightest idea whose baby it was. It was Robert’s or it was Malcolm’s. Either way I was not going to have it. There were abortionists somewhere in the United States of America and I would find one if it was the last thing I ever did in my life. I was not going to be cut open again for anything or anybody. I was going to live.

* * *

On Friday I didn’t start so on Friday afternoon I found Dr. Williams’s telephone number in my pocketbook and called him at his office and told him I had decided to take him up on meeting him for a drink.

“You have to take care of them for me,” I said to Klane. “I have to go and meet this doctor and get the name of an abortionist. I’m pregnant, Klane. I can’t stand it. You have to stay. You have to tell Malcolm a lie. Tell him I had to go talk to someone about a problem at the church. Tell him it’s about raising money for the new pews.”

“I’m here, Rhoda. You can count on me. Let me call my sister and tell her I’ll be late.”

Then I dressed up in my best silk dress and my best high-heel shoes and got into the old car and drove down to Dr. Williams’s office. “Come down here after office hours,” he had said. “Then we can go somewhere together.”

When I got to Dr. Williams’s office, he was waiting at the door and took me back to an examining room and took a seat on the table. I sat down in the chair and we began to gossip about people at the church.