Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 66330 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 265(@250wpm)___ 221(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66330 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 265(@250wpm)___ 221(@300wpm)
There was no question in my mind where I would go. Before I dropped off into an exhausted sleep, my suitcase still on the bed beside me, I booked a one-way ticket to Ohio. By this time tomorrow, I’d be back in my childhood bedroom in Yellow Springs. The one that was incongruously right off the kitchen because our house had been pieced together over multiple generations until the rooms sprawled out with no particular allegiance to a normal floorplan. My mom would be baking something in the kitchen. Hard to say what, but the sweet, yeasty smell of cinnamon rolls or banana bread would wake me up as much as the muffled thud of the oven opening and closing and the brisk metallic clink of the whisk glancing against the side of the mixing bowl.
I know I slept because when I woke up, my mouth had a thick, cottony coating and there was grit in the corners of my eyes. It had been fitful though. Haunted. I’d been searching for Con everywhere in my childhood home, convinced he was there. I kept finding new rooms. Some were filled with plants, making me think he had to be close by. I never found him though.
On the way to the airport, I thought about the actual rooms of the little Yellow Springs house. It was technically two, but my mom’s room had a closet so large that it seemed like it should have been a third bedroom. It even had a window. It would easily fit a nursery. My mom wouldn’t hesitate to switch rooms with me and be the one to sleep off the kitchen. She would love having me back. Dote on her grandchild.
And be completely heartbroken for me.
I called her from the terminal. She knew something was wrong just by the way I said hello. She insisted on meeting me at the Dayton International Airport even though I told her I could take a cab.
“It’s a thirty-minute drive. It’ll cost a fortune,” she said, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I thought I’d be ready to see her. It took me all day, with the layover in Chicago, to cross the country. I thought surely by the time the sun was coming down on what felt like the worst day of my life, I would be ready to tell my biggest supporter everything. I wasn’t though. When I found her at baggage claim, I couldn’t answer the questions written all over her face with anything other than a halfhearted shrug and watery smile.
The silence between us was almost painful as we waited for my suitcase, then drove the thirty minutes home. I could feel the effort it took her not to barrage me with questions. It made the air feel stiff. I wanted to spill it all, but it was like it was all bound up inside me. If I loosened the bindings, I might explode.
When we pulled into the driveway, it was dark. My mom turned off the car and turned to look at me. Her face was shadowed with concern in the sickly yellow light of the overhead. She laid her hand on my shoulder, and we sat there until the car darkened again.
“We should go in,” I said, the first words I’d spoken since we left the airport. My voice cracked with disuse.
She nodded and led the way, carrying my shoulder bag while I dragged my suitcase over the paving stones that led from the driveway to the front door. Once inside, I confounded her by leaving my suitcase beside the door and walking toward her room instead of mine. She followed me into it, not saying anything when I walked to her large closet and pushed open the door. I’d been in and out of this closet my entire life. I’d made the cavernous, half-empty space my fort when I was a child. I borrowed out of it as a teenager.
I walked the length of it, stopping at the window and stretching my arms out wide. They barely brushed the sleeves of her sweaters to the left and the rough edge of her jeans hanging on the other. Plenty big enough for a small nursery.
I turned around, and nearly smiled for the first time when I saw the bemused look on my mom’s face. She was trying so hard not to push me with questions, but I could tell she was dying to know what on earth I was doing, measuring her closet with the length of my stride and span of my arms.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
Her eyes widened.
I shook my head before she could ask any questions. “I don’t really want to talk about…I mean, I just want to focus on the future. I want to move home and raise the baby here, at least while I’m in school. Is that okay?”