Cookies and a Pregnancy

*Part 4 of a serial story of a Christian with a problem.

I don’t want to start a pregnancy like this.

That’s how the text started. During a two-week stretch where Grant was fantasizing about killing himself. Okay, maybe not fantasizing. But thinking about with some sort of morbid curiosity. That was definitely true.

And then he gets a text message from his wife that wasn’t the halfhearted (and a day late) apology he expected, but instead it started like this:

“I don’t want to fight with you, Grant. Not like this. Not today. I don’t want to start a pregnancy like this.”

Wow. He didn’t want to start one that way either. He definitely didn’t want to find out about one that way. But thanks, Dana, he thought. I appreciate the guilt-laden announcement a day after I apologized and you didn’t.

Steve was still up front getting his cookie. His coffee cup looked strange there all by itself. The whole world looked strange at the moment. Grant had two daughters. Now he had another son or daughter hidden away in his wife’s womb, and he was here wondering whether there were any way he could keep getting up and going to work and whatever other uninteresting tasks currently felt like his life.

Is that true?

He thought for a second while looking at the black plastic lid of his counselor’s coffee. And trying not to look at or think about the text message.

No. I don’t think most of my life is drudgery.

He hated that coffee cup by the time Steve got back. It felt like everything in the world that was wrong just staring back at him. Telling him he was too angry and too bored to think clearly about his wife being pregnant or about the nightmare or about anything else.

Why am I here? What can this guy possibly do for me now? The nightmare is way down the list of my problems now.

“I got you one, too,” Steve said as he sat back down. He set a cookie right in front of Grant. It was a big, chocolate chip one in a nondescript white paper sleeve. It looked good. And yet Grant felt like putting it through the nearest glass window, along with his right fist.

There was silence for a solid minute. Grant half expected Steve to ask what was wrong. Steve didn’t. When Grant finally made eye contact with him after it felt uncomfortable enough that he wanted to see what the man was thinking or doing, he saw that Steve was smiling warmly under his thick salt-and-pepper mustache and from behind his glasses. His eyes didn’t look like they were considering anything, weighing anything, worried about anything. They looked they were comfortably waiting. Like this guy was just a dude in a coffee shop waiting in good spirits for his grandkids to get here, or for an old buddy of his to show up so they could swap stories about retirement and fishing and talk stocks or sports or the old days. Steve looked like he had all the time in the world, and like he was happy, and like he would be willing to be a hundred different things Grant might need him to be. He was just ready.

“She’s pregnant.”

Steve nodded a couple of times, and his smile went away, though not as though he were shocked or wasn’t happy anymore.

“Are you glad about it?”

Grant almost parted his lips and let the word “No” fall out and onto the table and into his biography, where they would sit there for however long his life lasted, and maybe longer. We’ll, kid, the first time I talked about you was to a borderline stranger, and I told him I wasn’t happy you existed. God and self-control, or God through self-control, stopped him.

“I love her and I love our kids. Yes. But we’re not okay. And I’m not okay. So I’m. It sure what to do.”

“Try a bite of the cookie first,” Steve said, and pointed at the paper sleeve.

Grant took a bite.

Part 5 coming soon.