Read Part 1 here.
A Saturday morning found them walking through the farmer’s market, selecting ingredients for brunch. Weeks had turned into months, and they had settled into a routine. Troy still traveled for work, but when he was in town on the weekends he stayed at her condo.
They were an odd pair amid the health food spiritualism of the farmer’s market. Between stalls selling fresh produce and raw milk were tarot card readers and energy healers. Troy in his usual jokey manner tried to get Olivia to sign up for something the white lady with dreadlocks was calling a “soul cleanse.” It involved a pack of affirmations, incense sticks, and essential oils. Olivia balked.
“Oh, I don’t a soul,” she said with a faint chuckle.
Troy looked at her with something approaching surprise but quickly moved on, giving the dreadlocked woman one last hungry glance as they walked on in the rising heat of a May morning.
Olivia kept thinking about her soul. She hadn’t thought about not having one for years. That’s what the old nun at Catholic school used to say. She said “test tube babies” conceived unnaturally don’t have souls, just “animated bodies without God’s love.” Olivia smiled at the memory. When she told Marian about it, Marian marched down to the principal’s office and demanded a tuition refund. She got it, too.
Marian had raved about the incident for years. Her family, the nuns, the world—they were all against Olivia, and Marian couldn’t stand it. “You’re everything to me. Everything!” she had told her daughter fiercely, seeming to relish the fight.
They were supposed to go to the gym together one morning, but Olivia wanted to sleep in. Troy went by himself. On the treadmill, he had a massive heart attack and was gone.
Olivia didn’t cry. That wasn’t surprising. She hadn’t cried at Marian’s funeral, and that was the only family she had ever really known. When she came home the first night he was dead, Olivia restlessly jingled her keys, fingering the key to his apartment. She finally got in her car and drove to the unfamiliar, efficient space that Troy had called home. It was not a place that he had ever brought her into beyond a short stay.
The rooms were sparse but tastefully decorated. Western art, fine leather furniture, exotic curios. It was a calm, masculine space. She had never felt the need or desire to snoop before, but since he was dead, she felt an urge to find something to hang on to, almost like a souvenir. Most of what she found in the desk were old bills, work papers, and loads of chewing tobacco, which was a surprise. She guessed those pearly white teeth came along not far ahead of her and all that chaw was the remnants of a shortly kicked habit.
One scrap of paper in the bottom right drawer did catch her eye. It looked like a payment from a clinic, someplace called ClearWater Fertility Services. Olivia dug a little deeper in the drawer and found many more papers from ClearWater. Sorting through the desk, she saw that Troy had been paid at least $25,000 for the more than 300 visits to the clinic over a 15-year period. Olivia felt nauseated. Not from the information. It didn’t bother her. After all, she was the product of such a clinic. Besides, what did most white women of rapidly diminishing fertility want if not a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby from an unknown and distant man.
But she actually really was nauseated. About to be physically ill. Olivia thrust the papers back into the bottom drawer and sprinted to the bathroom where she hurled the seven blueberry muffins she had eaten that afternoon out of shock into the gleaming white toilet.
Troy’s 80-year-old, deathly thin mother, Kitty, wanted a real wake and nondenominational funeral. Troy was the product of a teenage pregnancy and the only child his mother ever had. Kitty both adored and despised her dead son. In adoration, she arranged poster boards of childhood pictures and carefully selected flowers. In hatred, she glowered at Olivia and cussed her son for never giving her a dime of the money he made with his ever-expanding business.
The picture boards took several days more to make than they should have. Kitty spread pictures all over the floor and glue oozed onto the sofa. Incessantly chain-smoking and foregoing all food, Kitty talked of her “lil’ Troy” and “back home,” some podunk, godforsaken little Texas town in the middle of nowhere. She was loud; Troy had certainly inherited that from his mother. Olivia’s head throbbed and she continued to feel sick to her stomach. She longed more than anything for the quiet of her condo, away from this obnoxious, anorexic old woman.
“Wait,” Olivia said, interrupting the hours-long monologue of a bereaved mother. “Why do you have one of my baby pictures in with Troy’s? Where did you get that? Did you go through my things?” She heard her voice pathetically rising in pitch and felt hot tears in her eyes. Why did she care so much about the picture?
“That is not yer baby picture. That is muh son, lil’ Troy. You think I don’t know muh own son? You, girlie, have been in hees life for what, two days? And yer tellin me what to do with muh son’s pictures?”
Olivia saw there was no point in arguing. She also had a more pressing concern. She dashed to the bathroom again to throw up.
Olivia was pregnant. She found out two weeks after the funeral. She was surprised she was going to carry it to term. Who knew a woman in her 40s and a man in his 60s could get pregnant without even trying? Why she was having it, she had no idea. She knew the increased risk of genetic disorders. She ignored it. She knew firsthand the difficulty of being a single mother. She pretended to forget. She knew all these things and more, but stupidly decided to have it anyway.
Continued in Part 3
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