I Left Pregnant and Swore She Wasn't His, Now He Wants the Truth novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Cup

My husband sits in a clinic hallway with a cup in his hand and chooses to believe me.

Gabe's POV

I sat in the truck in Mémère's yard until the sun came up and she brought me a cup of coffee on a saucer.

She put it on the hood.

She didn't say anything, and neither did I.

At seven she went back in and shut the screen door, and I understood I had been told to leave.

I drove home to a house with her car gone from the carport.

In the kitchen there was a dish towel folded over the oven handle.

Her reading glasses lay on the table, and a note on the refrigerator in her handwriting said milk, lemons, stamps.

I read it four times.

She had written it for a life where she would be here to buy them.

My father came by at nine with a bottle of Maker's Mark and a sack of boudin.

"Eat," he said.

"Not hungry."

"A man has to eat. You've got the Monday shift."

"She said it wasn't mine," I said.

"I heard her, son. Four hundred people did." He poured two glasses and slid one over. "I'm sorry. I told you in March that girl was too thin to be trusted. Something in the eyes."

"Don't talk about her."

"I'm only saying you did right by her. You gave her a good house, a good name."

"I asked her in front of the whole parish whose it was," I said.

"You asked what any man would ask."

I pushed the glass back across the table.

My father looked at it a moment and drank his own, and then mine.

On Monday I drove to the urologist's office in Lafayette and sat in a chair for forty minutes with a magazine about boats.

When they called my name I went in and told the doctor what I had done in August, and what had happened in the mill yard on Friday.

He was a stout man with half-glasses and he listened without writing.

"A pregnancy after a vasectomy happens," he said. "It's not common. It's something like one in two thousand, and it's usually because the tubes grow back together."

"Could it be mine?"

"If you gave your count at twelve weeks, I could tell you whether you were clear. You were supposed to come back with a sample in November."

"I didn't," I said.

"I have a note here that we called you twice."

I remembered both calls.

I had let them go to voicemail and then I had deleted them.

I did not want a piece of paper that said I was safe, because then I would have to tell my wife.

The minute I told her I would have to say why.

"Can you test me now?"

"I can give you a cup." He opened a drawer. "It's a quiet room down the hall. Fifteen minutes. We'd have a result tomorrow, and if you've got sperm, then a pregnancy is possible, and you'd know where you stand."

He held the cup out.

It was a small plastic thing with a white lid and a printed label.

I took it.

I stood in the hall outside the quiet room, and I read the label, and I did not go in.

She had said it once at the boil, and then again at the gate, when I called her name after her.

She had said it clear and flat the way she said numbers when she did the mill's books.

It isn't yours.

I could take the cup into that room and find out she'd lied.

If she had lied, she'd done it to leave me.

If she hadn't, then she had been with somebody else.

I would be standing in a clinic hallway at lunchtime holding the proof of my own mistake and her unfaithfulness in the same hand.

Either way, she had chosen to go.

She had told me twice that she didn't want to be found.

I decided that the kind thing to do for a woman who had left me was to take her at her word.

I told myself it was respect.

I told myself I wasn't a coward, and that a man could believe his wife and still love her and be wrong.

I walked back to the front desk and said, "I need to go."

The nurse said, "The doctor can give you a slip for the lab."

"I'll bring it by."

She handed me a folded sheet and a paper bag.

I put them both in my jacket and went out into the lot.

I drove home with the slip against my ribs.

I sat in the carport a while and then went inside and stood in the kitchen with her reading glasses.

I opened the drawer next to the stove, where she kept the rubber bands and takeout menus.

I put the paper bag in it, and the slip, and the cup inside.

I shut the drawer.

I promised myself I would take it out when I was ready to know.

I didn't open it again for five years.

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