Chapter 41: Positive

Molly's coffee smelled wrong.

She set it down on the gym's front desk and pushed it away with one finger.

She had made it the same way every morning for a year, and this morning one breath of it turned her stomach.

"You okay?" the front-desk assistant asked.

"Fine."

On the little set above the weights, the news replayed Mr. Wainright's wheelchair rolling down the courthouse ramp.

Molly turned her back on the screen.

"You've been green since Sunday."

Molly counted days in her head and stopped.

Her body had been wrong all week, tired and queasy and sore.

She had been busy, and frightened, and sleeping on a floor, and she told herself it was all of that.

At lunch she walked to the pharmacy on the corner and bought a box she did not look at, and a candy bar she did not want.

The gym's ladies' room had one stall and a mirror with a crack in the corner.

She locked the door.

She read the instructions twice.

Then she sat on the closed lid with the stick in her hand and watched the window.

It took less time than the box said.

Two lines, dark and clear.

Molly put her free hand over her mouth.

She was twenty-three years old.

Nine days ago she had stood in a bedroom and asked a man for this, and he had said not after, now.

She started to laugh, and then she was crying, and she stuffed her sleeve against her mouth so the junior class would not hear.

She wanted Troy so badly that her knees shook.

But he was across town at the district attorney's office giving a statement about Dane, with Hazel asleep in a carrier on his chest.

Tomorrow was the lawyers.

Saturday was the dinner, and Judith, and a ballroom.

He would hear it and drop everything, and then his hands would go to her stomach, and he would carry two gates instead of one.

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