I Left Pregnant and Swore She Wasn't His, Now He Wants the Truth novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Boil
I am sick behind a crawfish tent, the wrong woman announces my baby, and my husband says he had a vasectomy and asks whose it is in front of the whole yard.
I was sick behind the boil tent at my father-in-law's sixty-sixth birthday, and Delphine Arceneaux watched me do it.
She stood at the edge of the tent with a paper plate of crawfish in one hand.
She didn't look surprised.
"You're green, Odette," she said.
"It's the smell of the boil," I said.
"You've worked this boil for six years."
I wiped my mouth with a napkin and tried to walk past her.
She stepped into my way and smiled.
"Are you pregnant?"
I said no, and she heard what I didn't say.
That morning I had driven to a specialist in the city and paid in cash so nothing would reach our insurance.
She was a tired woman in a white coat who showed me a gray flicker on a screen and said, "Twelve weeks."
Then she said, "I can't tell you to keep it. I can tell you what happens if the placenta goes the way it went last time."
I knew what happened.
I had lain on our bathroom tile fourteen months ago and watched my husband press both hands into me, saying my name over and over.
Our son was born still at twenty-eight weeks.
In the hospital Gabe held my hand and said, "I won't do that again. I'd rather have you than any child."
I had heard it as an order.
Since then we had been careful, and I had been careful, and three weeks of antibiotics in March had made me careless.
I meant to tell him tonight, at home, with the door shut.
I had not decided what I would say when he told me to end it.
"Everybody!" Delphine called.
She raised her plate.
Four hundred people in the mill yard turned to look, with their paper bibs and their beers.
The zydeco band stopped halfway through a chorus.
"I think Odette has news."
"Delphine," I said.
"Look at her face, y'all."
From the stage Armand laughed.
He was a big man with silver hair and a voice made for a microphone, and he walked to the front of the stage.
"Is it true, cher?"
I said nothing.
"A baby," Armand said to the yard.
The people near the stage began to clap.
"A Guidry heir," he said, "on my sixty-sixth birthday, after all of it. Gabriel, come up here, son."
Gabe was standing by the scale house with a beer he hadn't touched.
I saw him hear it.
I saw his face go gray, the same gray as the tile, and my own stomach turned over again.
He came through the crowd without answering anyone who touched his arm.
"Daddy," he said, quietly.
"Say something to your wife."
"That's not possible."
He said it to Armand, not to me.
Armand kept smiling for the people near the front.
"What's not possible, son?"
"I had a vasectomy in August."
Nobody in the yard made a sound.
The band's fiddle player lowered his bow.
I heard myself say, "You what?"
Gabe looked at me then, and I saw he hadn't meant to say it loud.
I saw him know that it was too late.
"I was going to tell you," he said.
"In August?"
"After Mardi Gras. Then after Easter."
"You cut yourself open and let me lie next to you for eight months," I said.
"Odette."
"Whose is it?" Armand asked the yard.
Gabe didn't stop him.
He stood there with the mill's lights over him and the whole parish watching, and he turned back to me.
"Whose is it?" he said.
He said it low, so only the first rows heard.
It was enough.
I could have said, Yours, you stubborn fool, and the lab would have said so too, one day.
Then he would have driven me to Lafayette himself.
He would have sat in the waiting room with that gray face and told the doctor yes, whatever it took.
I would have watched him do it, because he loved me.
I put my hand flat on my stomach where nobody could see it through the dress.
"You're right," I said.
"It isn't yours."
The word went through the crowd in a wave.
Gabe didn't move.
Delphine put down her plate.
I took my keys out of the pocket of my dress and walked through four hundred people, and not one of them stopped me.
Armand's voice followed me out of the gate.
"Let her go, Gabriel. She's shown us who she is."
My car was parked behind the scale house, with my handbag on the seat.
I had no clothes, no phone charger and no plan.
I had a grandmother in Breaux Bridge who would take me in, and a husband who would look for me there first.
I drove east.
I went past Rayne and Scott and Lafayette, with the radio off, and I didn't cry until the Basin.
The Atchafalaya bridge is eighteen miles of black water and concrete with nowhere to turn around.
Halfway across, my phone lit on the passenger seat.
It was not a call.
It was a line of white text on a plain gray screen.
[Mother's Ledger opened.]
I didn't touch it.
A second line came under it.
[Task 1: Keep driving.]
I kept driving.
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