They Called Me Barren. They Picked the Wrong Wife novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Front Pew

At the Christmas service Lorraine asks the church to pray for Maggie's condition; Maggie reads Neil's lab report aloud, a retired lab technician backs her, and in the parking lot Courtney says Lorraine paid her forty thousand dollars.

I wore my grandmother's red wool coat to Grace Church on Christmas morning.

Lorraine had never seen it, because I had never had the nerve.

Bev walked in beside me and took the aisle seat of the front pew.

"If anyone asks," she said, "I'm here for the carols."

Behind us the church filled up, three hundred people in their good coats, and every one of them looked at me and then looked at the floor.

Lorraine sat two pews back on the other side, between Neil and Courtney.

She had put on her pearls.

Neil would not look at me.

Callum had come in late and taken the last seat by the door, still in his canvas jacket.

I did not turn around to check.

I felt him there anyway.

After the second hymn the pastor stepped up to the lectern and cleared his throat.

"Before the offering, our deaconess has asked to share a family blessing."

Lorraine rose and smoothed her skirt.

She turned to face the congregation with her hands folded, and her eyes were wet.

"This Christmas, the Lord has answered a prayer I carried for years," she said. "My son Neil is going to be a father."

A soft, warm sound went through the church.

Courtney stared at the hymnal in her lap.

"I'm asking you to hold that child in prayer," Lorraine said. "And to hold my daughter-in-law Margaret too, who has struggled so bravely with her condition. She cannot give him a family, and she is taking it very hard."

She looked down at me and smiled with great tenderness.

Three hundred people bowed their heads.

I stood up.

The pew creaked.

Bev's hand squeezed my wrist once, hard, and let go.

I walked to the front of the church with the folder in my hand and turned around and faced them all.

"I'm sorry to interrupt a prayer," I said. "I'd like to be included in it properly."

The pastor said, "Mrs. Rowan, perhaps after the service."

"This will be short."

I opened the folder.

My voice did not shake, and I was a little surprised.

"This is a laboratory report from five years ago. It says Neil Rowan, azoospermia. That means there is no sperm in his sample at all. The cause is listed as damage from the mumps."

I held up the second page.

"This is his signature. He signed it the day he handed it to me."

Nobody moved.

"I have been called barren in this building for five years," I said. "I let you. He asked me to, and I loved him. I'm done."

Neil stood up in his pew, white to the lips.

"That's old," he said. His voice cracked on it. "Maggie, that report is old. I've had it checked since. It happens that men recover."

"Does it?" I said.

A gray-haired woman in the third row got to her feet.

She was a retired hospital lab technician, and she sat in my waiting room every six months for a cleaning.

"Not from that," she said. "Not once it's confirmed."

Lorraine turned to her with a smile. "Oh, you can't know that."

"I read about forty of these a week," the woman said. "It doesn't just go away, Lorraine."

The church was so quiet I could hear the furnace.

Courtney had both hands over her mouth.

Lorraine drew a long breath.

"Margaret is not well," she said, to everyone. "She has been under terrible strain. Let us not shame a grieving woman on Christmas."

She said it so gently that three or four people nodded.

Then the church doors opened and closed at the back.

Callum had come down the aisle.

He stopped at the end of my pew, and I saw that he was looking at his mother, not me.

"Mom," he said.

Lorraine's face changed for the first time.

It was small, only a flicker at the corner of her mouth, but I saw it, and Bev saw it, and the lab technician saw it.

"Callum," Lorraine said softly. "You came home."

"I came home," he said. "Say what you were about to say."

She said nothing.

The organist, who had no idea, started the final carol.

I picked up my coat and walked out through the side door into the snow with the folder against my chest.

I was halfway across the parking lot when I heard running.

Courtney Fenn caught my sleeve.

She was out of breath, with one hand under her belly.

Her mascara had run, and she did not seem to know it.

"It isn't his," she said. "I know it isn't. I never said it was his until she made me."

"Made you how?"

She pulled a folded square of paper out of her coat pocket and pressed it into my hand.

"She paid me forty thousand dollars," Courtney said. "That's the first half."

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