red Christmas lights. Christmas, she thought with a smile as she softly rubbed her protruding abdomen. They would both be safe by Christmas. She stood for a while longer, watching the lights, ignoring the ache in her back and the soreness of her feet.
At least, she thought, that kind of hurt was normal for a pregnant woman. Not like the other—
She shook her head, not wanting to think about that. Instead, she walked carefully across the linoleum floor, now slick with melting snow, and settled onto the bench near the entrance to the women’s room. For a fruitless minute, she attempted to rearrange the oversized, faded red flannel shirt she wore as a jacket so that it covered most of her belly. She gave up when the shirt covered all but a triangle of her double-knit maternity top. Its faded floral print was in shades of lilac-and-pink, and it was loose enough to hide the roll of fabric and the large safety pin that rested on the swell of her belly and kept the stretched-out pink sweatpants from dragging beneath her feet.
Ugly, she’d thought when she’d first seen the outfit she now wore. It was the top layer of a bag of clothes a lady from the church had dropped off at the apartment back in September. I’ll never wear that, she’d thought at the time. Taylor will get a job and stop drinking and then we’ll be happy again. Like we were when we got married. We won’t be needing this kind of charity. But she’d been well brought up, so she’d smiled and thanked the woman for her help, invited her in for a soft drink, and made sure she was gone long before Taylor came home. Taylor hadn’t liked her having folks over to the apartment, and she’d done everything she could to keep Taylor happy.
Now, she smiled again, genuinely grateful for the woman’s help—the woman’s stubborn persistence—and the warmth of the ugly outfit. For a while, she concentrated on the stream of holiday travelers moving in and out through the rest stop’s double doors. Most of them stood for a moment, brushing snowflakes off their coats or stomping their feet on the heavy rubber mat as their eyes moved around the big, open room. She watched, hoping that the kindest looking of them would notice her and smile. But each pair of eyes swept past the pregnant young black woman, usually seeking instead the appropriate restroom. Some travelers spent a few minutes in front of the long row of vending machines before making their selections and going back into the weather to continue their journeys.
An hour later, almost 10:00 p.m., and the crowd of travelers had thinned to a trickle. The young woman stood slowly, pressed her hands into the small of her back and stretched. Then she visited each of the vending machines in turn, entertaining herself by imagining what she would buy if she found money in one of the change dispensers. She decided on the hot chocolate and, when the machines yielded no coins, dug through her pockets, hoping that somehow she had overlooked a few quarters. When she discovered she hadn’t, she shrugged and turned her back on the food.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been hungry, but she regretted the loss of the money she’d so carefully saved and kept hidden from Taylor—almost twenty dollars in ones and loose change. But Taylor had shown up unexpectedly. She’d heard his key, heard the door catch on the chain, heard him shouting in an alcohol-slurred voice for her to open the g-d motherfucking door right now or he’d fucking kill her.
She’d snatched up her flannel shirt and run out the back door, leaving everything else behind, deciding in a heartbeat what she’d been agonizing about for days. A car would be waiting, they’d told her. It would wait for her on Monday and Wednesday and then again on Friday. At 6:00 p.m. All she had to do was make the commitment to begin the journey. On Monday, she’d been sure things between her and Taylor would be better, if only she tried harder. By Wednesday, she hadn’t been sure, so she’d retrieved the money from a hole in the mattress and hidden it underneath the torn lining of her purse. Just in case. On Friday, with Taylor at the door, she’d known she had no other choice.
She’d run to the subway station, keeping to the back alleys just in case Taylor followed her.