Free The Mourning Hours by Paula Treick Deboard

bedsprings squeaking, her protests that she wasn’t going to leave.... Sitting on the couch next to Johnny, she seemed as sweet and harmless as a slice of apple pie.
    I couldn’t help watching her stomach, too—to see if it began to pooch out the way it happened with the married women at church. First it was a rounded blip, then a tight waistline, and before you knew it we were gathered in the church basement among streams of blue or pink crepe paper, discussing stretch marks and twenty-hour labors.
    If it happened to those women at church, it could happen to Stacy Lemke, too. I spied on her whenever I got a chance, peeking at her stomach around the edges of my history textbook. I tried to imagine slender Stacy with her belly button protruding, her hands gripping the sides of her stomach, lowering herself carefully to sit. And what would Johnny be like as a father? Proud? Embarrassed?
    It was funny because this—or something like this—was what I’d wanted last summer, when my heart had done a lopsided somersault every time I’d bumped into Stacy Lemke in town. I’d wanted Stacy for Johnny so that I could have a bit of Stacy for myself. But somehow, I thought, it had all gone wrong.
    “Let me braid your hair, Kirsten,” Stacy coaxed on one of those fall evenings.
    I considered, then shook my head slowly.
    “Aw, come on,” Stacy said, reaching for me playfully.
    “I don’t know.”
    She reached for me anyway, her hands gathering a mess of hair at the back of my neck. Last summer I would have loved this. I would have melted into a puddle at her touch. Now I remembered the way she and Johnny had laughed at me, and I pulled back. “I don’t want to.”
    Stacy sank back into the couch, frowning, her arms folded across her chest.
    Johnny sighed. “Don’t you have some homework to do, pip-squeak? Something upstairs?”
    I slipped off the couch and plodded to my room, where Emilie was engrossed in this month’s Seventeen. The cover read, “Thirteen Ways to Wear this Skirt.” How could there be thirteen ways to wear a skirt? I could only think of one.
    “Do you think Johnny and Stacy will get married in our church or her church?” I asked.
    Emilie gave me a look of disgust and went back to her magazine. “They’re not getting married, dummy,” she said. “They’re just dating, that’s all.”
    “But if they really love each other—”
    Emilie dog-eared a page of the magazine and set it aside. “Let’s put it this way. If they get married, it’s because she’s pregnant. If she gets pregnant, her parents will kill Johnny, then her. So there won’t even be a wedding to worry about. Capisce? ” That was her new word, picked up from TV.
    I sighed. “Capisce.”
    Even after careful watching, I really couldn’t tell if there was a difference in Stacy. Johnny, on the other hand, had become suddenly gaunt. He had gone on the wrestler’s diet like he did every fall, shedding the weight he’d gained during the spring and summer. It wasn’t unusual for Johnny to hit 190 pounds in the off-season, although he wrestled in the 160s. In the past, he’d eaten egg-white shakes for breakfast, ran laps around the barn, jumped rope, sprinted up the bleachers, lifted weights in the gym. Sweated, then sweated some more.
    But this year, he’d lost much of the weight without even trying. I didn’t notice it when he was bundled up in sweatshirts and warm-up pants, but when he sat across from us at the kitchen table in just a T-shirt, his arms looked positively scrawny, his chest sunken. Any sign of a bulge on his stomach—Aunt Julia’s lingonberry kuchen, Mom’s beef brisket—had completely disappeared.
    “Are you trying to drop another weight class or something?” Dad asked one night when Johnny refused a second helping of Mom’s turkey tetrazzini.
    Johnny shrugged. “I ate something before practice.”
    Dad sat back in his chair, studying Johnny carefully. “Does Coach want you to drop more