Free February by Lisa Moore Page A

breathed hot breath through her panties while she stood there. She had to close her eyes. She played along, fanning herself like crazy, and everybody cheering and laughing. Everybody whooping it up. And when he came out he had the garter swinging around on his finger.
    After a while, Helen wanted to go. She found Cal on the dance floor and dragged him out by the bow tie. She tugged one end of the black shiny bow and the thing came undone with a little pock and she seesawed it against his neck and he caught the end of it in his teeth, and then she dragged him, step by step, off the dance floor by the bow tie.
    Everybody cleared a path and the band tapped the drums with each exaggerated step Cal took, as if he didn’t want to go, as if she were a temptress, as if this were it, the big night, and she was going to chew him up and spit him out and he was frightened to death. He made big terrified eyes and kind of growled, and then he leapt off the dance floor and the band drum-rolled and they were gone out the door and down the steps.
    They had his parents’ car for the night, and how conspicuous they were, checking in at the front desk of the Newfoundland Hotel. Helen had a going-away outfit but they hadn’t bothered to change. The chandeliers and Persian carpets and a waterfall in the lobby. Cal’s tux with black satin trim on the lapels and the bow tie already undone and the shirt with the big frills, and each frill with a line of black piping, and the whole thing untucked because he hated the tux and couldn’t wait to get out of it.
    They were just kids experiencing adult luxury for the first time, and it was a lark and utterly serious. Helen marvels at how serious they were.
    Just twenty and twenty-one.
    She was knocked up, but that wasn’t why they got married. Or maybe it was. They didn’t choose to get married; they did it for their parents or they did it for the big party or they did it because deep in some not-often-used part of their brains, they believed in ritual. Lapsed Catholics, they believed subconsciously that a wedding could weld them together. But they were already welded and Helen had missed her period and she’d told Cal and he’d held her.
    Just put his arms around her, and she could tell he was wishing it wasn’t happening so fast. Cal wanted a little bit of time before they had youngsters, Helen could tell that.
    But he didn’t say.
    Wow, he said. Or he said, Great. Or he didn’t say anything. He moved his hand vigorously up and down her back as if she were a friend in need of consoling. A good buddy who had lost a big bet.
    And she had put her arms around him, too, when she told him about the pregnancy. They had been standing in the kitchen. Cal’s sweater smelled of cigarette smoke and she pressed her face into his chest and felt the roughness of the wool against her forehead, rubbed her face against that roughness. This was his Norwegian sweater with the suede patches because he’d worn out the elbows and his mother had said, Leave that sweater with me. Let me fix those holes.
    This was, Will you marry me? Or, I guess we should get married? Or there was a slight pause while Cal gathered himself together. After all, this was a baby. They were talking about a baby. For Helen, twenty years old had felt very old, very mature, but for Cal it felt as if the two of them were just starting out.
    Wow, he said.
    In the Newfoundland Hotel the bellhop scooped up Helen’s train to help her into the elevator. Someone winked. A businessman opening a newspaper on the couch in the lobby winked at Cal. Helen remembers the bellhop, careful with all the satin. He had a cotton ball in his ear.
    The doors of the elevator closed quiet as could be and Helen put her hand on the ruffles of Cal’s shirt and pushed him back against the elevator wall and stood on tiptoe and kissed him, pressed against him; and the doors opened. There was an elderly couple waiting, and they saw her kissing him and saw the dress, and