Free The Bookstore by Deborah Meyler

coffee into her round white mugs. As she brings one to me, she says, “This does not happen when you’re a lesbian.”
    “It’s definitely a plus in the lesbian column,” I say.
    “What does your mother say?” she asks.
    The reluctance to tell them is visceral. To inflict such disappointment. One of the lures of traveling down this road is that that telephone call never needs to happen. I watch as the cat settles himself comfortably on a beanbag strewn with underwear. “Earl’s glad you’re back,” I say.
    Stella just regards me over her coffee cup.

    THE NEXT DAY, after I’ve had breakfast, I flip open my laptop and start to work on my paper. I can’t concentrate. If I have the baby, I won’t be able to concentrate for the next eighteen years.
    I keep trying, and manage some workmanlike stuff thatdoesn’t require inspiration, and then I check my phone, check my e-mail, go on Facebook. I read other people’s posts, make jaunty comments, flitter away the time, profane the time.
    Bryan Gonzales, another art history student, calls me and invites me to a party at Columbia tonight. I say I can’t at such short notice. “Ah, come on, Esme. Bradley Brinkman is coming, and you all go weak at the knees for him.”
    I refuse again, tell him I am tired, tell him I will come to the get-together at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Sunday instead. If I am going to do this, then I can at least pay some sort of respect, treat this with all due seriousness.
    I lie in the dark. The rain is falling; I can hear the ebb and flow of tires on the wet tarmac, swooshing up dark spray. Through the blinds, blue ambulance lights flash on my ceiling from time to time, and car headlights arc by, ceaselessly repeated. Somewhere near, someone is playing a solo on a trumpet, making it sound more wistful than I thought a trumpet could ever sound, and I hear the notes dying, each one, on the air, like sparks from a fire fading into the dark.
    The tiredness is real, but I do not sleep, cannot sleep. For hour after hour I keep vigil with the bunch of cells, the mourner and the executioner.
    Sometime in the darkest part of the night, I notice that the trumpet has long been silent. There is nothing to indicate the time, no church clock chiming the hour, no early birdsong as advent to the dawn. I have been lying here the whole night long and it has been different from any other time in my life when I have been still and quiet and alone. I know why. It is because I am not alone.
    I have been thinking about a lot of things—about what matters, what seems to matter, what doesn’t matter at all. About God, too. I don’t know if he’s a he, a being with eyes to see us, ears to hear us, tears to weep for us. Or, if he can hear us, whether he can help us. I don’t know—we none of us know—if he is there, or if he was there once, and then got tired and walked away, so that we were left alone. But whether there is a God or not makes no differenceto me. I have been doing my own creating, and I don’t believe I have enough of a reason to get tired and walk away. There are many, many reasons, good reasons, to terminate a pregnancy. But that my PhD at Columbia might be a bit trickier now is not one of them. Nor is the intolerable hurt that for this baby’s father there was no hot night for its making.
    With the New York dawn chorus of clanking crates from delivery vans, I reach for my phone, call the clinic, and leave a message on their voice mail canceling the appointment. I finally turn my head on the pillow to sleep.

    WHEN I TELL Stella, she flings her arms around me and says that keeping the baby is cool, cool, cool. Then she says, “Hey, I’ll be your birth partner if you want. Like a doula or something?”
    “What’s that? What would you do?”
    She shrugs. “I dunno. I guess I would yell ‘Push’ or ‘Pull’ or something. But really, it’s great. And now, Esme?”
    “What?”
    “Call your mother .”
    I still have no desire at all to