A LOVE STORY

He drove straight over when she announced she was suddenly pregnant, he had already started fucking this other chick even though they hadn’t been broken up for more than 23 hours, hadn’t bothered to change the sheets, you had to feel sorry for the girl, but then she called him, or sent him a text, I didn’t know which with the news. How did it read, “I M PRGNT” would be economical and to the point, and just as game changing. His heart did cart wheels, I had to wonder could it be a tactic, I knew a guy who’s ex lied about having cancer to get the guy back, people are capable of crazy things. But he believed in happy endings and this was a dream come true, he said, although he always had a policy that he never wanted kids, he made it clear to women he romanced, pulling out, his chosen method of birth control, with a 73% rate of accuracy, I imagined. This no-kids-policy was non-negotiable; he hadn’t the time - he liked to watch a lot of Spike TV, his job at UPS took up the rest of his days, ice hockey on Thursday nights - he surrendered his cat to the local shelter, “I want to be fair to the cat,” he said – yet this news sent him over the moon, people are full of surprises.

He did the noble thing, he called up the girl he had been drunk fucking the night before and gave her the good news and the heave-ho – he had a baby to think about, prodding some chick smelling of tequila paled in comparison, even if she did go into overdraft at Victoria’s Secret, he would man up – marry the girl, pick out cribs, bandy about names over two meals and a shared app at The Olive Garden. He wanted to be there when they took that little snap shot that looks like a Polariod with swoosh lines, he would leave the remote buried between the cushions, ask for the afternoon off from captaining the brown truck, maybe not get too too drunk on Saturday night; he was willing to sacrifice, there was a baby on the way.

The Dr’s visit never materialized. Sometime the following week his gal fell off the radar for a few hours, she mumbled something later that it wasn’t meant to be. The whole experience had brought them closer, like the cliché says, but in this case it was true and they were happy and looking for houses somewhere in Northern New Jersey, just far enough away from the landfills so you couldn’t really smell them and the houses were still affordable.