Dennis: Part 8

My grandmother had a very serious conversation with me after the maybe-miscarriage situation.

“Jennifer, with all of the problems you’ve had, with all of the headaches you’ve given us, I’ve never ever threatened to put you out.”

We were in the car. She’d turned down the volume of her Sara McLaughlin CD to lay down the law.

“I raised you when you were little. Your mother was out running around town like a wild woman. She was down at the pier, she was at the club, she was driving her car in her whosit-derby thing.” She got annoyed and waved her hand in the air. “Who was home giving bottles and changing diapers?”

“You,” I said quietly.

“And I know you hate to hear it, but you’re an awful lot like your mother. I hope you get it together. She never did. Your grandfather and I still pay all her bills.”

“I know.”

“You can barely bathe and feed yourself without me getting involved. You think you can take care of a baby?”

I shook my head. She was right. I knew I couldn’t.

“I am telling you this now, so if you get yourself pregnant again-“

“I might not have been pregnant,” I argued. “The tests I took were negative.”

“Where did you buy them?”

I watched all the trees flicking past the car. The drive down the mountain was always so pretty mid-morning.

“Jennifer?”

“The dollar store.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She just sighed. Then she kept talking.

“I’m almost 70. I’m not going to raise another baby. Raising your mother’s unplanned babies didn’t help her out any. I won’t do it for you. If you get pregnant again, you’ll have a choice: put it up for adoption or find another place to live.”

I didn’t say anything at first.

“Jennifer, do you understand me?” her voice was very stern.

“Yes, I understand that.”

“When we get home, check your dresser. Your grandfather and I picked something up for you.”

After we got back from errands, I went to my room. On my dresser there was a massive box of condoms. I didn’t even know they came in such huge containers.

I slept over Dennis’s house that night. We were watching “I am Legend.” We both liked Will Smith movies. He didn’t like “I am Legend” though. He’d already watched it with Zach, but when I said I really wanted to see it, he told me to go ahead and pick it up from Blockbuster.

We were cuddling in his bed like we usually did.

I told him what my grandmother had said.

He kissed the back of my head and he said, “We’ll be more careful. I should have known better. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I told him. “It turned out okay. It made me think though. What would have happened if I’d stayed pregnant-I mean, if I really was. If I had a baby, what would have happened?”

“What do you mean? I would have taken care of you.”

And I had to figure out how to word the next part. I needed to say it without making him feel bad.

“Yeah, but…how?”

“How?”

“Yeah, where would we have lived?”

He kissed my hair again and snuggled into me tighter. “You’d have lived here with me.”

Something sort of shifted in my gut. I looked around at his basement and I saw it in a new way. It was full of junk. Always dirty. So many corners were covered in dust. It wasn’t even a finished basement. In the winter, he hooked up two space heaters. He had no bed-frame, just a mattress on the floor. A month prior to this, I’d found a patch of black mold growing on the wall behind his bed. I found it while he was at work. I asked his grandmother if I could take some cleaning supplies. I had two buckets, one filled with soapy warm water and one with bleach. I cleaned it for him, then I went to pick him up from his shift. I told him I’d found mold growing on the wall, but that I’d cleaned it up. It was one of the only times he was annoyed at me. “You don’t have to clean my room,” he said. “I wanted to,” I told him. “That wasn’t healthy.” “It wasn’t bothering me.” “You knew it was back there?” He asked me to please not clean his room again and changed the subject.

This basement was fine enough. It was kind of gross. I didn’t need much back then though. I was easy. But now he was saying this basement was a place you could put a baby in….a baby crib….surrounded by the piles of garbage and junk, with swords on the wall and stacks of dusty anime dvds….

“You couldn’t have a baby in here,” I told him. “We’d have to get our own apartment.”

“Maybe we should do that anyway.”

My eyes widened.

“I already proposed to you. Maybe we should get our own place.”

And I squealed and twisted around to kiss him.

I went to sleep that night still believing he and I would be together forever. But that’s not what happened.

His code of honor really got in the way and in the end, I couldn’t do it all myself. But I’ll tell that part next.