"Closer Than They Appear" by Cary Rainey

I’m a woman and nobody’s getting away with treating me like trash and nothing’s going to stand in my way.  I’m a good girl, just like my daddy taught me to be and I’m always going to be a good girl (right, Daddy?) and if anyone or anything wants to mess that up for me, well, Sunshine, that’s just tough shit because my daddy told me that good girls are princesses and princesses always get what they want and I’m pretty and I’m smart and I’m interesting and this is my time, this is my decade, my day in the sun, but the sun’s a cold flat dime in the sky and it wasn’t water.  It was ice and the car isn’t completely on the asphalt anymore and I hear myself whisper, “Oh no,” and I’m thinking: Garfunkel, Garfunkel, Garfunkel.  I don’t panic and I don’t freak out.  It’s just ice and there has been a steady, if meager, flow of traffic all morning and my right foot stays steady on the gas as my left foot drops lightly but quickly onto the brake pedal.

Good girl, I hear Daddy say.

Princess.

Melanie was my idea.  I was taking a bath one afternoon after lunch, and I was trying to look at the marriage through Danny’s eyes when the thought came to me like a bolt out of the blue.  Whatever problems we were having, whatever was wrong with our relationship, whatever I had done to mess things up, I knew how to fix, I thought without any doubt in my mind at all.  A baby would make things right.  No, not just right.  A baby, I realized as I stared down at my flat stomach, imagining it swollen, would make everything perfect.

I want to look behind me because I’m thinking about how the things coming up behind you are always closer than they appear and I need to know where that truck is, but I don’t look behind me.  I keep my eyes locked in place, focused on everything in front of the car: the road and the guardrail on my right and the empty lanes to my left and the steering wheel and my fingers and the windshield-wipers and the snow.

I told him on a Tuesday morning.  He had just gotten out of the shower and he had just come into the bedroom, still dripping and wearing his towel around his waist, and I told him, as soon as he came into the room, I said we needed to talk.  He came over and sat on the side of the bed and I told him.  He was quiet for a minute and judging by the look on his face, it would have been easy for someone who doesn’t know him to think he wasn’t very happy about the news, but I knew different.  I knew he was just letting it sink in and when it had, he would be overwhelmed with happiness and things would be just like they had been before, things would be even better than before, things would be perfect, and when he opened his eyes and looked at me, the look on his face told me all I needed to know. 

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