Excerpt: Endings and Beginnings

“Mae, I was worried you wouldn’t make it.”
“I said I would be here,” I look at my watch, “okay, so I’m a few minutes late.”
She rolls her eyes and the hostess leads us to a table in the corner. Quiet can never be a word used to describe a restaurant, unless of course, you are a celebrity and rent the entire place. A young woman in a white shirt and pony tail takes our order.
“What are you going to do?” Clare asks.
“About what?” I canvas the room casually.
She goes to smack my arm, misses, and hits the table instead. Several conversations end abruptly as the noise draws their attention. A smile spreads across my face. Clare looks down at the table cloth and whispers, “This isn’t funny Mae!”
“Clare, what do you want me to tell you? I really haven’t decided yet. I haven’t even had a chance to talk to Frank about this.” I ponder those words as they tumble from my lips and realize how ludicrous they are in light of Frank’s recent remarks. “I’ll give you half of everything, even the house.” Of course, I am still wondering if I dreamt that conversation.
“Mae, I’m pregnant.” All at once it seemed as if Clare was a soap opera I had unintentionally lingered on while flipping through the channels of my television set. What had I missed? My shocked expression acted as a dramatic pause, courageously she continued her dramatic sequence.
“I suppose you can guess who the father is?”
I pretend and guess, “Bud”? Perhaps more assertively than I should have.
She heaved a great sigh and explained, “I hate being the other woman.”
“Does he know?”
She shook her head no. “I’m not going to tell him, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my job, but .... I’m not going to tell him.”
“Why?” I ask, honestly curious.
Clare pulled her long auburn hair back and tossed it over her shoulders. She sat straight up in her chair and sighed. “He won’t leave her. I mean, I always knew that, men never leave their wives. And, if I told him about the baby, it would just connect me to him forever. The pain of not being able to be with him, married to him, loving him, would be unbearable.”
The server handed us our drinks.
I took a sip of my unsweetened tea and considered what Clare was telling me. It made sense of course, but that didn’t mean she would earnestly go through with it. Clare never did well being alone.
She took my silence as encouragement to continue, “I’ve been thinking about this, and, well, I think the bankruptcy is a godsend.”
Her remark surprised me enough to send tea spewing from my mouth. “What do you mean Clare? What are you babbling about?”
Typically, those words would make her strike back at me and we would engage in harmless best friend repartee. Instead.
“I’m not married like you Mae. I haven’t had the good fortune to find the perfect man to help me raise a child. I’m getting out. I’m not going to leave my child with a nanny or a grandparent for days at a time while I travel the world hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from home. I just couldn’t live with myself.”