Later that evening, they sat alone in their apartment, wondering if they had made the right decision. In her sweatpants, Kirsten perched cross-legged on the couch with a mug of chamomile tea. She’d twisted some of her blonde hair into a tiny braid that hung in front of her ear. Nate lost interest in the mystery on Masterpiece Theater. Unlike Kirsten, he couldn’t get excited about herbal tea. For him, it had to be the real stuff or nothing. Give him a good Dragon Well or Shizuoka sencha. It was the same with food. He didn’t see how Kirsten could rave about salads and yogurt as if they were real meals. It had to be a gender thing. He turned off the TV with the remote.
“Shouldn’t we at least feel sad about it?” he asked.
The string from the tea bag draped over Kirsten’s mug and ended in a paper rectangle dangling over the ceramic cat’s face.
“It wasn’t your choice. Hell, it wasn’t even your kid.”
That wasn’t what Nate meant but, as always with Kirsten, he couldn’t fit words to his feelings. He remembered her confessing a one-night stand after she missed her period. He didn’t leave. He couldn’t walk away from the woman who brought him blueberry muffins and went with him to the half-price double features at the old cinema. And maybe, he really was the father and the affair was just Kirsten’s ruse to relieve him of guilt. He would have held her hand during the abortion but she didn’t want that so he sat in the waiting room reading a Zen master’s poem about plum blossoms laughing despite the bitter cold. Kirsten had already dressed when he met her in the exam room. She insisted on throwing away the patient couch’s blood-stained paper cover and leaving a thank you note for the doctor. Nate left his innocence behind as well. Giddy as survivors of a plane crash, they drove home on the I-5. Sex was forbidden for a week after so he held Kirsten while she slept off the drugs. He wanted some reassurance that the day’s event wouldn’t follow him through life like a wrecking ball chained to his ankle but Kirsten had been through enough. Cracking her brave façade that the abortion carried no more moral weight than removing a cyst would only damage her.
“I’ll get you more tea.” Nate took her mug to the kitchen.
Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, New Verse News, Otoliths, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Tales of the Talisman. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception. https://jonwesick.com
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