"Are you okay?" Lexie asked. "You sound funny."

"I'm fine. I just wondered if you were coming to the store today. I thought we'd have lunch."

"No, I switched shifts. I'm working the three to eleven."

"How come?"

"Praline and Brownie have roseola, so I can't take them to day care, but my neighbor said she'd keep them tonight."

"Oh."

"Novalee, is something wrong?"

"Well . . . not really. I just need to talk to you."

"Come on over now. What time do you have to be at work?"

The line was quiet for several seconds.

"Novalee?"

"Huh?"

"What's the matter? What's going on?"

"I think I might be pregnant."

Lexie lived in low-income housing at the edge of town, a complex that had, years before, been a motel. Four units surrounded a pool, which the tenants called the toxic tub. The grounds, patches of bare earth and a half-dozen stunted cedars, were littered with rusted tricycles, airless inner tubes, trash can lids and chunks of bricks. Two skinny hounds licking at a greasy spot in the parking lot were undisturbed when Novalee pulled in behind them.

153.

The door to Lexie's apartment, number 128, was decorated with Santa and Rudolph and Christmas bells. Halloween was just a week away.

"Hi, n.o.bbalee," Brownie said. "I have roy-rolla. See?" He pulled up his Mutant Ninja pajama shirt to reveal a rash across his belly.

"Does it hurt?"

"Yes, but I'm a big boy," he said as he strutted back to the television and Wile E. Coyote.

"I'm in the bathroom, Novalee," Lexie called. "Coffee's on."

Novalee went to the kitchen, but settled for a gla.s.s of water. She didn't need coffee, but that was partly because her stomach wasn't ready for chocolate chip mocha, Lexie's coffee of choice, and partly because of the brightness. Lexie had painted everything with Glidden white glossy enamel, a garage sale bargain at fifty cents a gallon. On bright, sunny days the glare was blinding. The rooms were so shiny, so brilliant, that Praline, the blondest and fairest of the children, wore an old green velvet hat with a black veil to protect her eyes when she first woke up. That's when Lexie called her Madam Praline and served her milk in a dainty china cup.

Lexie sailed into the kitchen wearing another of her garage sale purchases, a filmy chiffon gown that she said was exactly like one Marilyn Monroe wore in Some Like It Some Like It Hot. Hot.

"Tell me everything."

"Okay." Novalee took a sip of water, then ran her tongue across her lips. "The guy I told you about . . ."

"The one who works in the garage."

"Troy Moffatt. Well, I went to bed with him . . . and Lexie, I'm scared to death I'm pregnant."

"Didn't he use anything?"

"No."

154.

"Did you?"

"No. Yes. I mean, I'm on birth control pills, only . . ."

"Then you don't have anything to worry about."

"But I've only been on them a little while."

"That's probably why you're late then. They can throw you off schedule the first couple of months."

"I just don't trust them."

"How late are you?"

"Well, I don't know if I am."

"What do you mean?"

"See, it's not time for my period yet. I'm not due to start for another couple of weeks."

"Then how pregnant could you be? I mean, if the pills didn't work, how far along could you be? Two weeks?"

"No."

"A week?"

Novalee shook her head.

"How long then?"

"Nine . . . ten hours."

Lexie smiled, squeezed Novalee's hand, then got up and poured herself a cup of coffee. "Honey, I think it's a little early to start worrying."

"No . . . it's not! It's exactly the right right time to worry. Now! When maybe I can do something about it." time to worry. Now! When maybe I can do something about it."

"You mean an abortion?"

"No, not that. Not like that."

Lexie looked puzzled. "Like what?"

"Well, I don't know. That's why I came to you."

"Me?"

"You work in a hospital, so . . ."

155.

"Novalee, look who you're talking to. I have four kids. Four! You think if I knew what to do . . ."

"But there are ways. I've heard . . ."

"Oh yeah. I've heard that stuff, too. The first time, I took quinine pills. A girl at school told me that would take care of it. It didn't. My G.o.d-fearing folks kicked me out of the house because I'd sinned and 'brought shame on them' and a few months later, I named my first baby Brummett."

"Brummett?"

"Well, I called him Brownie because that's what I craved the whole time I was pregnant." Lexie sipped at her coffee, then she said, "The second time, I tried sneezing."

"I never heard about that."

"Well, I hadn't either, but there was a newspaper story about a woman who had a miscarriage because she couldn't stop sneezing.

So, I figured if it worked for her, why not me? I sniffed black pepper, red pepper, cayenne pepper. I tickled my nose with feathers, cotton b.a.l.l.s, weeds. I plucked out eyebrows till I almost didn't have any left.

And it worked. I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed. And nine months later, I had a baby girl I called Praline."

Lexie stirred another spoon of sugar into her coffee.

"Now the third time, I jumped."

"You jumped."

"There was a Gypsy woman lived down by the Willis Bridge. I heard she had some kind of magic. She did. She said, 'Girl, if you jump backwards nine times before the sun comes up, you'll lose that baby.'

So I jumped. But just to be on the safe side, for extra insurance, I jumped backwards for over a mile. All the way from Parrish Road to the quarry. I had blisters, stone bruises, shin splints, a dislocated 156 kneecap . . . and in May, I had twins. No, honey, I don't know of one thing you can do but wait and see."

"How about one of those kits . . . a pregnancy test?"

"I don't think that's going to tell you anything after ten hours, but . . ."

They turned toward the kitchen door as Praline, wearing a Minnie Mouse nightshirt and her green velvet hat, shuffled into the room, her eyes puffy from sleep.

"Oh, oh. Madam Praline's up."

As Praline crawled into Lexie's lap, she said, "n.o.bbalee, I got the rolly-rolly."

"I know it, honey."

Lexie adjusted the black veil over Praline's face. "Would you like to have a cup of juice?"

"Yes, and . . . and . . ." Then Praline sneezed-twice.

"Bless you, Madam Praline," Lexie said. "Bless you."

Novalee spent the next two weeks trying to avoid Troy Moffatt.

He came to the front of the store several times a day, but she managed to stay too busy to do more than say h.e.l.lo. When he called her at home, she found excuses not to talk.

She had little appet.i.te and didn't sleep more than a few hours at a time. She got out of bed three or four times a night to go to the bathroom, certain that she knew the cause of the pressure on her bladder. Sometimes when she got up, she felt sick and dizzy, the way she had when she was first pregnant with Americus.

Then one morning, sometime before dawn, when she was just at the edge of sleep, Novalee felt the familiar wetness between her legs and it was over. She was free again. She was who she had been . . .

157.

without quinine, without vinegar or aspirin and c.o.ke . . . without sneezing or jumping. She had been lucky this time.

She remembered something then, something from a book she had read about India, about women of the Untouchable caste, women who aborted their pregnancies by burning themselves with iron rods heated in burning coals.

Suddenly, Novalee sat straight up in bed, sleep no longer a consideration.

She got up, turned on her light and started pulling books out of the stacks on the floor beside her bed. When she found the one she wanted, she flipped through it until she saw what she was looking for, then read again a poem about a black woman who aborted her child.

Novalee picked up another book, ran her hand across its cover. It was the story of an Arab woman who had, when she was young, put spiders inside her body, spiders whose bites, she had been told, would cause her to miscarry.

Novalee lifted a small book from the bottom of a stack, a book she had just finished reading, a story about a Jewish girl named Brenda who got a diaphragm because her boyfriend asked her to.

Novalee looked around her at a room filled with books. Books stacked in corners, standing on her dresser, crammed into her headboard, pushed into a bookcase. And in the library, Forney's library, there were more. More books . . . more stories . . . more poems.

And suddenly, Novalee knew-knew what she hadn't known before.

She wasn't who she had been. She would never again be who she was before.

She was connected to those women she had read about.

Untouchables. Black women. Arab women. She was connected to them just as she had been to girls in seventh-grade gym cla.s.ses and to make-believe women named Brenda and to real ones named Lexie.

158.

She remembered then the first day she met Forney, her first day in the library, when he had swooped up and down the aisles, plucking books from shelves . . . reading from one, then another . . . holding books, talking to them as if they were live . . . talking about trees and poetry and paintings . . . and she hadn't understood then, hadn't understood any of it. But now she was beginning to, and was sorry she had to wait for morning to see Forney . . . to tell him that she was finally beginning to understand.

Chapter Sixteen.