The Gift

“She'd have said I like you.” He grinned, looking sheepish, and she noticed freckles on the bridge of his nose for the first time. They were tiny and almost golden in the bright sunlight. “She'd have been right too. Usually she wasn't.” But Annie would have sensed immediately how much he liked her. Maribeth was more mature than the girls he knew at school, and the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. “I think she would really have liked you.” He smiled gently, and lay back on the sand, looking at Maribeth with unconcealed admiration. “What about you? You have a boyfriend back home?” He decided to ask her now so he'd know where things stood, and she hesitated for a moment. She thought about telling him the fiction of the young husband in the Korean war, but she just couldn't. She'd explain it to him later on, if she still had to.

“Nope. Not really.”

“But sort of?”

She shook her head firmly this time in answer. “I went out with one guy I thought I liked, but I was wrong. And anyway, he just got married.”

He looked intrigued. An older man. “Do you care? That he's married, I mean?”

“Not really.” All she cared about was that he had left her with a baby. A baby she couldn't keep, and didn't really want. She cared about that a lot, but said nothing about it to Tommy.

“How old are you, by the way?”

“Sixteen,” and then they discovered that their birthdays were only weeks apart. They were exactly the same age, but their situations were very different. However useless to him they were at the moment, he was still part of a family, he had a home, he was going back to school in the fall. She had none of those things anymore, and in less than five months she was having a baby, the baby of a man who had never loved her. It was overwhelmingly scary.

He walked out into the lake after a little while, and she went with him. They stood together while he fished, and when he finally got bored, he walked back to the shore and left his fishing pole, and dived into the water, but she didn't join him. She waited for him on the sand, and when he came out, he asked her why she hadn't gone swimming. It was a hot sunny day and the cool water felt good on his flesh. She would have loved to swim with him, but she didn't want him to see her bulging belly. She kept her father's shirt on the entire time, and only slipped her jeans off while they stood in the water.

“Can you swim?” he asked, and she laughed, feeling silly.

“Yeah, I just didn't feel like it today. I always feel a little creepy swimming in lakes, you never know what's in the water with you.”

“That's dumb. Why don't you go in? There aren't even any fish, you saw I couldn't catch one.”

“Maybe next time,” she said, drawing designs in the sand with her fingers. They ate lunch sitting in the shade of an enormous tree, and talked about their families and their childhoods. She told him about Ryan and Noelle, and how her father thought that sons should get everything, and girls didn't need to do anything except get married and have kids. She told him about how she wanted to be something one day, like a teacher or a lawyer, or a writer, how she didn't want to just get married and have kids straight out of high school.

“You sound just like my mom,” he smiled. “She made my dad wait for six years after she finished high school. She went to college and got her degree, and then she taught for two years, and after that they got married. And then it took her seven years to have me, and another ten to have Annie. I think they had a really hard time having kids. But education is really important to my mom. She says the only valuable things you've got are your mind, and your education.”

“I wish my mom felt like that. She does everything my dad tells her to. She thinks girls don't need to go to college. My parents don't want me to go. They would have let Ryan, probably, if he'd wanted to, but he just wanted to work in the shop with my dad. He'd have gone to Korea, except he was 4-F, but Dad says he's a great mechanic. You know,” she tried to explain things to him she had never said to anyone before, “I always felt different from them. I've always wanted things no one else in my family cares about. I want to go to school, I want to learn a lot of things, I want to be really smart. I don't just want to catch some guy, and have a bunch of kids. I want to make something of myself. Everyone I know just thinks I'm crazy.” But he didn't, and she sensed that, he came from a family that felt exactly the way she did. It was as though she had been dropped off at the wrong place when she was born, and had been doomed to a lifetime of misunderstandings. “I think my sister will do what they want in the end. She complains, but she's a good kid. She's thirteen, but she's already boy crazy.” On the other hand, Noelle hadn't gotten pregnant by Paul Browne in the front seat of his car, so Maribeth felt she was in no position to cast aspersions.

“You really ought to talk to my mom sometime, Maribeth. I think you'd like her.”