A Dangerous Age Read Online Free Page A

first apartment. The bed had just been delivered and we were making it up, but we didn’t even finish making it up. We made you instead. Louise, you must not have intercourse with anyone. If you think you cannot stop from doing it, you must come to me and we’ll get you some birth control pills first. You get pregnant in one second, one
second
. I know you don’t believe that. No one does.”
    I loved her telling me that. She had been drinking wine and she looked like a heroine in a movie, bending near me, her eyes big and wild and her hair curling all over the place like it does when she hasn’t combed it. Plus, I liked the guilt she felt for months afterward for having told me, and her fear that I wouldtell my father that she had told me. He would not have thought it was funny. He’s a serious man and so different from her it’s a wonder they’re still married. I guess they just like to do it.
    And then it was true. I was knocked up. And I wasn’t sorry and neither was Carl. Brian was jealous and Winifred was embarrassed, and we took to standing around the hospital bed, the four of us, trying to decide when to tell the older people in the family. We decided to have the marriage ceremony first and then tell them about the baby.
    “We’ll have the wedding here, in the hospital room,” Carl said. “So Brian can be best man. We’ll get a marine chaplain to do the service. There’s a nice man in the chapel downstairs. I talked to him right after Brian got here. I know he’d do it. Come on, Louise, let’s go talk to him.”
    Get this. I’m knocked up by a twenty-four-year-old marine on his way to Afghanistan for God knows how long. I’m going to get married without telling my parents. A baby is growing inside me. And while we are in the chapel waiting for the marine chaplain to talk to us, my cell phone goes off and Rafael Donald from PBS calls to say there’s some interest in my doing a piece about the national cemeteries in the D.C. area.
    I walked outside the chapel to take the call. “No,” I said. “No more cemeteries. Absolutely not. Ask them if they want to do a piece about babies born while their fathers are away at war. I’m pregnant, Rafael. How’s that for a turn of fate? He’s a twenty-four-year-old marine. I’m marrying him this week. Then he’s going to Afghanistan.”
    “What?” he said. “Louise, have you gone crazy?”
    “Probably,” I answered. “But I’m out of the funeral and cemetery business. I really won’t do that anymore. Who wants to back it?”
    “The station in Boston. WGBH. They’re rolling in dough, Louise. It won’t be about the cemetery. It will be about its history. Well, it’s your idea. Your proposal.”
    “My priorities have altered recently.”
    “I guess they have.” Rafael is married to an actress. She plays a doctor on
Days of Our Lives
. He worships her and talks about her all the time, even
quotes
her opinions on films. He’s a terrible romantic and wonderful to work with.
    “How about I send a crew to film the shotgun wedding? You’re photogenic as hell, Louise. Is this marine good looking also?”
    “What do you think? He’s twenty-four. He helped me move the beds into my new apartment. His twin brother’s in Walter Reed having his face put back together after a bomb blew up his vehicle in Afghanistan. Our new metaphors and stories, all sprung from our deepest fears. I’m ecstatically happy, Rafael. I’ve never felt this way. I’m giddy.”
    “Where will the wedding be?”
    “In the hospital, by his brother’s bed, with the widow of a nine-eleven victim for the maid of honor.”
    “I want to film it. Just one camera? Will you do it?”
    “Sure. But I won’t say for sure I’ll let you use it.”
    “That’s fair. I’ll send Carter Wilson. He’s so good, when you see the pictures you’ll want us to use it.”
    “Ten four.” I hung up and went back into the chapel and sat down by Carl and thought about getting to know him, but