Traps Read Online Free Page A

just think we should wait a while.”
    “I know uncertainty is not your best thing, but the truth is, anything can happen. The treatment could work and I could live to be a hundred, still teaching surfing and annoying my neighbors with flamenco music. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow on my way to Rite Aid to buy more Boost.”
    “Not if I buy you more Boost.”
    He closes his eyes and presses a last kiss on her forehead. They can hear footsteps approaching in the hall. He takes his hand off the door.
    “Have fun tonight,” she says, and then she steps out into the long beige hallway and turns left, away from his guests, and walks away without looking back. The sound of his Spanish music shimmies and pumpsbehind her and fades a bit each time she turns the corner, turns the corner, past the dark brown doors and the one little welcome mat, one little wreath, past her own door to the elevator to the garage.
    The Boost, it turns out, is at the end of an aisle stocked disconcertingly with bedpans and adult diapers, and it takes her a second, standing there in the fluorescent light, to make herself move to take some from the shelf. The Muzak from above is something familiar but slowed down, and played with a tinny-sounding piano that makes her sad. The cans are grouped in packs of twelve, slipcovered in a cardboard case with a handle at the top, and when she places her hands on a pair at eye level on the top shelf and slides them back and off, taking their weight like a village girl with two buckets of water, she sees that there, pressed against the white perforated metal back wall of the shelving where the two cases of Boost used to be, is a single boxed pregnancy test.
    Dana looks up and down the aisle for other boxes like it, but of course there are none. It is an aisle for the sick and dying. The box is pink, with a picture of a delighted woman holding the white plastic test stick, and a band of blue reads, “Second Test Free Inside.” On the shelf on either side of it is a thin furry strip of dust, where the cases of Boost never reach.
    Back in the garage she finds the door to Ian’s green Volkswagen unlocked, as she knew she would, and she places the cases of Boost on his seat. Her apartment is dark now, but her window is still cracked and through it she can hear the flamenco music and the laughter from his party. She passes through her dark living room and flicks on the lights in her bathroom, and from her backpack she withdraws the boxed test. The instruction sheet crackles as she takes it out. She examines the pictograms. She reads the tiny print. She pulls down her pants and holds the stick between her legs, staring at her socks on the floor on the blue circle of rug. A faint chorus of cheers floats in from Ian’s party, and she recaps the stick and sets it facedown on the counter and fastens her pants and then flushes and washes her hands, soaping thoroughly. When she has dried them, she flips it over and sees that she is in fact pregnant.
    Over the next hour, even with the blinds drawn and the window closed fully, she can hear the backbeat from Ian’s music. The Planned Parenthood website shows eight clinics offering abortion services within a ten-mile radius of her apartment. The American Cancer Society recommends a fifteen-step process for handling a denial of claim for prescribed treatments. The Patient Advocate Foundation has several sample letters of appeal. She owes him the news, she knows this, but it is ten o’clock, and his apartment is full of people, and the news is not only private, but also (she is certain) to him it will be heartbreakingly sad. Dana’s printer whirs and clicks, and she collates and staples as the papers roll out into the tray. She labels folders. She separates her printouts inside them with little colored tabs. Last, from under her keyboard she takes a cream-colored envelope addressed to Ms. Dana Bowman. There is an invitation inside it to the wedding, and a little card with