He thought for about three weeks. Then he moved to Austin with a girl from his band and changed his phone number.
I decided to keep my baby. It was the easiest decision I’ve ever made and also the scariest.
When I told my family, my mother’s first words were, “Well. What are people going to say?”
My father said nothing. He just looked at the kitchen table.
Brinn said, “Oh, Jenna,” in the voice you’d use if someone told you their dog got hit by a car.
Kyle said, “Who’s the dad? Is he gonna pay?”
That was it. That was my family’s reaction to the news that I was having a baby.
Over the next months, it got worse in small ways. My mother stopped asking me to church events. She’d always invited me to the fall bazaar and the Christmas cookie sale, and suddenly she didn’t. At Easter, she introduced me to a woman from her Bible study as “my middle one, Jenna, she’s having a little situation.” A little situation. I was seven months pregnant at the time, standing right there.
Once, when I was crying about Derek on the phone, my mother said, “Well, you chose this situation, Jenna. Nobody made you keep it.”
Keep it.
When Maisie was born in August, after nineteen hours of labor, the only person in the delivery room with me was my best friend, Vanessa. My parents said they’d come up the next weekend. They didn’t. They came three weeks later for one afternoon. My mother held Maisie for about four minutes, said she looked “just like that man,” handed her back, and spent the rest of the visit talking about Brinn’s kitchen remodel.
My father held her for a little longer. He didn’t say much. But when he handed her back, I saw his eyes were wet, and he looked away fast before my mother could see.
I’d forgotten about that until the drive home. I remembered it somewhere around Olympia, in the rain. My father’s wet eyes. It was the only thing that made me cry in the car.
When I got back to my apartment in Seattle, I’d just set Maisie’s car seat down on the kitchen floor when my phone rang. Vanessa.
Vanessa Kim had been my best friend since freshman year at the University of Washington, when we got stuck as lab partners in biology and she accidentally set my sleeve on fire with a Bunsen burner. She was a NICU nurse now at Seattle Children’s. She’d held my hand through nineteen hours of labor and called me a warrior and threatened to punch the anesthesiologist when he took too long.
“Hey,” she said. “I thought you were in Portland. I wanted to see how the birthday was going.”
“I’m home.”
There was a pause.
“You okay?” she asked. Her voice went soft, that tone nurses use when they already know the answer is going to be messy.
And I finally let myself cry.
Not loud. Not dramatic. The kind of crying that comes out of exhaustion and realization at the same time. I told her everything. The text. The rest stop. The turnaround. How numb my hands had felt on the steering wheel the whole way back.
She didn’t interrupt. When I finished, she was quiet for a while.
“They’re treating you like you’re less,” she said finally, “because you’re a single mom. You know that, right?” 