Tilting the Balance

Dear Barbara, I had to twist arms to get them to let me write this and send it to you, but I finally managed to do it. As you’ll gather, I’m already in the town you’re going toward. I had some interesting (!!) times getting back to the town from which we both left, but came through them all right. I hope you’re OK, too. I’m so glad you’ll be here soon-I miss you more than I can say. With all the love there is, Jens. There was a row of X’s under the signature.

Barbara looked at the letter, then at Yeager, then at the letter again. She held it in her right hand. Her left hand, which didn’t seem to know what her right was doing, pressed at her belly through the ratty wool sweater she was wearing.

“Oh my God,” she said, maybe to herself, maybe to Yeager, and maybe to God, “what am I supposed to do now?”

“What are we supposed to do now?” Yeager echoed.

She stared at him, as if consciously reminded of his presence for the first time. Then she noticed her hand, fingers spread fan-fashion, stretched over her belly. She jerked it away.

He flinched as if she’d hit him. Her face twisted when she saw that. “Oh, Sam, I’m sorry,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t mean-” She started to cry. “I don’t know what I meant. Everything’s just turned upside down.”

“Yeah,” he said laconically. He startled himself by laughing.

Barbara glared through tears. “What could possibly be funny about this, this-” She gave up in the middle of the sentence. Yeager didn’t blame her. No words were strong enough to fit the mess they’d just landed in.

He said, “Last night I found out I was going to be a father, and now I don’t even know if I’m a husband any more. If that isn’t funny, what is?”

He wondered if it would be too risque for Hollywood to touch. Probably. Too bad. He could all but see Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and somebody else-Robert Young, maybe-to play the guy who didn’t get her, all of them going through their antics bigger than life up on the screen. It would be a great way to kill a couple of hours, and you’d come out of the theater, holding your sides.

But it wasn’t the same when it really happened to you, not when you were wondering whether you had the Cary Grant part or the Robert Young one… and when you were afraid you knew the answer.

Barbara’s small smile was the sun coming out from behind rain clouds. “That is funny. Like something out of a silly movie-”

“I just thought the very same thing,” he said eagerly. Any sign that they were on the same wavelength felt doubly welcome.

The clouds covered the sun again. Barbara said, “Somebody’s going to get hurt, Sam; I’m going to have to hurt somebody I love. That’s the last thing in the world I want, but I don’t see how I can help it.”

“I don’t, either,” Yeager said. He did his best not to show his worry, his fear. It wouldn’t help, any more than it would have at the tryout for his first pro team half a lifetime ago. Would he make it or wouldn’t he?

Show them or not, the worry and fear were there. How could Barbara pick him? She’d been married to Jens for years and years, while she’d only known him a matter of months, and they hadn’t even been lovers for most of that time. And besides, with a choice between a nuclear physicist and a minor league outfielder with an ankle that told him when it was gonna rain, whom would she take?

But she was carrying his kid. That had to count for something. Didn’t it? Lord, if this was any kind of normal time, lawyers would be coming out of the woodwork like cockroaches. Maybe cops, too. Bigamy, adultery… Maybe the chaos the Lizard invasion had brought wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

He sucked in a deep breath. “Honey?”

“What is it?” Barbara asked warily. She’d been reading the letter again. He couldn’t blame her for that, either, but just the same he wished she hadn’t been.

He took her hands in his. She let him do it, but she didn’t grab hold of him back the way she usually did. The edge of the sheet of paper scraped against the side of his palm. He made himself ignore it, concentrated on what he had to do as if he were trying to pick up the spin of a curveball right out of the pitcher’s hand.

“Honey,” he said again, and then paused to feel for the perfect words even though Barbara knew a thousand times more about words than he’d learn if he lived to be a hundred. He went on, one tough phrase at a time, “Honey, the most important thing in the whole world for me-is for you to be happy. So you-go ahead and do-whatever it is you’ve got to do-and that’ll be all right with me. Because I love you and-like I said-I want you to be happy.”