The bathroom at the back of the shop was the size of a closet, and Jolene had locked herself inside it with a box of tests in both hands.
She could hear Roxy and Lupe on the other side, being quiet in the loud way that friends are quiet.
She peed on the first stick, capped it, and set it on the sink like it was a bomb with a timer.
Then she sat and stared at the tiles and did not pray, because she had stopped praying about this years ago.
Two minutes. She counted them twice and got two different numbers.
Then she stood up and looked, and the little window had two lines in it.
One line was dark. The other was pale and thin, like a pencil mark somebody tried to rub out.
A line was a line. She had read the box. A line was a line.
Jolene: No. No, that's not, that's not how this works.
Her hands shook so bad she had to lay the stick down flat on the counter.
She drank a whole glass standing up, then another one, and took the second test with her teeth in her bottom lip.
Then the third, because two was nothing. Two could be a mistake. Three was a fact.
Three tests. Three caps. Three little windows.
Every single one of them said the same thing.
Jolene: Pregnant. Pregnant. Pregnant.
Jolene sat down hard on the cold floor with her back against the door, and she cried like a kid. Snot and all.
She was twenty-eight the first time a doctor said it. Thirty the second time. Both of them said it like a weather report.
Jolene: He told me never. He said my body wouldn't hold a baby and I should go home and make peace with it.
Jolene: I made peace with the wrong damn thing.
Roxy: Jo? Honey, that's a long pee.
Lupe: If you fainted in there I'm breaking the door.
Jolene opened the door with all three tests fanned out in her hand like a bad poker hand.
Jolene: They all say the same thing.
Lupe: Holy shit. Three? You took three of them?
Jolene: I wanted one of them to be a liar.
Roxy didn't say a word. She just grabbed her and held on, and Jolene cried into her shoulder in the doorway of her own bathroom.
Roxy: I've got you. Whatever this is, I've got you.
And then something else came up through the crying, so big she had to say it out loud.
Jolene: There's a baby in me right now. Right this second, while I'm standing here. A baby.
Jolene: Dean's going to say I did it on purpose. He'll say I'm a whore and a liar who trapped some man.
Roxy: That man lost his vote when he put his hands on you. He doesn't get a say now.
Jolene: I don't even know the father's last name. I know his laugh and I know he likes bad jokes.
Lupe: So he's got a laugh and a kid on the way. That's more than most men bring to the table.
Jolene spread her hand flat over her belly, and her voice came out lower and harder than she had ever heard it.
Jolene: Nobody gets to call this baby a mistake. Not Dean, not his mother, not anybody in this city. This is mine.
Later she sat at the counter with the three tests wrapped up in a dish towel like something precious and stolen.
Jolene: You're going to need a doctor, little thing. And I'm going to need a lot of cake.
She picked up her phone to look up a clinic, and a number she didn't know lit up the screen.
One line. Is this Jolene?
Her thumb hung over the glass, and her heart went like a drum in her ears.