“You didn’t want to tell Willa?” Ellis asked. “I mean, she’s your only sister.”

Dorie shook her head. “Willa! I love her, but bless her heart, you guys know how she is. She’s so bossy. She’d tell me I’d chosen the wrong obstetrician, the wrong hospital. The wrong man, for sure. She’d be dragging me to La Leche meetings and I don’t know what all. And she’d for sure rat me out to Mama. And I can’t handle any of that right now. I need time to process, to figure it all out.” She sniffed. “I need this time at the beach with you guys, I really do. I need August like I never needed it before.”

“You got it,” Julia said. “We’re here, and we got your back.”

Ellis went to the sink and began rinsing out the wine glasses. “Listen, Dorie,” she began, “when does school start back?”

Dorie grimaced. “Don’t remind me. The week after Labor Day. Teachers report back the Thursday before, for preplanning.”

“That’s only a little over three weeks,” Julia pointed out. “Are you sure you’re up to going back to work at Our Lady of Angels? Especially with Stephen working there too?”

“I’ve got to,” Dorie said dully. “I signed a contract. Anyway, I need the money, and I’m gonna need the medical benefits, at least until after the baby comes.”

“Doesn’t Stephen have the same medical benefits?” Ellis asked. “Wouldn’t you be covered under his policy, assuming you didn’t go back to OLA?”

“I don’t know,” Dorie admitted. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m not quitting my job. I love teaching the girls, I really do. The money’s not great, but that’s not the point.”

“It will be, if you’re going to be a single mother,” Julia said. “Don’t forget, you’ll have to pay for day care, and a hundred other things. And what about a place to live? What will you do about the house? Do you think Stephen will let you keep it?”

Dorie clapped her hands over her ears. She rocked back and forth in her chair. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she singsonged. “I just freakin’ don’t know. I only know I hate Stephen. Hate. Hate. Hate.”

“I hate him too,” Ellis said, yawning.

“I hate him more than both of you,” Julia declared. “I know. Let’s fire up the van, drive over to his place, and key his car.”

“No,” Ellis said, taking up the challenge. “Let’s egg his house and TP it.”

“Or key the car, egg the car, and TP his house and his car,” Dorie countered, getting into the spirit of things. “Remember when we did that to Amber Peek, senior year, after she started spreading rumors that Julia was pregnant right before Christmas break?”

“I just remember my daddy made me pay for a whole new paint job for that piece-of-crap Tercel of hers when we got caught,” Ellis said.

“It was worth it though,” Dorie said. “Amber Peek. That lying bitch.”

They were both looking at Julia now, waiting for her to chime in with her own diatribe against her mortal enemy, Amber Peek.

“Good old Amber,” Julia said. “She was a bitch, and a sneak, and I’m glad you guys screwed up her car. But she wasn’t lying. Not that time. I really was pregnant, you know.”

17

Ellis and Dorie sat back in their chairs, too stunned to speak.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Julia said shakily. “I wanted to tell you. But my mother was so mortified … so … ashamed. She made me swear I’d keep it a secret. I almost told you, that night after her funeral, back at the house, but I couldn’t do it. Not in her house. Not after I promised.”

Finally Ellis picked up the discarded deck of cards. She began laying out a hand of solitaire.

“Why tell us now?” she asked.

“I need to,” Julia said. “I’ve needed to tell you for a long time. But I was afraid of what you’d think of me.”

“Oh, Julia,” Dorie said softly. “Julia.”

Ellis wrinkled her brow. “But … you didn’t even have a boyfriend your senior year.”

Julia grinned the old Julia grin. “Not one you guys knew about. You wouldn’t have approved. He was an army Ranger, stationed at the air base at Hunter. We met at an oyster roast. He asked me out, I went. He was cute, even with those awful haircuts they made the guys get, and I could tell he was totally smitten.”

“Did he have a name?” Ellis asked, annoyed, all these years later, that Julia had managed to conceal such a huge secret.

“Jack,” Julia said. “His name was Jack, he was twenty years old, and the thing I liked best about him was that he was a good half-a-head taller than me—which sealed the deal. I mean, I was six feet tall, so there weren’t a lot of guys out there that I could look up to. We went out exactly four times before we had sex.”

“He forced you!” Dorie cried. “Raped you?”

“Nope,” Julia said. “He was nice. Horny, but nice. I wanted to. I was eighteen years old, and I’d decided I didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. After all,” she said, nodding at Dorie, “you’d already done the deed, the summer before we were seniors. And as far as I knew, Ellis might never pop her cherry. So I just decided to go for it.”

“And?” Ellis said, trying to decide how she felt about being regarded as a potential nun.

“He was sweet,” Julia said, her face softening at the memory. “Although I don’t think he had a hell of a lot more experience than I did. There were no fireworks—but then again, no nightmares, either. Anway, you know that crap we used to hear about how nobody ever gets knocked up the first time they do it? Turns out, it really is crap.”

“You had unprotected sex, with an army Ranger?” Dorie said, her eyes widening. “You could have gotten AIDS. Or syphilis.”

“It wasn’t totally unprotected. He had a Trojan, although as it turned out, it must have been a really old Trojan. I didn’t get an STD. I just got pregnant.”

“Oh. My. God.” Ellis swept the cards into a pile. “Julia, how did you manage to keep it secret? We never had a clue. Ever. Not even when Amber Peek started running her mouth.”

“The baby?” Dorie guessed. “At Christmas, when you had your appendix out? That’s what really happened?”

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Julia said. “When I missed my first period, I didn’t think anything of it. You guys remember, I never had normal periods. But when I skipped my second one, I knew. But I just couldn’t bring myself to tell my parents. It would have killed them. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. The last day before Christmas break, right after my chemistry final, I’d gone to the bathroom. My stomach was killing me. I was so damned ignorant, I just thought that was part of being pregnant. I didn’t tell you guys, I didn’t tell anybody. I was bleeding. There was so much blood, I was terrified. I remember, I bought a Kotex from the vending machine in the bathroom, and I went straight home.”

“You were hemorrhaging?” Ellis asked.

“The bleeding slowed down after a while, but I had these godawful cramps,” Julia said. “I was curled up in bed and Mama just happened to walk by my bedroom door. She heard me moaning and crying, came in, and I was in so much pain, I couldn’t even speak. But I had a fever, like 102 degrees, and then she saw the blood on my sheets, and she freaked out.

“Loaded me in her Cadillac and carried me straight to the emergency room at Saint Joseph’s, where the doctor, who just happened to be a woman in Mama’s Bunco club, had to break the news that her daughter, still dressed in her Catholic girl’s school uniform, was not suffering from a ruptured appendix, as Mama insisted, but rather, that I had an ectopic pregnancy.”

“You could have died,” Dorie said solemnly.

“Right at that moment, I wished I had,” Julia said. “If you’d seen the look on Mama’s face when I had to admit that yes, I really was pregnant. It was like she’d been punched in the stomach.”

“What … what did they do?” Dorie asked. “I’m sorry, I know this is hideous to ask, but I can’t not.”

“It’s all right,” Julia said, shrugging. “After all, I made you bare your soul, didn’t I? Anyway, they did laparoscopic surgery. Right before they sent me home from the hospital, the doctor, Mama’s friend, came in to see me. She told me the embryo had attached itself to the wall of my fallopian tube, which caused the tube to rupture, and that it never would have been a viable pregnancy. She also gave me a prescription for the pill, bless her heart.”