Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw

waistband cinches her stomach like a rubber band.
    Wayne has Alberta Hunter on the CD player. Everything in this apartment is sprung, broken, and was already junk when it was new. Except his sound system, which cost more than his car.
    He has a present for her, a robe. It’s black satin, knee-length, with black lace lapels. She can tell from the Victoria’s Secret box he went all the way up to the mall in Jefferson City to buy it.
    “Happy birthday,” he says. Her birthday is in March. “I don’t mean for you to wear this now. It’s for after.”
    She doesn’t say anything.
    “I can keep it here,” he says.
    She starts to cry.
    “Don’t say anything,” he says when she still doesn’t say anything.
    He cuts a snack cake in two and puts a half on her plate, then licks a dab of white filling off his thumb. “I know it’s hard on you. I’m just thinking that maybe, after the baby comes...”
    She puts her head in her hand, to stop the sentence. She already knows where it’s going. His notion seems to be that being involved with someone who is a wife and mother will be less of a problem than being involved with a pregnant lady. She suspects he has hopes of then persuading her to leave Neal and New Jerusalem behind and go soaring off with him into skies above other places.
    She can’t imagine any of this. Even in the privacy of her mind, she never takes this any further than it actually goes. She holds it in a present tense of kissing in cars, listening to bluesy music, her being impossibly pregnant, him being impossibly young. This is what it is. She can’t find any place on it where she can even pin a hope.
     
    “Oh, excuse me,” someone says. Jesse turns to find out the grocery cart that has just banged into her from behind is being driven by her mother. It’s the express line and Jesse has her package of ground beef, carton of macaroni salad, and Summer’s Bounty starter plate on the belt, ready to be expressed while she reads a tabloid borrowed from a nearby rack. Her mother has caught her at a good moment, looking for the cover story on the baby born with a tattoo on its arm.
    “I’ll have to make a citizen’s arrest on you,” Jesse says, nodding toward her mother’s half-full cart, way over the TEN ITEMS OR LESS posted on the cardboard sign above the cash register, trying to put her on the defensive, usually the best way to begin a conversation with Frances.
    “Wendy and I have an understanding,” her mother says. Wendy is the checkout girl, who still looks about thirteen despite having worked here for years.
    Jesse is wishing she didn’t have a ninety-nine-cent plastic plate on the belt next to her, and a tabloid in her hand. Two of her mother’s most cherished beliefs about Jesse are that she is stuck just above the poverty and literacy lines.
    “Hallie tells me you’ve gotten yourself a beau.”
    “Well, I am seeing someone.”
    Seeing someone. This has an amazing sound falling from her mother’s lips—the foreign, metallic sound of a lunatic pronouncement, as though she’s quoting a headline from the paper Jesse has just slid back into its rack. As though her mother is saying Elvis is alive and living with Natalie Wood in a gas station out in the Mojave Desert. Jesse hopes she’s not looking amused.
    “You might wipe that smirk off your face,” her mother says as Wendy hands Jesse her change, as usual dropping the coins on top of the dollar bills so they slide onto the conveyor belt. Jesse picks up the change and stuffs it along with the folded money and the register tape into the back pocket of her jeans.
    “Hey, I’m ...” Jesse starts, not sure where she’s going.
    But her mother is already bustling her frozen entrees and skim milk and air deodorizer packs out of the cart, flashing Wendy a witheringly false smile, the one she thinks has made her so popular among “shop people” for years.
    Jesse tries, against her better judgment, to break this deadlock. “I mean, I’d