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Theresa is twenty-nine on a date with a man who says he plays semi-professional rugby. One of his eyes is swol- len shut and he angles that side of his face away from her. Out of tenderness for his injury, she goes to bed with him but they can't kiss because her brow might bump into his wound. He has stiff sheets and a lamp on the floor and a bare window she looks out of after they're finished. "It's hard to tell how high up we are," she says. "The window is just a square of sky." He pats her shoulder. After some silence, he says, "I actually have a girlfriend." When Theresa gets home, she sees there is some blood on the shoulder of her favorite blouse, and she drops it into the trash can. "It's time to grow up," Carissa tells her. Carissa is pregnant again, and has to go, bath time is the worst. "Just pick someone and stick with them." She hasn't said the thing about Theresa's vag in years, but it's there in the subtext. Stop being so choosy, so scared. Start your life already.
Theresa is thirty-one when she meets Adam. She's at a bar with her manager, a new low, and he's just excused him- self to go to the bathroom. All night, he's found ways to rub himself against her, standing at the bar waiting for drinks or holding her chair out for her, and it's clear he'd like her to come to the bathroom with him. But she's already seen Adam. He's with someone, a very pretty woman with a girlish headband in her hair. It's that headband that clears the way for Theresa, that lets her walk up to the bar and pretend to ask for a drink, elbowing Adam as she does. Up close, he's familiar. He has kind brown eyes, broad shoulders that curve slightly inward. He smiles at her; she sees that one of his front teeth crowds the other. "I think I know you," she says. "Don't I?" His date looks back and forth between them, the straw from her drink clamped tight in her mouth. "Remind me," he says. She wants to collapse into his arms. Finally, she thinks. Carissa was right.
Theresa is thirty-two at the wedding. She wears an off- the-rack dress that is two hundred dollars more than she wants to spend and too tight across the chest. Carissa, her matron of honor, weeps loudly through the ceremony. "My sister always seemed like the lonely type," she'll say in her speech later that evening, using the back of her wrist to dab at her eyes. She'll raise her glass and Theresa will see how happy Carissa is for her. She'll hug Carissa, thank her for seeing what Theresa couldn't see, but Theresa is uncomfortable that her family sees her that way, a lonely woman, nearly a lost cause. She's lonely then and there, with everyone toasting her and Adam, with him bending to kiss her neck and whisper that her boobs in her dress are making him hard.
Theresa gets pregnant. It's exactly like in the commercials, with the test that shows two pink lines and the husband who comes home and sees it and doesn't know what it means, then grabs her and hugs her tight. The calls to family, Carissa shrieking and dropping the phone, the standing in what will be the baby's room and imagining the stuffed giraffe, the comfy rocker, the diapers stored neatly on shelves. "This baby is so lucky," Adam will say, resting his hand on her still-flat stomach. "You are going to be an amazing mom." She drives by the abortion clinic only once. That she doesn't get out of the car, doesn't want to get out of the car, is enough for Theresa. Soon enough, the baby kicks, turns its whole body. "Do you ever think about Roy?" she asks Carissa on the phone. It's been years since they've said his name, Carissa the mom of four now. All those years ago, just twenty years old, Carissa had felt those same jabs, flops, kicks. "Roy?" Carissa says. "Oh, Roy." They are silent, listening to each other breathe, and then Theresa changes the subject to diaper pails.
Theresa is thirty-three when she gives birth to Cece. She won't let them take her, won't let them wheel the baby out to be weighed or bathed. The baby stays with her, in that room. "You're being silly," Carissa says. "The baby still has afterbirth in her hair. Let them take the poor thing." Theresa struggles out of bed, wets a soft blue washcloth, and washes Cece's head as best she can. Her scalp feels like velvet and Theresa is posi- tive she sees the baby smile.
Excerpted from Hot Springs Drive by Stephen Hunter. Copyright © 2023 by Stephen Hunter. Excerpted by permission of Roxane Gay Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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