Shout Her Lovely Name by Natalie Serber Read Free Book Online

marching out of her mouth on tired feet.
    Ruby switched from remorse to frustration in a single tick. “And you’ll be making it, I suppose.” Closing her eyes, she wound the clock tighter. “I have a boyfriend now. He buys me flowers.” She kept turning the key. Turning the key until she felt the pop beneath the metal backing.
    Before she went to the kitchen to mix up ketchup, garlic powder, diced onions, honey, vinegar, and dry mustard, Sally touched Ruby’s shoulder. “I have learned to shift my expectations. You’ll learn that some things in life you just have to put up with.”
    Ruby swallowed down two words: Bev and never.
    Her mother’s kiss was light and dry against Ruby’s cheek. “Don’t take it so hard. I still love you.”
     
    Through her bedroom window, Ruby watched her father squirt too much lighter fluid on the coals. When he struck the match, a blaze flashed momentarily brilliant. Soon the three of them would sit at the kitchen table and Ruby would reach for her mother’s hand, tell her a different set of stories about college.

Alone as She Felt All Day
    Ruby drew the blinds apart with her fingers, peered out at Ira leaning against the giant mimosa tree in the brick courtyard. Beautiful and funny and absolutely the wrong boy. His white shirt, the pink blossoms, and the feathery green leaves were all muted by the lead weight of the sky. Thunderstorms were likely. The blinds escaped her fingers and snapped back into place. Sighing, Ruby returned to her hard plastic chair. A mocking illustration of a pink uterus with elegant fallopian tubes, an egg floating lazily downstream, was taped to the wall in front of her. HEALTHY REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM the diagram proclaimed. She shifted her gaze to the carpet, which was as gray as the sky.
    Ira had insisted on joining her. He wanted a chance to play doting husband, to hold her hand and call her snookums, as if anyone would believe his act. As if this weren’t serious. Since Marco was neither available nor aware of the situation, she preferred to find out alone. When she relived this scene, she wanted to have nobly taken the news solo. The nurse knocked once, then strode in, crisp and precise. One hand rested on her square, uniformed hip, the other clasped Ruby’s chart. Her face was impassive.
    “Your test came back positive.” A heavy line of bangs created a horizon across her forehead. Her eyes bored into Ruby, waiting for a response before committing to any emotion. When Ruby held her face in her hands and asked if the nurse was certain the rabbit had died, the nurse’s tone revealed neither support nor enthusiasm. “We don’t use those terms anymore. But yes. Absolutely.”
    The ceiling seemed to drop down onto Ruby’s head, giving her a crushing headache. Squeezing her eyes shut, as if that could somehow protect her from the news, she quit breathing, crossed and then re-crossed her legs, grabbed at the fabric of her suddenly too tight skirt and tugged it down her thighs. Orange juice mixed with the bitter taste of aspirin burned the back of her throat. All the symptoms of early pregnancy, symptoms she’d learned about in health class, symptoms she had misread as hangovers, announced themselves. She was exhausted and sick to her stomach.
    “When was your last period?”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “Your last menstruation was when?” The nurse paused, her efficient pen poised expectantly over the forms. Her unfaltering gaze, the pristine whites of her eyes, nailed Ruby to her chair.
    “June? Maybe May.”
    “You found nothing unusual about your absent cycle?”
    She’d missed her period before. Living on Frosted Flakes and Manhattans with two cherries all summer long, she thought she was too skinny to bleed. The crests of her hipbones pleased her. They flared like conch shells beneath her skin, and she liked to imagine Marco pressing his ear to her, telling her he could hear the ocean.
    “Judging from the hormone levels in your blood, you’re