Read Promise Me A Rainbow Online
Authors: Cheryl Reavi
“My God, what are you two doing?” she cried, putting herself bodily between them. “Do you know Mrs. Donovan is ready to call the police? I live here! Are both of you crazy! How much do you think I can take, Joe? You want me to have to spend the evening at the police station, too—get my name in the papers for disturbing the peace?”
“Catherine, there’s only
one
crazy person here and it’s not—” Joe tried to put in, but she wasn’t listening.
“Jonathan, what is the matter with you?” she said, letting him have it, too.
“I want to know why he’s here!” Jonathan shouted.
“He’s the father of my baby!” Catherine shouted back. “That’s why he’s here! Now, I have had it. You get out of here and you leave me alone! Both of you!”
“Catherine!” Joe called as she started back up the stairs. He couldn’t believe she’d told Jonathan about the baby and he tried to follow her, but Jonathan had his arm again.
“Goddammit,” he cried, shoving Jonathan hard. “Catherine!”
She turned on him. “I mean it, Joe. Stay away!”
“All right! You want me to go, I’ll go! But by God, you’re not the only one who’s had enough here! Between Della and you—and this nut case ex-husband of yours, I’ve had about all I can stand, too! If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get. You want to see me again,
you
call
me
, Catherine!”
Catherine didn’t wait for the end of his tirade, and the only response he got was her door slamming—hard. He stood on the stairs for a moment. His shirt was all crumpled up from Jonathan’s handling, and one of the buttons was missing.
Jonathan was sitting in the corner on the landing where Joe had shoved him.
“She’s pregnant?” he asked. “Catherine’s pregnant?”
Joe didn’t answer him. He still couldn’t believe Catherine had told him like that—just out with it. Twice now she’d said what she didn’t mean to say. He was glad she’d told him; he wanted the bastard to know he’d dumped her too soon. He was going to do for her now the only thing he could—make sure the pregnancy remained none of Jonathan’s business.
He stepped over Jonathan’s legs and left.
Yes, Catherine thought as she looked around the group, they knew. Abby and Cherry and Beatrice and Maria. She put the papers she was about to hand out aside. She might as well get it over with.
She got up from the desk and came around to stand in front of it.
“Listen up,” she said, and they all looked in her direction, none of them meeting her eyes. “I have two things I want to tell you. The first is about Mrs. Bauer. She’ll be getting out of the hospital in a day or two. She’s not well, but she has improved enough to go home. She asked me to tell you that she’d like for you all to visit her some time before Christmas—something about Santa Claus having already visited her house and leaving some packages with your names on them.”
They all smiled at that news, and Catherine smiled with them. She went on before she lost her nerve.
“The other thing I want to tell you is about me. Not too long ago, we had a group discussion about being pregnant. I told you that I didn’t think any of you
should
be pregnant. Do you remember that?”
There was a low rumble of acknowledgement.
“What else did I say?” she asked them.
“You said since we were pregnant, we had to forget about the things that shouldn’t be and the things we couldn’t change and set our goals,” Abby offered.
“Right. And what were the goals.”
“A good healthy baby,” Cherry said.
“What else?”
“Learning how to be a good parent,” she added.
“Right. The first thing is for you to do everything you can to have a healthy baby. The second thing is for you to learn everything you can so you can be a good and loving parent. What I want to tell you is that the goals I set for you are also the goals I set for myself. I am . . . pregnant, and I want
my
baby to be healthy. And
I
want to be a good parent. I intend to do the same things that I’ve been teaching you—”
She stopped. They were all looking at the floor. Now came the hard part, and Cherry’s hand went up immediately.
“Are you still going to be our teacher, Ms. Holben?”
“I don’t know, Cherry. I’ll have to wait and see.”
“You going to get married?”
“I have no plans to get married.”
“You going to take care of your baby all by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You said a baby needed a mother
and
a father.”
“Yes, I did. I also said when that isn’t possible, the baby’s mother has to work extra hard to make their life together the best it can be. I have some advantages that all of you don’t—I have a career, I have a means to support my baby and myself. That’s why I think it’s so important for you to get as much education as you can.”
“How come you’re not going to marry Joe?” Cherry persisted. “He told us he was your boyfriend.”
Catherine was a bit taken aback at that information, but she didn’t let herself be sidetracked. “I don’t want to get into that. I just want you to know about me for sure”—she looked at Maria—“so you don’t have to wonder anymore and we can get on with what we’re supposed to be doing.”
“But who’s going to be your support system?”
“No more questions. Now, the central office is sending someone over to review the information for your math and English exams this afternoon . . .”
She’d done it. She’d made the announcement but she was having some difficulty assessing the effect. She’d piqued their curiosity and she’d given Maria a certain credibility she’d been lacking with the group thus far, but whether or not she’d damaged her own credibility, she couldn’t tell. And this was only the first hurdle. She still had to advise the school superintendent of her condition.
The weather was too damp and cold for any outside activities, so she sent the girls to the large empty room down the hall that had once been a library to eat their lunches and to dance and rehash Ms. Holben’s announcement. She sat alone in the classroom, worrying about Joe. She’d been so angry with him—and for no real reason. God only knew what Jonathan had said to him. She supposed that she, with her battling ex-husband and ex-lover, had given the Mayfair tenants enough to keep them titillated for the next year. She could hear them all now. “Catherine seemed so nice and quiet . . .”
“Ms Holben?”
Catherine looked up. Maria stood in the doorway, frowning, her arms folded over her chest.
“Beatrice says I got to talk to you,” she said. Her tone of voice suggested that she was doing both Beatrice and Catherine an immense favor.
“Go ahead.”
“How come you don’t know if you’re going to be our teacher?”
“Because I haven’t talked to the superintendent of schools yet. It may be that they’d rather not have me continue this class.”
“He don’t have to know anything, does he?”
“Yes, Maria, he does. Pregnancy isn’t the kind of thing you can keep a secret. Too many people already know about it. You should know that.”
Maria looked away, and when she looked back, Catherine thought she was about to cry.
“Come sit down, Maria,” Catherine said, but Maria stood stubbornly in the middle of the room.
“I didn’t mean to go telling, Ms. Holben. All of us were at the mall looking at Christmas stuff—me and Beatrice and Abby and Cherry—and we went and got Sasha so she could see it, too. This girl came around talking to Abby because she knew her in regular school. Then she started talking about
our
class—if you was a good teacher and stuff like that. That’s when I said it, Ms. Holben. I
hate
girls like that—running around thinking they’re so good. I thought she was a friend of yours, so I said you didn’t have no business teaching us because you were just as pregnant and not married, as we were—” She stopped. “Beatrice says if you don’t teach us anymore, it’s my fault because I told that girl. They’re all mad at me, Ms. Holben.”
“Well, they shouldn’t be. I’ve told you before. We have a choice about our own behavior, but we don’t have a choice about the consequences. I don’t blame you for anything that might happen because of what
I’ve
done.”
Maria continued to stand there. She didn’t say anything else, but she sighed.
“Tell me,” Catherine said. “How is Sasha?”
“Sasha says her milk don’t come in anymore. Used to, every time she heard a baby cry, she got milk, and that made her cry, too, because she didn’t have Treasure to drink it. It scares you, Ms. Holben, when that happens. It’s like your mind knows you ain’t got your baby anymore, but your body don’t and you can’t tell it—” She broke off and looked at the floor. Surprisingly she sat down in the desk closest to her.
“Is that what happened with you? With your first baby?”
Maria wiped her eyes. “Yeah. The Welfare took it. They’re going to take this one, too.”
“Is that what you want? You want them to take this baby.”
“It don’t matter what I want. I used to drink a lot—everything I could get.”
“Are you drinking now?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you make everybody feel so damn guilty! Ain’t nobody can make a person feel guilty like you do!”
“I don’t want you to hurt that baby, Maria, but I couldn’t make you feel guilty unless you cared about your child.”
“I do care about it, Ms. Holben! The others—they think they’re better than me.” Her mouth quivered and her eyes welled up with tears.
“Are they?”
She gave an exasperated sigh. “No, they ain’t! Abby got a baby from some sucker she met last summer on the beach—some college dude—and she don’t even know his name. Abby thought she was living in a movie, only it was real and there ain’t no happy endings when it’s real. And Beatrice,
her
baby’s daddy is married and he’s a teacher. She ain’t got no more sense than to fool around with a
teacher
. She’s dumb, Ms. Holben. She’s still thinking he’s going to marry her, and he ain’t marrying nobody.
“I love my baby’s daddy. We were going to get out of here—go someplace new where don’t nobody know us. He had the money saved so we could get married, but somebody stole it. And now I got to go on living with my mama. My mama don’t do nothing but wear one of those little robes with the snaps up the front so she can get it off quick when the men come. I have to keep my door locked all the time so her men don’t come looking for
me.
She don’t care if I’m pregnant. She don’t know if I’m alive, and I’m right in the same house with her.”
Suddenly Maria grinned, but the grin didn’t reach her eyes. “How come you do that, Ms. Holben? How come I can tell you something like that and you sit there like it’s
nothing
?”
“Because you’re giving me the business,” Catherine said.
“I’m not giving you nothing but the truth!”
“Oh, I know it’s the truth, but it’s not the truth you want to tell me. You want to give me an excuse for not keeping your baby—when I think you want that baby more than anything in this world. Let me tell you the truth. If you want your baby, you can do something about it. You’ve got a social worker, talk to her. Tell her what you want and let her help you get it. Get into AA. Tell your social worker you want to move out of your mother’s place, and tell her why. Show them you’ll do whatever it takes.”