SPN FIC - The Summer of '78
So. There was a poll. And you guys voted. Yes you did. Trouble is...the Muse, she is a contrary wench.
I need a book, he thought desperately. I need a book, or somebody who knows what the hell they’re talking about.
Characters: John and Mary
Genre: Het
Rating: G
Spoilers: none
Length: 1390 words
THE SUMMER OF '78
By Carol Davis
He’d lost three layers of skin and was as red as a strawberry when he surrendered and turned off the water.
“Shower,” Mary had said. “Pleeeeease take a shower.”
John hadn’t been to the garage since yesterday, hadn’t been anywhere near it, but she claimed she could still smell it on him. Gas and oil and grease and window cleaner. She could smell it on him, she said, and the smell made her need to yark.
Not want to. Need to.
Married less than a year, and he made his wife need to puke.
He knew he’d get his ass handed to him if she found out he’d said anything to anybody, but he’d needed to know, was this normal? As if so, was there an end to it? They called it morning sickness, but for Mary “morning” was all day long. All night long, too. There was no predicting any of it. She’d be fine one minute, and the next…
He’d started to think she’d harked up everything she’d eaten since the third grade, and there was just no way that much vomiting could be good.
So he’d asked.
And they’d laughed at him.
Mike Guenther didn’t have kids, so he was no good as a resource. But Danny, and Dougie down the street, and Elvin - they all laughed. Thumped him on the back and wished him good luck and told him to do whatever Mary asked, no matter how weird it was. “Trust me,” they all said. “Just do it. You don’t wanna know what happens if you don’t.”
He sniffed himself head to foot, feeling like a dog that’d been out in the heat too long, and for the life of him couldn’t detect so much as a suggestion of petroleum products. He thought fleetingly about using some of Mary’s hand lotion to disguise anything that might be lingering, but…no, the smell of the lotion set her off, too.
Lotion.
Coffee.
Gasoline. New-mown grass. Scented candles - and she’d loved those damn things, up until a couple weeks ago - and air fresheners.
Pretty much, anything that smelled like anything.
He ferreted through his drawer until he came up with shorts and a t-shirt that smelled of nothing but clean, even when he burrowed his nose deep into the fabric, thinking Mike Guenther would have him committed if he knew he’d been snuffling his underwear like a pig going after truffles. It took him almost ten minutes to decide on a pair of jeans. By the time he was dressed, he’d worked up enough of a sweat to think he ought to climb back into the shower.
Nine months of this? He’d have himself committed.
He went downstairs thinking he’d simply stand back, stay downwind of her, and found her sobbing in the kitchen. “What…?” he muttered, took a step toward her, then stopped himself. “Mary, what’s the matter?”
She pointed.
At a cantaloupe.
He reached out, rolled the melon across the table toward him and picked it up. It wasn’t rotten. Didn’t have maggots crawling out of it.
“What?” he asked, bewildered.
“It - I can’t - it’s not,” she sputtered, swiping at her nose with the back of her hand, then dissolving into a fresh round of weeping.
“Babe, it’s a melon.”
She glanced down at herself, past the belly that was still a flat plane, then looked at him, tears dripping off her chin. Something in her expression - thank God - provided the answer he needed, and he had to force himself not to cringe. He considered the cantaloupe for a moment, tried mightily to remember the few newborns he’d ever seen up close, then said with as much conviction as he could muster, “Its head isn’t gonna be that big, Mare.”
“Big enough!” she howled.
Keeping his distance as much as he could, he brought her Kleenex and a glass of water and a chair, put the melon in the refrigerator and stood in front of it, as if she could see through the closed door and his body would prevent that. She ran out of gas after a while, but she started growing that look he’d already seen way too much of: the one that said he’d done the wrong thing, or not enough of the right thing. She waved a hand toward the back porch and muttered crossly, “Put it in the driveway.”
He knew better than to ask what she was talking about. Nodding obediently, underwear-sniffing dog that he was, he leaned through the open doorway and scanned the porch. Sitting out there like flotsam washed up by the tide was a small, three-drawered dresser that looked like it’d been bounced all the way down the slope of Mt. Whitney, then left out in a monsoon. It seemed to have been painted brown, once upon a time.
“Whatcha gonna do with that?” he asked, trying for “lighthearted.”
“Paint it,” she said.
“Oh,” he said.
“For the baby.”
“Ah,” he said. “Okay.”
If she’d asked him, right then, if he were the stupidest man on the planet, he would have agreed. Because Danny and Dougie and Elvin had told him to, and because, apparently, he was. “If I scrape it and sand it and paint it,” she said through clenched teeth, in a voice that made her sound like Darth Vader, “it’ll be fine.”
I need a book, he thought desperately. I need a book, or somebody who knows what the hell they’re talking about.
Did she mean she intended to paint the thing? Or was what she’d said some sort of code for “I want you to do it”?
Nine months of this?
“Okay,” he said.
He put the thing in the driveway, on top of a flattened-out trash bag. Maybe the damn thing was her version of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, he thought. Just needed a little love. And okay, it wasn’t warped or broken.
People had told him, more than a few times, that he wasn’t a man of imagination. That he saw what was, and that was the end of it. He wasn’t much of a dreamer; he’d admit that. But there was a place in this world for people who had their feet on the ground.
And a place for people who didn’t.
Like his wife.
The day was mild, sunny, with a bit of a breeze. He found a scraper, some sandpaper, a can of white paint, and he set to work. She might have intended for him to do the painting and she might not have; either way, going ahead with it seemed like a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon. After he’d been at it for an hour or so Mary brought him out a sandwich and a glass of iced tea and some of the melon. She sat on the edge of the lawn - upwind of the paint - and watched him for a while, then got up and went back inside.
When she came back out, she rested a hand on his shoulder and said softly, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not -“
“Yes, it is. I don’t mean to act like that.”
He shrugged underneath her hand and offered her a smile. “Guess I can forgive you. You’re doing the tough part.”
“I was going to do this. The painting.”
“You’d spend more time puking than painting.”
“That’ll stop. They say.”
“Sure as hell hope so.”
“You and me both, soldier.”
She held something out to him then: a white envelope with his name written on the front. “What’s this?” he asked.
“Open it.”
There was a card inside. A clown, holding a bunch of balloons that read Happy Father’s Day Daddy!
It was signed We Love You.
“From me and the tadpole,” she said. “There’s cake, for later. And I renewed your Sports Illustrated.”
We Love You.
His paint-spattered thumb lay against the card right below the words.
When he looked up at Mary, crying over cantaloupe seemed entirely sensible. So did sniffing his underwear like a pig going after truffles.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
She stepped closer to him, held his head against her belly, and stroked his hair. “Love you,” she whispered.
Didn’t matter much if things got worse, he thought.
They were also going to get a lot better.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~