Struck Pregnant

Kate felt she had been thwarted, eternally. She would forever be that disastrous person under whose watch the ship goes down, the baby gets kidnapped by a piercing artist, the dog eats candy, and ancient civilizations clash over peanut brittle. She would leave havoc and destruction always behind her. She would never be able to put an apron on and fix up supper. She could dirty dishes but not wash them. She could operate a sledge hammer but not a drill. She looked around herself at the destruction of a lovely Sunday, and despaired. Then, into all that madness, a spear emerged. A spear shaped like Ronnie, in a black pantsuit, cutting through the milling parishioners, hair perfect, back from the doctor. Ronnie had fixed one thing, now turned to another. She found the key, now turned to the box. She knew the code. She turned off the alarm. She and the fire chief practiced roleplaying with Bubber about safety and how not to pull an alarm. “Unless there’s a fire!” said the fire chief, elongating his words for Bubber’s small ears. “Then you pull the alarm right away!” Kate had been thinking of duct taping it shut. Kate was sitting on the Sunday school stage when Ronnie finished wiping everyone’s nose and restoring them to their rightful places. The elders went to the eldering room, the nursery workers to the nursery, and the children back to their parents, and then Ronnie came over to Kate and said, “Are you alright?” “Why,” said Kate. “You threw up? You fell down? Is something going on?” Later, she would tell Babe that this was her Paul on the road to Damascus. And that instead of blind, she had been struck pregnant.