Cross Means Yes...Right?

My little brother, disguised as a well-behaved groomsmen with his tailored suit and disarming grin, was prepared to speak at our rehearsal dinner that cold January night in 2008. How sweet of him. Three weeks' notice is what we gave everyone for our wedding, and after putting my parents through that time of mad planning and Sam's parents, siblings and new nephew a spur-of-the-moment cross-Atlantic flight of no fewer than 4,200 miles, I should have expected some payback.

(Sam and I on his farm in England with the aforementioned little brother in the background.)

Jonathan, the clean-cut groomsmen with a dark heart (and a fever at the time, which my Mother in her blind love never neglects to recall), stood up after a heartfelt, tearful toast by a dear friend, and amid the sighs that filled the room, turned to me and took a breath for his words of love and congratulations. In the presence of my heroic parents, their friends, Sam's bleary-eyed (and also very heroic) parents, and all the people in the room who loved me and Sam enough to get themselves out on a single-digit winter night to a last-minute rehearsal dinner, he raised the mike and said, 'Well...I thought you were pregnant.'

That memory knocked around my brain as I sat crouched on the john last week, three years and a month later, chin on my knees, willing the faint vertical 't' to disappear, squinting at the e.p.t. on the floor atop some crumpled tissue as if it would succumb to my wishes if it saw my look. Cross means yes, right? Or does it mean no? I fumbled with the directions for a third time to read again: line means no, cross means yes.

It's not that I don't want a child. Quite to the contrary, it's just I wasn't planning for one now. We've just come back from England; our house isn't finished; Sam doesn't have a job; I haven't biked Scotland or hiked Colorado yet...and, if I already didn't know, the look on Sam's face told me he wasn't planning for one either.

I should have known. Earlier, I changed into pjs for the night and was alarmed to find I had inflated into Dolly Parton in one day, free of cost, except a little soreness.  Other realizations rushed in at once: waiting for a 'late' period, nauseated feelings until lunch time each day, crinkling my nose at some unidentified offending smell each time I opened the fridge, and the fact that I'd rather run off a cliff in the other direction than eat vegetables or drink tea, which heretofore has been the basis of my diet. No length of stare contest with the e.p.t. on the bathroom floor is going to change the fact: I'm pregnant.

Ok then. Here we go.