Shock, disgust, a flicker of something that might have been recognition. The memory of her own teenage pregnancy with Nola, maybe. And then it settled into something cold and final. You’re not keeping it. I am. You’re 16. You don’t get to decide. I already decided. Charlene’s hand moved fast. The slap caught Nola across the mouth and split her bottom lip against her teeth.
The taste of copper flooded her tongue. “Dale’s going to kill you,” Charlene said. “Not a threat, an observation. Clinical, like she was reading the weather.” Dale came home at 11 that night. Nola heard the conversation through the thin wall of her bedroom. Charlene’s voice low and urgent. Dale’s rising like a tide coming in. She had her boots on already.
She had the $27 folded in her pocket. She’d been ready since the slap because Nola Price had spent eight years learning to read the weather in that house, and she knew a storm when one was building. The bedroom door opened without a knock. Dale stood in the frame, backlit by the hallway light, and for a moment, he didn’t look like a man.
He looked like a shape, a silhouette of everything that had ever hurt her, compressed into one dark outline. “Get up,” he said. She was already standing. What followed lasted less than three minutes, but time works differently when you’re being hit. His fist caught her temple, not her stomach. Even Dale had a line he told himself he wouldn’t cross, though the distinction meant nothing to Nola as she hit the wall and slid sideways.
Her elbow cracked against the baseboard heater. She curled instinctively around her belly and his boot caught her lower back once, twice, and then Charlene was pulling him off. not to protect Nola, but because the neighbors were home and the walls were thin. “Get out,” Charlene said. She wasn’t talking to Dale. Nola didn’t argue.
