Chapter 4: Confessions Over Whiskey
The orange juice with pulp and the saltines sat on his passenger seat for two days. He’d bought them immediately, a tangible act of penance, but couldn’t bring himself to go up. He’d texted her instead. Left something at your door. She’d replied with a simple thumbs-up emoji. The distance in that tiny graphic felt continental.
He needed to talk to someone who wasn’t her, who wasn’t a clinic nurse, who wasn’t the ghost of his own future. He needed Davon.
The bar was Davon’s church. A narrow, sticky-floored cave where the lights were always low enough to hide the stains and the music was just background bass you felt in your molars. Reggie found him in the usual corner booth, a bottle of imported beer and a textbook on sustainable architecture open on the table. Davon was highlighting a passage, his brow furrowed in concentration.
“Since when do you study in bars?” Reggie slid into the opposite seat, the vinyl releasing a sigh of trapped air.
“Since my apartment’s got a leaking pipe and a landlord who thinks ‘fix it’ is Spanish for ‘ignore it.’” Davon didn’t look up. “Also, the noise here is more consistent. Less distracting than intermittent hammering.” He finally closed the book, taking in Reggie’s face. “Damn. You look like you lost a fight with a philosophy exam.”
“Something like that.” Reggie flagged down a waitress, pointed at Davon’s beer, held up two fingers. He needed the liquid before the words.
The beers arrived, condensation already beading on the brown glass. Reggie took a long pull, the cold bitterness a welcome shock. He stared at a neon whiskey sign across the room, its buzzing glow reflected in the dark wood of the table.
“Alexis is pregnant,” he said. The words, spoken into the bar’s murmur, sounded both monumental and absurd.
Davon’s beer bottle halted halfway to his mouth. He set it down slowly, carefully. “Say again?”
“Pregnant. I’m the father. Obviously.” Reggie took another drink. “Found out after the whole… hotel thing.”
A long, slow exhale escaped Davon. He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “Man. Wow. Okay. How far?”
“Few weeks, I guess. She only just told me. After telling me I gave her an STD that messed with her birth control. So, you know. It’s a whole romantic story.”
“Jesus, Reg.” Davon’s voice was flat, a controlled neutrality. “Is she… what’s she saying?”
“She’s keeping it. That’s not a discussion. It’s a fact.” Reggie traced a watermark on the table with his thumb. “I told her I’m in. That I’d be there. For the appointments, the… all of it.”
Davon watched him, his eyes missing nothing. “And are you? In?”
“I said I was.”
“That’s not what I asked.” Davon leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I asked if you are. Or are you just saying the thing you’re supposed to say because the alternative makes you look like the villain in a Lifetime movie?”
The question landed like a gut punch. Reggie’s jaw tightened. “What’s the alternative, Davon? Walk away? Let her do it alone? Be that guy?”
“You’ve been ‘that guy’ about a lot of other things. Consistently.” Davon didn’t blink. “Why is this the line?”
“Because it’s a kid!” The words came out louder than he intended. A couple at the bar glanced over. He lowered his voice, a rough, strained thing. “It’s not just her. It’s not some argument we can have and then fuck our way past. It’s a person. A whole other person that’s going to exist because of me.”
“And that scares you.”
“Of course it scares me. It should scare anyone with a functioning brain stem.”
“No,” Davon shook his head. “I mean it scares you specifically. More than it should. You’re not just freaking out about diapers and lost sleep. You look haunted, man.”
Reggie finished his beer, signaled for another. The waitress brought two more without a word. The alcohol was a dull warmth in his empty stomach, doing nothing to fill the hollow.
“I went to the clinic,” Reggie said, staring at the fresh bottle. “Had to get my blood drawn. Sat in this waiting room with these… posters about prenatal care and shit. All these diagrams. And I kept thinking, what do I know? What do I actually know about any of this?”
“Nobody knows at first. You learn.”
“From who?” Reggie’s laugh was a short, sharp bark. “You learn from watching, right? From having someone show you. Who showed me, D? Huh?”
Davon stayed quiet. He knew the territory.
“My old man’s greatest lesson was how to disappear without a sound.” Reggie’s voice dropped, low and gritty. “He perfected it. One day he was just… not there. No note. No big fight. Just an empty space where a father was supposed to be. Like he evaporated. And my mom… she filled the space with work and silence and this… this tiredness that never went away. I learned how to be quiet. How to not be a problem. How to become invisible in my own damn house so I wouldn’t add to the weight she was carrying.”
He took a swig, the beer tasting like nothing now. “So what’s in me, huh? What’s the blueprint? The only model I’ve got is a ghost. A guy whose name we stopped saying because it hurt her to hear it. That’s the legacy. That’s the paternal wisdom I’m working with.”
“You’re not him,” Davon said, but it sounded weak, even to him.
“How do you know?” Reggie’s eyes were bright, glassy with a pain that wasn’t from the alcohol. “I’ve got his blood. I’ve got his genes. I’ve got his skill set. I’m great at leaving, Davon. I’m a fucking artist at the casual exit. The slow fade. The ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ while I’m already halfway out the door. That’s my inheritance. So what happens when this gets hard? And it will get hard. What happens when the baby’s screaming at 3 a.m. and I’m exhausted and Alexis looks at me with those tired, resentful eyes? My instinct won’t be to step up. It’ll be to step out. To find some quiet, some space, some… some relief. And once you take that first step out, the next one’s easier. And then one day you’re just… not there. You’re a story. A bad taste left in someone’s mouth.”
He was breathing heavily now, his hands clenched around the bottle. The admission, voiced aloud in the grimy bar, felt like a confession. It hung in the air between them, ugly and true.
Davon didn’t offer platitudes. He just let it sit. Then he said, “So that’s your fear. That you’re pre-programmed to bail.”
“It’s not a fear. It’s a pattern. I’ve been practicing for this my whole life.”
“Then you gotta break the pattern.” Davon’s voice was calm, surgical. “You don’t have a model? Fine. Build a new one. From scratch. You don’t know what to do? Ask. Show up to the appointment and ask the doctor. Read a book. Google that shit. When you feel like stepping out, you plant your feet. You let the baby scream. You let Alexis hate you for a minute. You stay in the room. However ugly it gets, you stay in the goddamn room.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“I didn’t say it was simple. I said it’s what you have to do. It’s manual labor, Reg. You don’t have the instinct, you use your hands. You use your head. You do the work.”
Reggie slumped back against the booth. The adrenaline of his outburst was fading, leaving a deep, weary ache. “I promised her I’d be at the first appointment. Next Thursday.”
“Good. That’s a start. A concrete thing.”
“What if I look at the ultrasound or whatever and I feel… nothing? What if it’s just a blurry picture and all I feel is this crushing sense of obligation and dread?”
“Then you feel that,” Davon shrugged. “And you go to the next appointment anyway. Feelings aren’t facts. Your actions are the only thing that matters here.”
The noise of the bar swirled around them—the clink of glasses, the low din of a dozen private conversations. Reggie felt oddly stripped, his charismatic armor completely dismantled, leaving only the raw, frightened wiring underneath. Davon had seen it all now. There was no performance left.
“I bought her orange juice,” Reggie said, the non-sequitur surprising even him.
Davon’s mouth twitched. “Okay.”
“With pulp. And saltines. She said that’s all she can keep down.” He looked at his friend, a flicker of desperate, practical need in his eyes. “Is that… is that a thing? Morning sickness?”
“Yeah, Reg. That’s a thing.” Davon finally took a sip of his own beer. “My sister went through a phase where she could only eat green apples and peanut butter. It’s weird. You just… you get what she needs. You show up with the weird stuff.”
Reggie nodded, storing the information. A simple task. Get the weird stuff. Show up.
They drank in silence for a few minutes. The weight was still there, but it had shifted, become something he might be able to carry instead of something that would crush him.
“You’re gonna have to tell your mom, you know,” Davon said softly.
The thought sent a fresh jolt of nausea through him. His mother, who had worked double shifts to fill the hole his father left. Who’d looked at him sometimes with a mixture of love and a fear that he’d inherited the same wanderlust. “Yeah. I know.”
“And you might think about… finding him.”
Reggie’s head snapped up. “No.”
“Hear me out. Not for forgiveness. Not for a relationship. For intel. You’re scared of becoming a mystery. So don’t let him be one. Find out who he is. What his reasons were. Maybe they’re pathetic. Probably they are. But then you’ll know. The ghost becomes a man. And you can decide, with your eyes open, to be nothing like him.”
The idea was repulsive. It felt like digging in a grave. But it also held a terrible, logical sense. To study the failure he was determined not to repeat.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Reggie muttered.
“Later,” Davon said, draining his bottle. “One thing at a time. First, you survive Thursday. You look at the blurry picture. You hold her hand, or you don’t, but you stand there. You stay in the room.”
Reggie paid the tab, leaving too much cash on the table. They stepped out into the evening, the city air cool and sharp after the bar’s cloistered warmth.
“Thanks, D,” Reggie said, the words insufficient.
Davon just clapped him on the shoulder, a solid, grounding weight. “Go home, man. Get some sleep. The world didn’t end today. It just got a lot more complicated.”
Walking to his car, Reggie felt the ghost of his father at his shoulder, a whisper of empty space. For the first time, he didn’t just feel afraid of it. He felt a simmering, defiant anger toward it. This was the shadow that had shaped his life. This was the vacancy he was supposed to fill.
He got in his car. The empty passenger seat where the groceries had been seemed significant. He started the engine, the sound firm and real in the quiet street.
He wasn’t a ghost. Not yet. He was a man in a car, with a appointment on his calendar and a terrible pattern to break. The fear was a cold stone in his gut, but beneath it, now, was a current of something else. A stubborn, nascent will.
He drove towards his apartment, not away from it. A small act. A start.
A start became a week of stumbling through a strange new routine. He worked his security shifts in a haze, the silent, cavernous warehouse feeling more like a mirror of his own head than a workplace. He texted Alexis only necessary things: Heard back from the clinic. All clear. Her reply: Good. He brought more groceries, leaving them at her door like a guilty neighbor: ginger ale, bland crackers, a bizarre brand of pickles he’d read about online.
He didn’t see her. The space felt necessary, fragile. The ghost of his father paced beside him through every quiet hour, a silent critic of his every move.
Thursday morning arrived not with a sense of purpose, but with the gritty exhaustion of a man who hadn’t truly slept. His night shift had been a marathon of monotony, his mind replaying Davon’s words on a loop. You stay in the room. The sky was a watery gray when he clocked out, his eyes burning.
He drove straight to her apartment, the rising sun doing nothing to warm the chill in his bones. He needed a shower, a coffee, a moment to scrape the night’s grime off his skin. He didn’t allow himself any of it. He parked outside her building at 9:15, his body humming with a dull, cellular fatigue.
He texted: I’m here. No rush.
The wait stretched. He watched a pigeon fight its own reflection in a puddle of oily water. His phone buzzed.
Coming down.
She emerged five minutes later, a silhouette against the glass door. She moved carefully, as if her body were a vessel she was still learning to pilot. She wore loose, soft-looking pants and a simple hoodie, her hair pulled back in a careless knot. She looked younger, and profoundly tired.
She opened the passenger door and slid in, bringing with her the faint, clean scent of soap and a sharper, lemon-like smell. “Hey,” she said, not looking at him, fastening her seatbelt with a definitive click.
“Hey.” He put the car in drive. “You okay?”
“I threw up the toast I tried to eat. So, spectacular.” Her voice was flat, factual. She stared out the window. “You look like hell.”
“Night shift.” He navigated into traffic, his movements feeling slow, underwater. “Did the ginger ale help at all?”
“For about ten minutes.” She leaned her head against the window. “Thanks for getting it, though.”
The civility was alien, a thin sheet of ice over everything unsaid. He drove. The clinic was across town, a different, cleaner facility than the one he’d visited. This one had cheerful, framed prints of flowers in the waiting room. It smelled like lemon disinfectant and anxiety.
He stood beside her at the reception window, a silent accessory, as she gave her name. He fumbled for his wallet when they asked for her insurance card, but she’d already produced it, her movements efficient. She took the clipboard and found two chairs in a corner.
He sat beside her, watching her pen move. She checked boxes, her brow furrowed in concentration. He saw the word “gestational” and looked away, his stomach tightening. A television played a morning show, the hosts laughing with violent brightness.
“Do you want me to…” he started, then stopped, unsure what he was offering.
“Just sit there,” she said, not unkindly, just drained. “I got it.”
When the nurse called “Miller,” they both stood. He followed Alexis through the door, down a hallway painted a calm, forgettable blue. The nurse, a woman with kind eyes and a badge that read “Maggie, RN,” led them into a small, cold room.
“Hop up on the table for me, sweetheart,” Maggie said to Alexis, gesturing. “We’ll get your vitals first, then the doctor will be in for your ultrasound. Dad, you can have that chair there.”
Dad. The word, so casually deployed, hit him with the force of a physical blow. He managed a nod, lowering himself into the plastic chair by the wall. It was far from the exam table. He felt like an observer, an audience member at a play he didn’t understand.
He watched as Maggie wrapped the blood pressure cuff around Alexis’s arm. He listened to the soft rustle of the Velcro, the squeak of the pump. Alexis stared at a poster about breast-feeding on the opposite wall, her jaw set. The machine hissed softly as it released.
“One-twenty over seventy-eight. Perfect,” Maggie chirped, making a note. “Any nausea today?”
“Always,” Alexis muttered.
“The good news is it usually means things are progressing right on schedule. The bad news is it sucks.” Maggie smiled warmly. “Doctor Espinoza will be right in.”
The door closed, leaving them in a silence filled with the hum of fluorescent lights. The room was too bright, exposing every scuff on the floor, every fleck in the acoustic ceiling tile. Reggie’s fatigue was a heavy blanket, smothering his thoughts. He rubbed his gritty eyes.
“You didn’t have to come straight from work,” Alexis said quietly, still looking at the breastfeeding poster.
“Yes, I did.” The words came out rougher than he intended.
She glanced at him then, finally taking in the shadows under his eyes, the stiff set of his shoulders in his security uniform. She didn’t say anything else.
A sharp knock, and the door opened. Dr. Espinoza was a compact woman with a brisk, no-nonsense energy. She shook both their hands, her grip firm and cool. “Alright, let’s see what we’ve got,” she said, turning to a rolling machine with a screen. She helped Alexis lie back, arranging the paper sheet.
Reggie’s mouth went dry. This was it. The moment he’d feared. The blurry picture that would make him feel nothing.
Dr. Espinoza squeezed a clear gel onto Alexis’s lower abdomen. Alexis flinched at the cold. The doctor picked up a wand—a transducer, Reggie’s brain supplied uselessly—and pressed it to her skin, moving it in small, deliberate circles.
The screen flickered to life, a storm of grainy, shifting static. Reggie leaned forward, elbows on his knees, trying to decipher the chaos. He saw nothing recognizable, just lunar landscapes in shades of gray.
“There we are,” Dr. Espinoza said, her voice changing, softening. She stopped moving the wand. “See that flickering? Right there.”
She pointed to a small, pulsing flutter in the center of the static. It was a rapid, rhythmic blink, a tiny, relentless star in the gray haze.
“That’s the heartbeat,” the doctor said.
Reggie stopped breathing. It wasn’t a picture. It was a movement. A rhythm. A beat. That tiny, frantic flutter was alive. It was working. It was separate from him, from Alexis, a thing unto itself, already tirelessly doing its job inside the chaos.
He felt a shudder travel up from the base of his spine, a seismic release he hadn’t known was coiled there. It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t love. It was the obliterating, profound shock of reality. This was not an idea. Not a problem. It was a heartbeat.
His eyes shot to Alexis’s face. A tear had escaped the corner of her eye, tracing a path into her hairline. She was staring at the screen, one hand pressed over her mouth, her own chest rising and falling in time with that other, quicker rhythm.
“Strong and regular,” Dr. Espinoza said, clicking a button. A fast, galloping sound filled the room—whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh—the audio of that visual flutter. It was the sound of a horse running, of a train in the distance, of life insisting on itself.
The sound broke something in him. He looked from the screen to Alexis, her vulnerability utterly naked now, and back to that relentless, blinking light. His father’s ghost, which had felt so solid in the bar, dissolved in the face of that pulse. That rhythm was a fact. His own heart hammered against his ribs, a clumsy, sympathetic echo.
He didn’t think. His body moved on its own. He stood from the distant chair, the legs screeching on the floor. He took two steps to the exam table and his hand, clumsy and large, found Alexis’s where it rested by her side. He didn’t lace their fingers. He just covered her hand with his, a solid, warm weight.
She didn’t pull away. Her fingers turned, gripping his with a surprising, desperate strength. She held onto him like he was the only solid thing in the spinning room. They didn’t look at each other. They stared at the pulsing light, listening to the galloping sound of what they had made, as the doctor measured and clicked, her voice a distant murmur.
He stayed in the room. He held on. The ghost was gone. In its place was only this sound, this light, and the terrifying, anchor-hold of her grip.