Still Life with Husband by Lauren Fox

and I want to destroy it. I had no idea I could be this angry. I’m exhausted, just from holding it in. Pretending to Steve that I’m sad but recuperating, like a normal person would be. Pretending I’m going to be okay…” She turns back to me with a little start, as if she’s surprised to see me. “But I don’t think I am going to be okay,” she says. “I know that women have miscarriages all the time, and then they go on to have healthy babies. And I was only eight weeks pregnant. Barely even pregnant. I was hardly even used to the idea. But you know what?”
    She stops talking, but I’m not sure why. Is she waiting for me to guess what “what” is? I shake my head.
    “I don’t believe it’s ever going to happen for us again,” she says. “I don’t know why, but I think that this baby was our one chance, and now it’s gone. It sounds stupid. But I know it.” Before I can argue with her, she’s off and running. “You know what else? What the hell am I supposed to be doing with myself now? I’m on this break from my job, and it was like, being pregnant was my job. Retro, huh?” She exhales, a gravelly whoosh of air. “But now what the hell am I supposed to do?” This would be the time I would expect my best friend to be crying. But she just looks at me, her lips pressed together, her eyes steely. She smooths down the front of her sweater with trembly hands.
    “Meg, oh, I don’t know what to say to you,” I admit, pretense gone. “I don’t know how to make you feel better. That’s all I want to do.”
    “How can you?” she asks. “This kind of thing definitely qualifies as a girl’s own private hell.”
    “Well, do you know anything else concrete about the miscarriage?” The word unexpectedly embarrasses me, like “vagina.” “Did they say why this might have happened, or what might come next?”
    She sets the practically untouched cookie down on her napkin. “The doctor said that these things sometimes just happen. It probably doesn’t mean anything, especially so early. It’s not uncommon and it’s likely that I’ll carry my next pregnancy to term. That’s what they say, blah, blah, blah.” She sighs.
    We sit in silence for a while, awkward silence, I think, but maybe Meg is so deep in her sadness that she doesn’t feel the discomfort. To compensate, I eat three cookies. “Want to go for a walk?” I ask, brushing crumbs off the table and into my hand.
    Meg and Steve live across the street from an elementary school, and, naturally, just as we step outside, thirty five-year-olds emerge en masse from the building for recess, a carnival of brightly colored, puffy parkas and monkey-house screeches. I look over at my friend, who is watching the chaos intently.
    “It doesn’t matter,” she says, turning back to me. “I never imagined it as a five-year-old. As a baby, yes, and even sometimes as a toddler, but I never envisioned an older child.”
    “Well, still and all, let’s move away from here,” I suggest, crunching through a pile of brown and red and yellow leaves.
    “I haven’t been out much since it happened,” she continues, as if I hadn’t spoken, and from deep inside this other place she seems to inhabit, “but every time I do go somewhere, all I see are pregnant women and little babies in strollers. You just start to think of yourself as someone who’s about to enter a new phase of your life, and then all of a sudden you’re not.” Meg chops her hand through the air, a gesture of finality. She’s moving just the tiniest bit faster than I am; she probably doesn’t even notice it. I take a quick extra half step, adjust my speed to hers.
    We walk along in silence for a while longer. The day is brilliant blue and warm for October in Wisconsin. We’re both wearing coats, but we hardly need them. I want to make a comment about global warming, which is one of my favorite subjects, but I decide not to. All around us birds are chirping wildly. I’ve never