Page 98 of Badd Baby

Rune drew me away, then, inside and upstairs to her room, which was an eclectic reflection of the various periods and phases of her life—treasured stuffed animals from her girlhood decorated her bed, band and movie posters plastered the walls, bookshelves featured dogeared romance paperbacks, high school textbooks, dictionaries, a thesaurus, and nearly two dozen black and white comp notebooks. A delicate, antique white desk under a window held a framed photograph of Rune with her parents at what I assumed was her first day of college, another of her as a preteen in front of the Grand Canyon in a Vanna White ta-da! pose, and a third showed Rune and Lindsey in matching sorority T-shirts, faces painted in USC colors, grinning like fools in the SoCal sun.

Rune perched on the edge of her bed and slid back to put her back to the wall, grabbing a floppy-eared, well-loved stuffed rabbit. "I feel like I need to hold Babbitt for moral support," she said. "No jokes from the peanut gallery."

"Y'know," I said, lounging on the bed beside her, our feet hanging over the side, "I was talking to a customer a couple weeks ago about that phrase, and she told me it actually has racist connotations."

Rune looked at me in surprise. “Really? How? I thought it just meant unsolicited opinions or something like that.”

“That's what I thought too," I said, "but apparently the peanut gallery meant the cheapest seats, which were pretty much always reserved for Black people, back during segregation."

Rune blinked at this information. "Huh. Guess I won't be saying that anymore. I had no idea."

"Me either, until she told me." I took her hand. "So."

She slapped her other hand on top of mine. "So."

"You're pregnant."

She nodded. "Yup."

“You said you're planning on keeping the pregnancy?"

She nodded. "Yeah. I…I guess I never really considered any other option." She looked at me. "Do you…do you have any thoughts on that, Duncan?"

"I mean, I feel like I don't really get an opinion, Rune. It's not my body, it's yours. I support any decision you make."

"I appreciate that, but what's your personal opinion?"

"That is my personal opinion. Men shouldn't have any say in what women do with their bodies, legally or otherwise." I shrugged. "I believe life is precious, but so is bodily autonomy. And while there are circumstances where there just may not be any other choice but to terminate, this doesn't seem like that kind of a situation to me. But, it's not my life, not my future, and not my body."

She nodded. "Your mother raised you well," she said.

"And my dad. He raised Dane and I to respect women." I laughed. "Plus, my sister is kinda scary."

Rune sighed. "I'm keeping it. Like I said, I've never really considered anything else."

“That's settled, then. I just…I guess I felt like I had to get that question out of the way so I know we're on the same page."

"How does this work, Duncan?" she asked, looking at me. "You and me." She touched her belly. "This."

I shook my head and shrugged. "I don't know."

“Well, in a perfect world, what would it look like for you?" she asked.

"Rune, I…"

She drew her legs up to sit cross-legged, turning to face me. "Answer the question, Duncan. And be honest."

"Thinking selfishly, you mean?" I asked.

“Yes," she said.

"In my selfish, perfect world, you'd live in Ketchikan with me. We'd come back here as often as possible. It's a five-and-a-half-hour flight. Not nothing, but not crazy, either. Doable for a long weekend, easily." I shrugged. "That's my honest, selfish answer."

"I'm an LA girl, Duncan," she said. "I'm worried Alaskan winters would kill me."

I laughed. "Rune, I think you're falling victim to a common misconception about Ketchikan. We're actually located in a temperate rainforest region. Our winters are actually more like Seattle's. People from the Lower Forty-Eight think of Alaska and they think every city in Alaska gets forty-six feet of snow and is dark year-round. The reality in Ketchikan, though, is that most winters we get more rain than snow, and it tends to stay above freezing for the most part. Yeah, thirty-eight will be cold as hell to a SoCal girl, but it's not the Arctic Circle. It's not Gnome. When you think ‘Alaskan winter,’ that's what you're envisioning—the sun setting in November and not rising until January, temperatures in the teens, and tons of snow. It's not like that where I live."

She frowned thoughtfully. “Really? You're not making that up to trick me into moving there?"