You Can’t Be Too Careful

Abstract

You Can’t Be Too Careful Jane Ratcliffe (bio) The pregnancy was a mistake. which isn’t to say i regretted it, just that it frightened me in a particular way I was doing my best to contain. I’d had two miscarriages in my twenties and was now in my forties. Plus, Billy, the father, was so young—only twenty-one—and even less ready to be a father than either of us could have known. We’d met at a mutual friend’s Thanksgiving dinner party. Smart, clean cut, witty in a considerate way, Billy seemed older; with my knee-high boots and short skirt he’d thought I was younger. Admittedly, the sex was delicious. So much so, we had it all the time, taking breaks only for meals, work, and basic cleaning up. We were still in this initial rapturous phase when suddenly I was pregnant and Billy got his diagnosis. His parents were both dead and there weren’t any siblings, so we decided it was best that he move in with me, though this wasn’t at all the way I’d imagined the evolution of my life. I lived on the Bowery, in the same loft my ex-husband, Banks, and I had rented when we were both art students at Parsons. Eventually the building had gone co-op, and we’d bought in. Back then it was all dangling wires and holes in the floor, no walls or shower, generations of roaches. But Banks and I had made the place beautiful. They’d torn down a building across the street, and light poured in like gasoline. From nothing but air we managed to conjure up a living room, a painting studio, a kitchen far too large for even our combined cooking capabilities, two bedrooms (we’ll have a family soon enough, Banks had wistfully promised), and a bathroom spacious enough not only to house a shower and tub, but also to serve as a darkroom once his career was grounded enough for me to focus on mine. Electrical, plumbing, dry wall, tile, weathered wooden planks from a collapsed upstate farm; neither of us knew what we were doing with our shiny new tools and easily damaged hands, but we read many books and asked many questions and in the end we had a home. Back in March, Billy decided to turn Banks’s old painting studio into the baby’s room. Armed with a roller and a brush and some kind of plastic hardhat, he painted the walls a pale pink. I insisted he change them to yellow. Banks had painted the second bedroom petal pink before we’d lost our first child to miscarriage. Billy acquiesced, then ran a wallpaper border of animals holding balloons just below the crown molding. “Banks would have painted something cool up there,” he’d said, a smear of wallpaper plaster dried along his sunken cheek. “I know that, baby.” Banks had left some of his early paintings in there and they were worth a [End Page 107] decent amount of money now. After his diagnosis Billy had taken a great interest in the paintings, and then in Banks. He was always wanting to hear the stories of how it was back in the day—the hardships, the breakthroughs, what our love had been like—and I told him what I remembered, to fill our increasingly empty nights. As it turned out, once the sex stopped, Billy and I didn’t have much in common except that had his mother still been alive she’d have been about my age. And had my first child lived, she’d have been only a handful of years younger than Billy. I was in my fifth month of pregnancy when a pipe in the bathroom burst. The plumber said all of them would need replacing. Banks and I still owned the loft together and Banks wanted to check things out for himself. There was nothing he could do about the pipes, we both knew this, but he’d insisted on coming despite my best arguments. He showed up on the first official day of summer. His hair was...