LatinosUSA

1971

“You want this jacket?” asked Cathy, opening the closet door wide to reveal a handmade denim jacket festooned with hundreds of large, garish silver stars.

Cliff regarded the apparel dubiously. “Where’d you get that?” he asked his lover of one night.

“This junkie I used to date,” she replied with a still-intoxicated slur.

“Junkie?” asked Cliff.

“God, he was great in bed when he was high!” she recalled. “He’d shoot up the smack,” she remembered with a fondness that Cliff found disconcerting, “and he could just go all night.” She cackled with glee.

Cliff pushed the door shut and said, “I’ll pass.” Cathy seemed a little disappointed. Perhaps, thought Cliff, she imagined that he would don the disgusting jacket, shoot up and then become great in bed, like his predecessor.

“How did you get tangled up with a heroin user?” he inquired curiously. He spent just one night with this chick, and already he was having second thoughts about his involvement. She had seemed so innocent at the tavern.

“Daryl used to come into the all-night porn shop where I worked,” Cathy explained. She shrugged. “It just happened.”

Cliff gazed shrewdly at his girlfriend of — he glanced at his watch — 11 hours, and thought, man, I am so out of here. He began edging toward the door of Cathy’s apartment. “I’ll…catch you later,” he said awkwardly.

She stopped him in his tracks with, “I’m ovulating.”

Cliff blinked. “What?”

“I almost certainly got pregnant last night, Cliff,” she told him boldly.

“But you said you were on the pill,” he pointed out.

“I lied,” she said shortly.

“Why?” he asked. He was confused. What did this chick want with him? he wondered.

“As of last night, I’m 24 years old,” she said, apropos of nothing.

Cliff now recalled that when he encountered her at the tavern, she said she was celebrating a birthday, and he bought her the first of many drinks. He looked at her again. She looks older than 24, he thought.

She went on, “It’s time I settled down. And I have,” she added, pointing a slender forefinger at him, “decided on you.”

Cliff’s pupils dilated. “Me?” he cried, raising his voice a little. “I hardly know you. What makes you think I would settle down with you, even if you are pregnant?”

“My brother-in-law is a lawyer,” she said threateningly, “and we’ll take your narrow ass to court. And a paternity suit won’t sit well with your employer,” she predicted accurately.

Cliff was a junior marketing executive at a prestigious firm, and with an income already in the six figures, he stood to lose a lot should he fall into disfavor with his reputation-conscious employer. He had only been slumming last night. Had he become the unwitting victim of a designing woman?

“How will a court know you didn’t get knocked up by any of the dozen other guys you’re probably sleeping with?” he asked belligerently.

“I’ll deny having sex with anyone else since my last period,” she told him. “And I know your blood type from the STD clinic, where I work, and it’s compatible with any child I’ll have. Besides,” she added a little uncertainly, “I’m pretty sure that I haven’t been laid since I scoped you out.” She affected a mean little smile.

Damn, thought Cliff. Now he remembered where he first saw this crazy chick: at the venereal disease treatment center he visited a month ago. She drew his blood. So, he was screwed, both literally and figuratively.

“You have,” Cathy went on didactically, “no plausible deniability.”

“But you don’t know for sure if you’re even pregnant,” he pointed out. It was a weak hand, but it was the best he had.

“I know,” said Cathy with certitude. She sighed. “And I can’t wait till we get married and I can quit my job and just live off the fat of the land.” She cackled again.

2024

The large Peckwood family gathered round the vast dinner table in the manor house, as was their custom, to celebrate Thanksgiving Day. They all felt they had a lot to be thankful for. Grandpa Cliff, head of the family, looked with pleasure at his eight children and twenty-four grandchildren, plus their spouses, and the three great-great-grandkids, who were sitting at the kids’ table. Never would he have imagined, more than half a century ago, on the eve of his marriage to Cathy, that he would have so fulfilling a life. He smiled.

He told them all once again about the whirlwind romance he’d had with their mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. About how he’d spotted her at the debutante cotillion and gingerly approached her, afraid she would ignore him or worse, shoo him away. How she had so many ardent suitors and how he had persisted till at last he won her notice and eventually, her love. How he had to coax Cathy, a teetotaler, to take a sip of champagne and how it had tickled her nose. It was a tale recounted dozens of times, but no one ever seemed to tire of hearing it.

“It was a mighty effort to gain her affection,” he said, “but well worth it.”

Around the table, everyone beamed with pleasure. Cathy Peckwood, the matriarch of the family, loved by all for her reticent manner, passed six years before. The whole family would be eternally grateful for her foresight: it was she who designed the world-famous Astral Cloak, the star-covered denim jacket on which the family fortune was based. Everyone around the table, including the small children, was clad in the admittedly outrageous garb. The coats’ many stars glittered in the candlelight.