A Thing As Good As Sunshine Read Free Page B

silence wasn't angry. I couldn't put my finger on
it, but I sensed a bit of inevitability mixed with excitement and an
undercurrent of resignation in the way Momma picked at her fingernails.
    "Momma,
please tell me what's wrong. I can take it."
    She
laughed and put her hands over her face. "Good, because I'm not sure I
can."
    "Momma?"
    "Honey-Girl,
when Auntie comes back we have to check and make sure you're not pregnant."
    Pregnant? Suddenly I felt not at all smart, in any way.
    Neither
of us said another word until Auntie Pria came back. Auntie was in full
medic-mode when she took a small blood sample and then laid me back onto the
exam table and gloved-up.
    "Honey-Girl,
listen carefully, I'm going to tell you the whole sordid story about the birds
and the bees that Momma never told you," she said and gently probed into
places only Sheng Tian had ever been. I was grateful for the clinical tone she
used, because my head nearly exploded with every new concept she laid out:
intercourse, penises, vaginas, eggs, sperm, fertilization, zygotes, fetuses,
babies, genetics.
    I
listened very carefully, which wasn't easy with my brain whirring away. The new
ideas Auntie described threw odd light on things I'd been ignorant about my
whole life, things I had naturally just accepted without question. The new ideas
rattled, crashed, met, melded, bounced, clashed and finally settled uneasily
into a context with what I already knew in a way that left more holes than
answers.
    Auntie
eventually patted my knee and helped me to sit up. Momma remained in the
corner, head hung low and eyes averted. Auntie took off her gloves, balled them
up and pocketed them rather than putting them in the recycler.
    "Any
questions?" Auntie asked.
    Questions? I had more questions than there were asteroids in the belt. Where should I
start with the questions?
    "Sheng
Tian knows all of this, too?"
    Auntie
laughed. "Maybe not in quite so much detail. But yes, I'm sure he's got
the basics."
    "So
how come it bothered him so much to find out I'm fertile? He looked at me like
I was untouchable."
    Auntie
looked at Momma. For the first time I understood that both of those titles were
honorary, and why they had to be. Momma could not possibly be my mother. Auntie
was not her sister. But we were still family.
    "Honey-Girl,
when a woman signs-up for work on a Perseus Rock, she surrenders her fertility
before shipping off-world."
    "What?
How?"
    "The
surgery is called a hysterectomy," Auntie explained. "They cut us
open and remove the uterus, the place the baby implants and grows after intercourse."
    From
Momma I knew that competition for colonial mining positions out here in the
belt was fierce, ten or twelve or fifteen years of work and you could go back to
Earth as a full-citizen and live like a Sultan. It took sacrifice, compromise,
separation from everyone and everything you loved. But to give up a part of
yourself to take the job, any job, that was brutal. Horrifying. "All of
you?"
    "All
of us. And they check to be sure when we arrive," Auntie said. I saw a
tear leak from the corner of her eye before she looked at the floor. "I
check, now."
    I felt
sick.
    "When
you told Sheng Tian you'd come up from Earth on the last crew transport, he had
no reason to think that sex with you was anything more than what it appeared to
be. A physical act of love," Momma said.
    "Or
lust," Auntie interjected.
    "Love,"
I said, insulted.
    "Either
way, he wasn't worried about pregnancy. Until Auntie Pria dropped that bomb on
him."
    "But
pregnancy is natural, right," I said, thinking back on Auntie's birds and
bees talk. "Why would it worry him?"
    Momma
sat down in front of me and took both my hands in hers. "Honey-Girl, how
many children have you seen in this rock?"
    I
answered without thinking. "Just me."
    "And
how many children do you think are written into my Ledger?" Momma asked.
It was the same tone of voice she used when she asked me to think through a study
problem instead of giving me