The bus ride home was hot and smelled of sweat and stale cigarettes. June had been to the lavatory twice, each time navigating the aisle on the verge of vomiting, hoping that she actually would so she might feel better. She wanted to open a window, but the latch was in the row ahead of her, and the man who sat there was asleep, his blond hair mashed against the glass like a sunstruck crown. She leaned back against the seat, watched the hills and road cuts of Kentucky flash by.
The first time it had occurred to June that she might be in trouble was a few weeks before, on another bus ride—a school field trip to Charleston—her friend Vivian Taylor in the seat beside her. June’s lunch bag had lain between them, its brown paper smudged with grease from the fried bologna sandwich she had made that morning. June had picked up the bag to roll it tighter, and it released a salty, meaty smell, one that she usually savored, but just then, the memory of its taste caught in her throat, tremored to her belly and back again. Chips shattered inside the bag as she wadded it into a loose ball. Vivian watched, eyebrows raised. Even the sound of the breaking chips made June retch. She shoved the lunch under the bus seat and lay her head in Vivian’s lap, tried to shut out the odors and noises of the bus—tried to shut out the idea that had begun to rise up in her mind, a mist that settled into the dark hollows of her brain where she didn’t want to tarry. She felt Viv’s hand raking through her hair.
The night before, in the parking lot of the Waffle House, she’d finally told Tom about the baby. After a few beats of silence, he’d asked, Are you sure?
I’m sure. I’ve read up on it, she’d said, watching his face. She hadn’t told him details: the sickness, the missed period—was it one or two?—the aching fullness in her breasts—how, lately, she couldn’t stand the smell of onions or boiling chicken. The visit to Grannie Carrie’s for confirmation.
His shoulders fell. Seeing the air go out of him like that had cut her to the quick. He asked, Does Mama and Isom know?
Her voice quivered. Mama does, and I’d expect Isom does by now, too. She tells him ever thing, don’t she?
He put an arm around her, said, Oh, Junebug.
She waited for him to ask about the baby’s father but knew he’d already assumed it was Ellis. She wondered how to tell him the truth—that she wasn’t even sure.
Oh, God, he said. And for the first time since she’d been sick on the school bus ride—since she’d known—she let herself cry to someone other than Carrie. Tom held her tight, let her sob. It wasn’t until after he’d settled her into a motel room in Oak Grove that he asked what she was going to do.
I don’t know, she said.
He picked at the chenille bedspread, then asked after Ellis. He said, Isom will kill him, no joke. And I’m afraid he won’t let you keep an Akers baby in his house.
June weighed what to say, but Tom spoke again.
He, for sure, ain’t gonna to allow you to marry one, he’d said.
Just then, her mind split in two directions. She thought of Ellis, who she hadn’t seen often since he quit school and went into the mine to work the dead shift and sleep away most of the daylight. She only saw him when he had showed up at the ball field on Saturdays or when he called while she was at Aunt Beauty’s—or when they’d slipped off somewhere. Then, she recalled the flash of another man’s white shirtsleeve as he drove past the house last Friday, on his way home to Columbus. Through his open car window, a wisp of a Johnny Rivers song, then brake lights as he drifted around the curve. At that moment, she’d known it was the last she’d see of JT, who never showed up for work on Monday. Someone must’ve told him that she was pregnant. Word moves fast in a holler.
Tom said, Don’t let Isom get mean. You need me, you know you can call. Or go to Beauty’s.
She knew he was thinking of Rena and the belt. I will, she’d said.
He’d touched her arm then, said, And you finish school, you hear me? Only a couple of months left to go. Don’t do what I did and quit.
Later, she wished she’d told him what the English teacher had said about the essays she had written, but just then, she was thinking of Granny Carrie’s predicted due date: October or November. No telling where Tom’ll be by then, she thought. Forty-seven miles outside of Myrtle Gap, June pictured Isom waiting for her on the porch, furious that she’d been gone overnight. She stood, teetered down the bus aisle, made it to the lavatory just in time to vomit into the shiny, metal commode.
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From In The Fields of Fatherless Children by Pamela Steele. Published by Counterpoint. Text copyright © 2026 by Pamela Steele. All rights reserved.
