Mary Again?
A funny thing happened one day. Mark called me from wherever he was stationed in the Marines. It may have been West Virginia. What was even more peculiar was what he needed to ask me. With a sense of urgency he needed to know if I had Mary’s phone number.
“Now WHY would I have that?” I asked. He was grasping at straws it seems…
“Well, if you talk to her, give her my phone number. It’s important.” Mark asked, almost pleading.
“Mary is not going to call me” I insisted, but for some reason I knew I was now lying to him and myself.
That evening, while hanging out at Fiddler’s Green, I relayed this rather odd conversation to Chrissy. She immediately suspected what I had suspected. Mary was now pregnant with Mark’s Love child, or Mark was going to die from AIDS. Those were the only two reasons anyone would need Mary’s phone number that bad. Even, despite the AIDS theory, I found it amusing. Chrissy found it amusing when I told her. We laughed about it but decided we should keep it to ourselves because we didn’t know anything for sure just as Paul came in.
“We can tell Paul?” I asked after he asked what was going on. He found it amusing.
Sean walked in and I asked “We could tell Sean, right?” He found it amusing as well.
As we were all laughing and making fun of Mark, Jay walked in. Again I said, “We can tell Jay…”
Jay did not find it amusing. Mark was f*@%ed. Now, one way or another, Mary was going to ruin his life forever. That was depressing, but I still found humor in it.
Sure enough the next day I got a phone call from Mary. She had something important to tell me. She was pregnant. I pretended to be totally shocked.
“Don’t worry, it’s not yours”, she assured me, as if that was physically possible. Then she told me I was going to be shocked when I did find out who the father was.
“Is it Mark?” I asked. She was a little shocked that I guessed, but I quickly let her know that he had called me and asked me to give her his phone number. She was really grateful, but I had to ask. “Are you absolutely sure it’s Mark’s?”
She insisted it had to be because he was the only one she was with around that time. Now that it was true, I actually felt bad for Mark.
Despite her insistence, we still advised Mark to get a paternity test. Mark was already on that. We asked him when this could even had occurred and he told us it was when he took her to the airport back in December. It took a month or so to have the paternity test done because Mary resisted, but it was a good thing he did, because Mark was not the father.
The next time Mary called, I confronted her about the lie. She said that because she wanted with all her heart for Mark to be the father because she loved him. Instead it turned out to be some bald guy she had met up with in New Jersey before Mark took her to the airport. He dodged a bullet there. I told Mary that whatever her reasoning for putting forth such an accusation, insisting Mark was the only guy she was with and that the baby was his was a breach in the trust of everybody. With that we expected that to be that last we heard from Mary.