The day the test came back with two blue stripes, I put on my jeans and The Flicks T-shirt - the one with Alfred Hitchcock on the back - and drove to work. The Flicks was an indie movie house, and I worked there with artsy types who had lines of poetry tattooed on their forearms, dyed hair, and Converse sneakers. We wanted to make art. Children were not a part of our collective plan.

That morning I strode through the kitchen - past the assistant manager who was making curried sweet potato soup over the large gas range - stood before the espresso machine, turned the machine on to make a latte, and stopped.

I didn't know if I could drink coffee. Coffee might be poison now. I listened to the whirring of the espresso grinder, the machine grinding the beans into fragments. I'm not ready, I mouthed.

A couple of weeks earlier, while we were sitting on my couch talking, my boyfriend Caleb's face suddenly started to flush. He looked down and brushed his hand over his head, which I knew meant he was feeling nervous or insecure. He looked up quickly and blurted out, "Kelly, I want to marry you."

I sat stunned. It wasn't a proposal as much as a declaration. We had only been together for five months, and because Caleb lived in the woods, we had only seen each other a few times a week. Twice, he had panicked and disappeared for a week or longer. The first time, I wrote his absence off to jitters. The second time, I called and left a message on his cell phone: "If you are interested in a relationship with me, you will call me today, and you will continue to call me on a regular basis. If not, then this is goodbye."

Our relationship hadn't been romantic or blissful, but in the moment after he had declared he wanted to marry me, all I could remember were the blissful parts. I looked into his wide blue eyes and remembered lying on that beige couch while he played his guitar and sang "Pale Blue Eyes."