I think I would have felt better about the whole experience if I’d just marched right in there, hopped over the counter, grabbed the public address phone and announced, “Attention CVS employees and fellow shoppers, I’m five days late and I’m here to buy a pregnancy test. Now carry on with your own agendas.”

Instead I scurried in there with my heart pounding, certain I was visibly sweating and agitated.  It was like I was doing something bad, rather than as if I was the 32-year-old married woman that I am, who may or may not be pregnant with my own husband’s child.  I found my way to the aisle, with which I was not already acquainted.  This, after all, was my first foray into pregnancy test-buying. I am, by nature, over cautious.

The shelves of aisle 6A jut out further than 6B, and the boxes of tests are all right there, poking into the waiting area for the pharmacy.  I hedged over toward the B side of the aisle, where all the vitamins are, trying to hide from the pharmacists who had a clear view of me loitering around the pregnancy tests.  I may as well have been standing there naked for all the discomfort I felt.  Teenagers are more definitive and shamelessly conspicuous about such a purchase!

I squatted down, pretending to study glucosamine tablets, while really straining my eyes across the aisle to side A, trying to figure out which of countless brands I should choose.  Who needs that kind of decision-making pressure in a moment like this?

I was certain the pharmacy guy was on to me, and that he had already started a game of operator with his fellow pill pushers. “Ooooh, check out the tall girl in 6. Looks like she’s eyeing up the pee sticks,” I imagined he gossiped.  Either that or he’d pushed a button under his register for security to keep an eye on the woman acting peculiar around the vitamins and/or pregnancy tests.

A handful of minutes earlier, as I was tying my laces to leave the house, the country song Real Love by Phil Vasser was on my digital music station.  These lyrics rang in my ears:

“Then one night you came to me
With tears in your eyes and an EPT and said
“Guess what, yeah, baby ready or not.”

It was how I made the decision to finally grab a box of EPT, which had 2 tests in it (see over cautious declaration above).

On my way to the register, I picked up a bottle of sunscreen and a razor and situated them on either side of the box, so as to not inadvertently announce my business to everyone else in the line.  The girl at the register couldn’t have taken any longer than she did, fumbling with a bag to pack my purchases.  I just wanted to run out of there, I practically did when the sale was finally closed.

Now I was just about three blocks away from the next chapter of my life.

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