Rachel’s home looked occupied and welcoming. Fenced fields ranged on either side, one containing sheep, the other half a dozen cows. The house wasn’t visible until about six hundred feet farther when the lane rose over a hill. In a hollow beyond, the ramshackle farmhouse was nestled between towering pine trees, with a barn rising behind. With the mountains as a backdrop, the scene should have been picturesque, except that no fewer than four cars stood in a row in front of the house, each in a varying stage of either repair or disintegration. Smoke rose from one of the chimneys, tainting the air with the stench of burning coal. To one side, three children, who looked old enough that they should have been in school, chased a litter of puppies of uncertain breed and a gaggle of hens to their respective pens.
The sort of scene that gave Appalachia its stereotype. Marking all dwellers of the mountains with the brush of cars on blocks, ignorance, and truant children wasn’t fair, yet the notion had come from somewhere. Ashley ran across the somewhere more than she liked, especially when she was expected to provide a safe delivery and healthy baby and momma.
She descended from the Tahoe, removed her medical bag from the back, and headed for the house. Two hound dogs commenced howling and tore around the corner of the house. Ashley preferred cats, but she liked dogs, and most of the time, they didn’t frighten her. These two black-and-tan hounds were no exception. She flung up her hand in a “stop” gesture. “Keep back. I’m busy.” She kept her tone brisk and no-nonsense.
The hounds sat.
Beyond them, the front door opened and a woman in knit pants and a flannel shirt pulled the cigarette from her lips long enough to shout at the dogs to “git back.” She then waved to Ashley. “Y’here t’see Rachel?”
“Yes.” Ashley mounted the two steps to the concrete slab that served as a front porch. “Is she here?”
“She’s puking her guts out in the bathroom, but you’re welcome to come in.”
“Are you her mother?” Ashley judged the woman’s age to be around fifty.
“Older sister.”
Not thirty years older than Rachel; she just looked it with her overbleached blond hair.
“Sorry about that.” Ashley stepped over the threshold into a living room with worn, but good enough quality furniture and a wide-screen TV blasting a morning talk show. Beyond the dialogue of the talking heads, Ashley heard Rachel moan, then running water.
“Midwife’s here, Rach.” The sister’s voice sounded like a foghorn.
No wonder. The air was positively blue with cigarette smoke.
“Coming.” Rachel sounded weak.
The sister looked to Ashley. “Sure hope you can do something for her. This is making me sick.”
“I have some things that can help.” Ashley glanced around. “Where will she want me to examine her?”
“Her bedroom. Top of the steps.”
“I’m coming,” Rachel called.
“Can I get some boiling water in the kitchen?” Ashley glanced through a doorway, but saw only a dining room in one direction and a bedroom in another.
“Thattaway.” The sister waved beyond the dining room, then settled on the sofa across from the TV and lit another cigarette from the end of the one still in her mouth.
Ashley shuddered inwardly and entered the dining room. A Dutch door led into a large and sunny farm kitchen. It was spotlessly clean, though the Formica countertops had to have been put in fifty years earlier. A teakettle already stood on the range top. Ashley picked it up, found it still contained water that was nearly warm, and returned it to the burner to heat. From her bag, she drew out a plastic bag into which she had tucked some chopped fresh gingerroot. She poured a few of the pieces into a mug she found in a cabinet above the stove and waited for the water to boil.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.” Rachel stumbled into the kitchen. Her face was greenish in hue, and she pressed her hands to her stomach.
“You’re still having morning sickness?” Ashley looked at the baby bump beneath Rachel’s clutching fingers. “What are you eating? How much? How often?”
As usual, much of the cause behind Rachel’s continued sickness was her diet—too much sugar or artificial sweetener and too little actual food.
“You have to eat better, Rachel.” Ashley sat Rachel at the kitchen table, then answered the call of the whistling teakettle and poured it over the gingerroot. The sweet, sharp tang of the ginger filled the air. “Do you all have some honey?”
“Yes ma’am, from our own bees. That cabinet to your left.”
Ashley found a honeycomb. She tapped out some of the thick, sweet honey into the ginger infusion and carried the steaming cup to Rachel. “Sip this slowly. It should settle your stomach. I’m going to leave this gingerroot with you. You can freeze it to keep it from molding. Try to drink things like this or water or fruit juice that is naturally sweet, all day. Lots of toast, chicken. Not much spice. You need to eat more.” She pulled out the other chair. “If procuring these things is a problem . . .”
“We got money. This is a good farm.” Rachel sniffed at the tea, took a tentative sip, and glanced up in surprise. “It’s good.”
“I know. I sometimes wish I had an excuse to drink it.”
“Funny that, you delivering other people’s babies, but you don’t got none of your own.”
“I’m—” Ashley broke off. She had been about to point out that she wasn’t married, so children weren’t an option, but then Rachel wasn’t married either and was on her second. “I’m too busy for children.” She finished with another truth. Now was not the time to preach to Rachel about abstinence before marriage.
“I guess I’m glad I’m having this one.” Rachel’s hand dropped to the pocket of her slacks. Cellophane crackled.
Ashley’s eyes narrowed. “Are you still smoking?”
“No.” Rachel’s hand shot back to curve around her cup. A packet of cigarettes plopped out of her pocket and onto the floor, and she hung her head. “Not much.”
“I won’t tell you again that you have to stop. I’ll simply have to drop you and send you to a doctor.”
“I know.” Rachel drained her ginger tea and returned the cup to the table with too much force. “If only Arlene would stop it would help. But I’ll try. I don’t want no doctor.”
“All right then. My offer for a place to stay still stands.”
The house had more than enough room for Rita and Rachel. Right then and there, the company would be welcome so she could sleep without worrying over the slightest sound.
Ashley rose. “Let’s go into your room to examine your vitals and listen to the baby.”
Despite the evidence of smoke in the upstairs bedroom, Rachel’s vitals proved to be good. She was too thin but seemed strong and alert. The baby’s heart also sounded strong.
Ashley began to pack up her things. “I’ll see you in two weeks unless you want to see me sooner. Give me a call.”
She went straight home, having left her visit to Rachel for last because of the smoke she suspected she would find. Smoking and chewing tobacco were common in the mountains, but Rachel’s home was one of the worst she’d been in for a while. Ashley’s clothes, hair, and skin all reeked of it. At home, she threw her clothes into the washer and washed her hair, then scrubbed her skin. Today she took the time to dry her hair, as she was picking up Heather for a trip to Roanoke and shopping at Valley View Mall.
They hadn’t talked much since Heather dropped her bombshell at lunch. Ashley hoped they could reopen the subject during the drive today, as they were going in the same vehicle. Ashley didn’t need the gory details of Heather’s infidelity. She didn’t think she wanted them. She was more concerned about Heather’s emotional health, as that could affect the health of the baby in the long run. She also worried about Ian’s reaction. In short, Heather could have set the end of her marriage in motion, and Ashley didn’t want to see that happen for a couple she always believed was happy together. She loved Heather. She loved Ian. They were h
er friends. The idea of the two of them suffering emotional and spiritual pain cut Ashley to the core.
And scared her a little. She’d always thought their marriage a good one. If it wasn’t, whose was? Her parents’ seemed solid, but maybe they had secrets she didn’t know about. The same with her brothers’ marriages.
She had lived nearly thirty years with too little romance. In school, she had been too focused and driven to waste time on her male classmates. In Brooksburg, she knew all the single men too well. Most didn’t want a wife who ran around the mountains at all hours of the day and night. Now, with her plans to go to medical school swinging into motion, the last thing she needed was a relationship with anyone.
So she literally kicked herself when her gaze strayed to the motel parking lot, seeking a white Mercedes SUV. He was gone back to his civilized and privileged life in the city. No doubt he’d shaken off the notion of finding his birth family, even with his mother dead, and she would never hear from him again. So much the better if she was so often seeking out signs of his presence.
She sped across the highway without a second glance to the motel parking lot and drove into the quiet neighborhood of restored—for the most part—Victorian mansions where Heather and Ian lived. Despite the time being noon on a weekday, both vehicles filled the drive. Odd that Ian would be home.
Foreboding cramped Ashley’s stomach. When she drew up behind Heather’s Camry, she knew she should get out and go to the door. She didn’t want to. She doubted she could face Ian. She expected to be awkward with Heather. Many of Ashley’s patients had been unfaithful to their spouses and gotten pregnant, but as far as she knew, none of her friends had been, especially one of the friends with whom she had bonded partly because of their shared faith.
“You’re probably just naive, Ash.” She sat for a moment, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.
And in that moment of hesitation, Heather appeared in the front door, pulling on her coat while she juggled her handbag and shoved open the screen door. She said something over her shoulder, then the storm door banged.
Ashley closed her eyes. This didn’t look good.
Heather yanked open the passenger-side door and leaped onto the seat. “Let’s go.”
“Buckle up.” Ashley flicked a glance toward the house to see if Ian was going to follow.
Heather snapped her seat belt into place. “Okay, Mom, I’m ready.”
“Still the mall?” Ashley backed into the street and headed for the highway.
“Still the mall. Everything is getting too tight.”
Silence reigned. With an effort, Ashley resisted the urge to fill the quiet with the noise of the radio. If she waited long enough, she knew from experience with hundreds of patients, Heather would speak.
She held out for a long time. They had nearly reached Roanoke when Heather finally straightened in her seat, hands clasped over the handles of her handbag. “I told him.”
“I thought you might have.” Ashley kept her eyes on the road, paying attention to the increased traffic.
“He cried.” Heather began to sob with deep, shoulder-quaking sobs. “I thought he’d get mad. I thought he would break something or toss me out on my rear. I was ready for that.” She covered her face with her hands. “I could have gotten mad myself about how he was gone all the time and more interested in making money than loving me. But he cried instead. He thought—he said he thought I would never do anything like that to betray him, that he never worried when he left. He said—he said—” Her crying grew too intense for speech.
Ashley’s heart wrenched and twisted in her chest. The friend in her wanted to pull over and hold Heather. The midwife in her wanted to warn Heather how bad this was for the baby. The critic in her wanted to shout, How could you betray him then? He’s kind and smart and ambitious and successful and gorgeous through and through. And best of all, he loves you to distraction. The gossip in her wanted to ask who was the baby’s father, an aspect she knew she didn’t really want to know in the event she knew him.
She was driving seventy down a major expressway with nowhere to exit in sight. The best she could offer was to open the console and hand Heather a box of tissues. Then she needed to pass a pickup hauling a trailer at ten miles below the speed limit, and the road took all her attention. I-81 was notorious for heavy truck traffic. The closer they drew to Roanoke, the more numerous were the eighteen-wheelers with their loads of everything from logs to turkeys.
In the passenger seat, Heather blew her nose, sobbed some more, blew her nose again, then sat back in the seat. She took several deep and shuddering breaths, caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror, and shrieked. “I look horrible. I can’t go shopping looking like this.”
“There’s some hand sanitizer in the console. You can wash your face with that, and I know you have makeup in your purse.”
The mundane, the need to concentrate on repairing her appearance, would calm Heather. In midwifery school, when Heather got overly stressed about an upcoming exam, Ashley had persuaded her to take a few minutes to give her a makeover or demonstrate how to get her eye shadow to look attractive and not clownish, a skill at which Ashley forever failed. Even at midnight, Heather loved making up her face to look flawless and stunning. The vanity aspect of it never bothered Ashley, for Heather was also generous and loving.
Had those traits in combination led to her infidelity? Lonely, she had been tempted by someone attracted to her warmth and beauty. Ashley liked to think she herself never would do such a thing if she found a man she loved and who loved her, but maybe she would in a fit of loneliness.
Feeling a little queasy, she spotted the exit she needed for the mall and slowed. Beside her, Heather wiped her face with hand sanitizer and tissues, muttering about how bad it all was for her skin, then she gathered up her purse and began to rummage for a bright-red makeup bag. As Ashley suspected, it contained everything Heather needed to repair her appearance—except for the puffiness around her eyes.
“Can we pull over somewhere?” Heather waved a mascara wand. “I can’t put this on in a moving vehicle.”
“I can hardly put it on while standing still at my bathroom sink.” Ashley turned into the mall parking lot. In the early afternoon of a weekday, it held relatively few cars. She picked a spot near the food court entrance and parked, leaving the heater running against the sharp, cold wind outside. “Talk to me, Heather.”
“I don’t have anything more to say.”
“I let you get away with that once already.” Ashley leaned her back against her door. “I was in shock then, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear anything else, but I think it’s beyond that.”
“What?” Heather shoved the mascara into her makeup bag and snatched out a jar of foundation, waving it like a weapon. “You want to know all the salacious details? Who is the father? How did I end up sleeping with him? How many times did it happen? Did I like—”
“Knock it off.” Ashley didn’t raise her voice; she kept it quiet and firm. “You know me better than that. I want to know about what you plan to do going forward. Why did you tell Ian today, and did he say anything about what he plans to do?”
Heather paused in the act of smoothing foundation over her face and hung her head. “Ian is a smart man. He’s seen me tossing my cookies three mornings in a row because he’s been home late enough in the morning for me to be getting up, and he straight-out asked me.”
Ashley bit her tongue to stop from asking how bad the morning sickness was, what she was doing to control it, was Heather concerned it was still going on.
“And he asked how far along you are.” Ashley could only imagine the impact the news had on Ian.
Heather nodded, then resumed smoothing on her makeup. “Like I said, I thought he would rage at who the man is, go out and punch him or something. But he didn’t. He got tears in his eyes, then broke down.” Her lower lip quivered and she gave her head a violent shake. “I’ve never seen that man cry, not even when
his dog died.”
“Do you think maybe you should have canceled this shopping trip?”
“Of course not. I needed space between us.”
Ashley straightened. “You don’t think he would hurt you, do you?”
“Ian hurt me?” Heather gave her a disgusted look. “Of course not. I just mean I couldn’t bear to see his pain any longer.”
“Heather.” Ashley paused to choose her words with care. “Don’t you think staying there with him would have done more to ease his pain? Or . . . or do you no longer love him?”
“Of course I still love him. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” Tears flooded her eyes again. “I’m a terrible, awful, despicable person for what I did. I hate myself for it. It was a brief and stupid affair, and I thought I could just put it behind me. But then I realized I was pregnant and . . . I’m just completely beyond being forgiven.”
“Heather, you know that’s wrong-headed thinking.”
“Intellectually I know that’s not true. I am certainly sorry for what I did, even without this forever reminder of how awful I am. But I don’t think I will ever forgive myself. And Ian . . . I don’t deserve to have his forgiveness.”
“Maybe marriage counseling?” Ashley was out of her depth there. “I mean, something must have been wrong between the two of you for this to happen in the first place.”
“We didn’t think so, but there must have been.” Heather shoved her makeup bag into her purse without applying blush or powder or lipstick. “I don’t need any more makeup. I need a scarlet letter on my chest.”
“You need lunch, for the sake of the baby, if not yourself.”
Heather reached out and squeezed Ashley’s arm. “Leave it to you to think of the baby. But you’re right. I wish I weren’t hungry. I think I’m supposed to feel so guilty I can’t eat, but once the morning sickness leaves, I am utterly starving. Can I have a burger and fries?”
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