by Amy Sorrells
“I’ll do that,” he says. He’s coming in at lunchtime, scheduled to close. “You think tomorrow’s soon enough?”
“I think so.” I hope so.
“It’s been a long night. Three Narcan runs. Two nursing home runs, and one of them dead before we got there. Then a heart attack at the Waffle House out by the interstate. I didn’t sit down once ’cept when we were driving to the next call.” He pauses. Country music plays on his radio in the background. “You know, the hospital’s still seeing cases of the flu,” he says. “Say the mild winter gave it a late start.”
“Maybe that’s all it is, then.” Come to think of it, folks have been coming into the diner coughing all over the place. I picked up the last two afternoons and closings because Carla was home fevering and coughing too. My windshield wipers move to the music playing on my own radio as they wipe away a misty rain. I rest my hand where I can feel the baby kicking. “Let’s hope that’s all it is.”
When I get to the diner, the smell of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls fills the air, and the place is already buzzing with customers. Mothers and preschoolers fill nearly all the tables, a playgroup from one of the bigger churches that meets here sometimes on Wednesday mornings.
I recognize a couple of the mothers from high school, girls who’d sat on the stage in the auditorium on awards day every spring, collecting ribbons and certificates for perfect attendance and honor roll grades. Girls who waited until they were married before getting pregnant. Girls who don’t have to work during the day because their husbands make plenty as plant managers or schoolteachers or commuting to the city for work. Girls who wear clothes I see in the windows at the local boutique. Girls who have second babies strapped in car seats and hanging over their elbows when they come in, and some of them carrying third legitimate babies in bellies swollen big as mine.
I take their orders of cinnamon rolls for the toddlers, eggs and sometimes oatmeal and decaffeinated lattes for themselves. I imagine their children playing and giggling, toys spread across hardwood-floored living rooms of their three-bedroom tract houses in the new neighborhoods outside town, not floors that bow under their feet when they walk across them or walls that had to have the smoke scrubbed out of them. Girls whose babies have a chance without having to make a decision like that baby mother who stood before King Solomon . . . without having to make a decision like me.
Every day the question of what I’m going to do about this baby feels like a gleaming sword hanging above my heart, threatening to slice me and my baby in two. And although the visit to Mama brought me some comfort, Elizabeth Blair’s threat won’t leave my mind.
Twenty minutes into the shift my feet already ache. Feels like one of the baby’s feet or maybe an arm is lodged under my ribs. Rain falls steady outside, running in little rivers down the diner windowpanes. Hersch flips orders and scrapes the grill in a comforting cadence. The mothers and preschoolers trickle out except for a trio whose children are coloring quietly and happily in another booth. Some of the lunch regulars shuffle in, including Shorty Smith and his brood from the tool factory and Bud and Larry the handymen. Reubens are popular on this rainy day, and Hersch pushes mounds of steaming corned beef around next to Shorty’s three over-easy eggs to go with his no-butter English muffin.
By the time Gabe comes in, my side aches. If my belly felt any heavier it’d be dragging on the floor. I meet him in the break room and see that his face is drawn and somber, a sign of the stress of his late night. “You all right?”
“I am now,” he says, smiling for me.
“It sure is a gray day.”
He nods. “You’re not overdoing it around here, are you?”
“No.” The ache in my groin warns me this is not a completely honest answer. I ignore it. “I’m worried about Sudie.”
“Let me get through this shift. I’ll check on her first thing in the morning,” he says, putting on his apron, then stepping to the sink to scrub his arms, his hands.
“All right.”
The day drags on, and as the lunch crowd tapers off, a group comes in asking for a table for eight. Administrators from the university, by the look of it. Several of them wear brushed-gold name tags stating their department: admissions, financial aid, multicultural student life.
“It’s his birthday,” one of the women whispers in my ear, nodding to a tall black gentleman wearing a bow tie with his suit. “Do you have any chocolate cake today?”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I wink, doing my best not to let them see that I am tired and want nothing more than to go home, check on Sudie, and put my feet up.
“When are you due?” she asks kindly, not like Anna Rose’s mother. For as highfalutin as the students and their families can be, most of the folks who work at the university, professors included, are pretty down-to-earth. Living in Riverton year-round takes away a bit of the novelty of us townies, I suppose, and they eventually realize we aren’t all charity cases. Working at Riverton College becomes just a job to them like any job becomes after time, and a square of land with a house on it is just a square of land.
“I got about a month left.” I smile, hoping she doesn’t ask the next question. But she does.
“Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”
“It’s a boy.”
“Do you have names picked out?”
I shake my head. She doesn’t know I won’t let myself pick a name, like Sudie won’t let me pick names for any of the rescues.
“Well, spring is a wonderful time to have a baby. Good to get outside and walk. Beautiful time of the year.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Coming from her, and since my secret is out, I take her encouragement to heart. I follow her to the two tables Gabe has pushed together and where the other seven are already seated.
“Anything I can get y’all to drink while you’re looking over the menus?”
They rattle off requests for iced tea and diet sodas, a couple of them content with the glasses of ice water Gabe fills behind the counter.
“There any chocolate cake left?” I lean hard against one of the counter stools and hand Gabe the drink order. The pull in my groin feels stronger, and along with it, a familiar knot in my back.
Gabe places the other glasses on the tray next to the waters.
Hersch sprays and wipes down the counter where Shorty and his friends sat. Carla sits in the break room, her back to us, the adding machine zipping out lines of totals and tallies.
“Should be. Why don’t you take a break.” He eyes me as I rub my belly, which is hard and tight.
“I’d be fine if it didn’t feel like somebody’s shoving a baseball into my lower back.”
“Let me take that tray out to them. I can get their orders. Me and Hersch can get this.” He looks at Hersch, who turns and nods at me.
“I can get these drinks, if you can get the rest. And if you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“You are one stubborn lady.” He grins.
I hoist the tray up and over my arm like I’ve done hundreds of times before, and I’m halfway to the table when pain sears across my pelvis. The tray, the glasses, everything crashes to the ground in a numbing roar, and I’m paralyzed by the squeezing spasm.
“Jaycee—” Gabe is next to me in a second.
“Somethin’s not right.”
28
* * *
My right arm aches where a paramedic shoved a needle into it to give me intravenous fluids. Above me, a monitor bleeps the regular rhythm of my heart. And next to me, the baby’s heartbeat whooshes through a speaker on another monitor.
A hand pushes the curtain back from the door of the emergency department room, and Dr. Fitzgerald appears.
“Hey there, missy, what do we have going on here?” His voice booms, and I’m sure whatever patients are the least bit conscious can hear him. The whoosh of the baby’s monitor gets louder as he fiddles with a couple of knobs, then inspects the strap the nurses placed across my belly.
“Good news
is, baby looks great. The nurses who checked you, they said your water’s intact, and you don’t have any bleeding.”
“No, sir.”
“Are you still having pain?”
“A little.” I try not to wince. “But nothing like I had at work. It was bad. Really bad.”
“Contractions don’t usually feel too good.” He winks, then his face gets serious. “That’s what’s happening, Jaycee. You’re having contractions.” He looks at the baby monitor again. “In fact, you’re having a small one right now. Can you feel it?”
It’s nothing compared to what I felt when I fell, but when I touch my belly, it’s hard as it’s ever been. “Not really. Just tight.”
He nods, then inspects the bags of fluid hanging on the pole next to the bed. “I’ve asked them to keep you on a little bit of medicine here to slow down how often you have those contractions. This little guy needs a few more weeks before I’d be comfortable letting him come out. We’ll keep you here a day or two and see if this doesn’t help. Sometimes it does. Sometimes we have to keep people longer.”
“Longer?” I push myself up higher and look at Gabe, his face wrinkled with worry. “I’m supposed to work. And Sudie. She needs my help.”
“Hush,” Gabe scolds. “I’ll see about Sudie. And you know Carla won’t let you work a lick once she hears about this.”
“You really should listen to this guy,” Dr. Fitzgerald says. “I think he might have a bit of a crush on you.”
I roll my eyes but can’t help but notice the adorable blush rising into Gabe’s cheeks. He’s right about Carla not letting me work. She’d said as much when the paramedics wheeled me out of the diner on a stretcher. Said she’d pay me anyway. But I can’t stand the thought of that.
Dr. Fitzgerald puts a hand on my leg and pats me, as I imagine a father might pat his own daughter. “Let’s take this one day at a time. Everything else looks just like it’s supposed to look, besides the contractions. We’ll do what we can to see if you can get back to the things you need to get back to. But right now, we need to be conservative about all this. Okay, kiddo?”
Kiddo. No one’s called me that before. I imagine my real father might have, if I’d had the chance to know him. “Okay. Thank you, Dr. Fitzgerald.”
“You’re welcome.” He gives Gabe’s shoulder a squeeze on the way out of the room.
Three days later, Gabe brings me home. The trailer is quiet, especially with the windows closed, since I leave them open as often as I can, and there is a faint trace of the old smells I worked so hard to scrub out of the walls and floors.
“I stocked you up,” Gabe says.
The counters are full of fresh snacks and drinks. “You did! Oh, thank you!” I take a big red apple from the collection of fruit, next to a giant bag of peanuts in the shell, fresh bread, and my favorite chocolate chip cookies on the counter. In the fridge, there’s milk and lunch meat, yogurt, and more. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
“You’re right, I didn’t have to. I wanted to. Remember?” Gabe crosses his arms and raises an eyebrow at me, obviously referring to our previous conversation when we let the turtle loose. “Besides that, I was standing there when the doctor said bed rest, Jaycee. How you gonna get to the store when you’re on bed rest?”
“I don’t know. I coulda figured it out.”
“Right,” he says sarcastically. “Now why don’t you figure yourself on over to the couch there and put your feet up already.” He’s already set it up with pillows and a blanket from my room, my Bible, a stack of new magazines on the side table, and on top of it all, the tattered copy of the North Carolina romance novel.
I smile at him, the way the one dimple on his left cheek lingers as he watches me settle myself and turn on the TV.
The evening news comes on.
“We’ve got flash-flood warnings all across the region tonight, with things not expected to get any better in at least the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.” A weathergirl with straight-edged, long brown hair and a form-fitting dress sweeps her arm across the screen. Huge blotches of green and red mark the areas where the most rain is falling. Riverton is right in the middle of it.
“Heard Chief say on the radio they’re going to have to start closing some roads. Mudslides along some of the valley roads. You’re high enough here you won’t see flooding, but the roads leading out of here, I’m not so sure about them.” He runs his hands through his hair.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t care if they do close them. I’ll find a way in here if you need me.”
“Doctor says the pains should stay away—”
“As long as you mind what he says and don’t get up. He doesn’t know how stubborn you are.”
I think about Jayden. About the names of Sudie’s babies. Mary. John. Samuel. Their names etched deep into the cold hard granite. “I’m gonna mind.”
“I hope so.”
“I will, Gabe. By the way, how was Sudie when you saw her earlier?”
“She was fine, especially since Mary Beth came and took the opossums. I brought her a few groceries too. Told her about a couple of the guys at the station willing to mow and keep tabs on the cemetery until she’s better.”
“She appreciated that, I’m sure.”
“She did, although she was a little hesitant about the guys.”
“She’s particular about things there, that’s for certain.”
“She wouldn’t let Mary Beth take her newest patient, a big brown bat with a concussion in an aquarium on the middle of her kitchen table.”
I laugh. “Sounds about right.”
“And she’s managing to get outside to the hawk and raccoons without any trouble.”
“That’s a good sign. They’re all almost ready to release anyway. How does she look? Is she eating?”
“She looks all right. Checked her blood pressure and it’s high, but she won’t call the doctor . . . won’t let anybody call for her, either.”
I sigh. “That’s no surprise. Talk about stubborn.”
“Yeah, talk about stubborn.” He pats my nose with his finger. “Promise me you’ll stay put, little missy. I gotta work at the station the next two days. On call between those.”
“I will.”
“And you’ll call if you need anything? Even if you feel the littlest twinge? If I’m in the middle of something, I’ll send a separate truck.”
“I will.”
He leans down and kisses me on the top of the head. Warmth runs through me. To feel loved for who I am and not what somebody can take from me is something. I never thought that kind of love was meant for me.
On the corner of the side table, next to the magazines, is my mail, and I sort through it, the same old mailers, a couple of utility bills. And a thick white envelope, official letterhead from Walter Crawford, JD, CPA.
I don’t know which is pounding harder, my heart or the rain outside as I tear it open. Lightning brightens the room, then the TV flickers and thunder rumbles low and long, rattling the walls of the trailer as I read words like plaintiff and defendant, the Court and establishing paternity and filing for custody. It is signed by Mr. Crawford, “on behalf of Bryan Blair.”
A pain shoots across my belly and I drop the papers, sending them flying all over the floor.
Dear Lord, please. Help me. The baby can’t come early. Bryan can’t have this baby. . . .
The pain eases, and I quick text Gabe and send him a photograph of the front page of the document. What am I going to do?
I try to rub the rest of the pain out of my side, praying it’s stretching and not a contraction. I don’t have money for a lawyer. And it doesn’t matter if half the town stands up for me—which it wouldn’t. With Mama in jail and what happened to Jayden, all a judge is going to see is that. Nobody needs to tell me the whole world is stacked against me in this.
I rub my belly and breathe through the pain, which lingers low like a warning that it’s sure to come again. I search
the internet for what the letter means, what my options are, but all I can find are websites of lawyers who seem awfully anxious to take cases.
My phone vibrates with Gabe’s reply. It’ll be okay. Trust me.
Trust him? Really? What can he do?
Every time I pray, the Lord says to trust him, too, but nothing seems to be getting any better. The Blairs have money and a house that doesn’t have rust stains in a neighborhood with swing sets and sidewalks, all of that able to hide—or at least make people look away from—the finger-shaped bruises on Elizabeth Blair’s arms and who knows where else. They don’t have a list of court records on the public websites. They never lost a child to heroin.
Trust me.
That’s not helping! Tell me something else, Lord! I want to scream.
Trust me with your child, the voice says again.
How? I don’t know how to trust anything, Lord, let alone you.
I get up, but only to turn off the TV, to use the bathroom, and to get a tall glass of ice water to last me the next few hours.
When I sit back down, the Bible Sudie gave me at my baptism is sitting on the table, reminding me of Sudie lecturing me about trusting the Lord too. I try to ignore it, but something keeps nudging at me to open it. Something. Or Someone.
It’s not going to help, Lord. I know all about your peace that passes understanding, how I’m supposed to “be still and know,” and yes, how I’m supposed to trust you with all my heart and lean not on my own understanding. I’ve been trying to acknowledge you in all my ways, and nothing’s helping. Things just keep getting more complicated. Nothing in the Bible’s going to help.
Still, I flip through the pages, worn from years. Sudie had gone through and highlighted all her favorite verses in it before she gave it to me, so plenty catch my eye.
A trio of pressed pansies fall out when I get to one page, right in the middle of the Psalms. Verse 103:17 is highlighted.