“That was weird,” I actually said out loud.
I went back to my peanut butter spreading, thinking he sure must have been nervous about that client. As I carried my plate into the living room for the rare treat of a little trashy daytime television, I felt that nausea grab hold of me again. I had been nauseous kind of a lot lately. And my pants were feeling a little tight...
“Oh my God,” I said out loud. I dropped my sandwich on the coffee table and sprinted upstairs saying, “Please, please, please!”
Maybe my penny-in-the-fountain wish would come true after all. I grabbed one of the pregnancy tests from the enormous stash I kept in the bathroom cabinet. I followed the directions, set it on the sink, and walked out of the room. I paced up and down the hall twice, not nearly the five minutes the package said. But, when I peeked in, one eye squinted shut, I saw it. Two lines.
“Yay!” I squealed. I could feel the tears in my eyes, the breath catching in my throat. This is what we had been waiting for all this time. If anything would put the pep back in our marriage, it was this little baby.
I jumped in the car, assuming Ben was playing at the club only a few blocks away. I debated. Part of me wanted to go to the baby store and present him with a tiny gift that night over a gorgeous dinner. But the other part of me couldn’t contain her excitement. He had to know right now.
I paused at a four-way stop where I was about to go straight. Only, when I looked to the right, I saw Ben’s Jeep stopped on the side of the road. Before I even had time to wonder if he had broken down or run out of gas, he leapt out of the front seat, lowered the tailgate, and unzipped the golf bag.
I just sat there blinking and blinking, my eyes focusing in and out as if readjusting to the light. My body went numb, and my heart couldn’t decide whether to pound or stop. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen, something that I’d never have believed if I’d heard it from a friend. And, though it is normally Lovey’s voice that I hear in my head at moments like these, this time, it was Rob’s:Be careful what you wish for.
Lovey
The Other Road
Aproper Southern woman doesn’t make a big fuss about herself when she’s sick or hurt or down. It’s better to suffer in silence than be a burden to others. And, of all the things she taught me, my momma embodied that one the very best.
I thought of Momma when I said to Jean again, “You are not to call her. She will feel like she has to run down here and see me, and that’s the last thing she has time for.”
Jean put her hand on her hip and said, “She will kill me if you go in for surgery and she doesn’t even know.”
“She won’t make it in time anyway, so why stress her. We’ll call her when I’m out.”
“I know, but...”
“But what?” I snapped. “I’m not going to die in surgery, Jean. For heaven’s sake. Who would look after your father?”
“Don’t even think about dying,” Dan chimed in from the foldoutchair bed beside me. He reached over and took my hand again. “What would I do without my girlfriend?”
Jean looked at me in awe, for probably the tenth time that day. As soon as the assisted living nurse arrived for her hourly check, Dan was awake, alert and fully present. When the paramedics arrived, and I started coming back into consciousness, he was shouting at Kelly, one of our regular nurses, from the bed, “No, not that robe. She’ll want the pink one for the hospital. And make sure you get her slippers too.”
I was certain I was still dreaming, my subconscious floating back to a simpler time when my husband was in charge, when he was the breadwinner, decision maker and protector, and I was the grocery shopper, dinner cooker and pigtail braider.
By the time I was fully conscious again, sitting up in my hospital bed, oxygen in my nose, morphine pumping through my veins with the same breathtaking vengeance as an epidural after hours of labor, I realized that, indeed, it had been true.
“I don’t think we’ll be prepared to make that decision until we’ve had a second opinion,” Dan was saying to the nurse. “If there’s some way to set it while it heals and avoid the surgery altogether, we’d obviously choose that option.”
It was about that time that Jean had arrived, sprinting at her high school track pace, completely out of breath.
“Surgery?” I asked.
But before I could get an answer, she burst into tears. “Are you in so much pain, Momma?”
I held my arm up. “I am in no pain of any kind, darling. Now what in the world is wrong with me?”
“It’s your hip, Ms. Lynn,” Kelly, Dan’s nurse, said. “You broke it when you had your spill.”
“Damn stepladder,” I said under my breath.
It was one of those moments that we all inevitably have in our lives. One of those times that we wish instead of veering right we had veered left, instead of taking the interstate we had chosen the back road. I looked at Dan and then back at Jean. And I suddenly realized that, if we could all erase those moments we wish we had taken the other road, what a disturbingly different world it would be.
Annabelle
So Soon
