11. Keeley
KEELEY
I arrive at the office, waving half-heartedly to Trinny at the front desk.
She winces, and I already know what she’s going to say.
“Your schedule is packed. Dr. Fox had something come up.”
Ugh . I’m nearly through the backlog, but my days are just as long because Dr. Fox and Dr. Joliet seem to have a lot of shit that just comes up , always to my detriment.
And maybe if they knew I was pregnant they’d stop doing it, but it’s still early in my tenure here and they already don’t seem pleased.
There have been comments about my attire—my cardigans would be more flattering if belted, apparently—and there are vague complaints about the way my new patients aren’t thrilled with me.
Why would my patients be thrilled? They thought they were getting a well-known doctor and got dumped on the one who’s still wet behind the ears.
I can’t say I’m thrilled either. I’m putting in as many hours as I did as a resident, and they somehow feel longer .
At least at the hospital, my day was exciting.
There were burns and lumps and deformities.
There were blisters the size of my hand and the occasional cutaneous larva migrans .
Now, my day is always some version of the same thing: “I’m breaking out” or “I don’t like these lines” . Psoriasis is as exciting as it gets.
I glance at the schedule. There are now three patients shoved into time I blocked off for my nineteen-week exam.
“I’ve got a doctor’s appointment today,” I tell Trinny. “That’s why I blocked it off.”
She looks at me, eyes wide. “Do, uh, you want to tell her?”
My shoulders sag. I already know how that will go…Dr. Fox takes disappointment poorly, to say the least. “I’ll change my appointment.”
But this is going to have to stop. And I’m wondering how I’ll ever gather the courage to tell Dr. Fox why it has to stop when I can’t even ask for a lunch break.
Julie is able to fit me in at the end of the day. I hope her irritation over this is why she’s coming down on me so hard about everything else. “Keeley,” she says, “you’ve put on ten pounds in a week.”
“It’s all gone to my rack, though,” I argue, glancing down. Out of nowhere, I’m suddenly spilling out of every bra I own.
“You’d dropped weight early on and you had some catching up to do,” she says. “It’s just something we’ll need to keep an eye on.”
“I thought we were here to discuss the baby’s health,” I mutter, feeling judged. “Not mine .”
“This is about the baby. A serious spike in weight might be a sign of gestational diabetes. Didn’t you do an obstetrics rotation?”
Various facts pop into my head. Between six and nine percent of pregnancies, excessive thirst and urination might be the only signs. It’s easier to play dumb, though, so I simply shrug.
“Yeah, but I was hooking up with Lowell Chambers at the time. Remember him? Maybe you were gone by then. Anyway, I was in a lust-induced fog, and it all went in one ear and out the other.”
She gives me one of her polite Julie smiles, the kind that say, “I can’t believe this woman and I got the same degree . ” I get that look from colleagues quite often, surprisingly.
“Is the father going to be involved?” she asks.
I glance away. “I’m not entirely sure.”
It’s been two days since Graham left and there’s been absolute silence. I assume this means he’s gone back to his soulless and tidy apartment in New York, run the numbers, and written it off.
I’m mostly relieved. Yes, there’s the occasional thought about how fucking easy it is for men to bear none of the consequences, but then I remind myself: I didn’t want him involved and I don’t need his money.
I mostly don’t need his money. Any day now, I’m going to turn into the kind of person who stops buying designer clothing and taking trips to Cabo.
“Well, let’s take another look,” she says, grabbing the jelly for the ultrasound.
My heart beats a little faster. I watch the screen as the transducer glides over my stomach. And then…a profile. A nose, a leg, a tiny, fast-beating heart, flickering in and out like a flashlight in a storm.
My throat tightens unexpectedly.
My child. Something I never thought I’d see.
“The baby is kind of facing away,” Julie says.
“I’m going to start doing the measurements and maybe he or she will turn for us here in a second so we can figure out the gender.
” A tiny foot comes into view and a flutter in my stomach matches the movement.
I want to see more, so badly, and at the same time, I can feel panic bubbling in my chest. I’m not ready for this to be any more real than it already is.
“That’s okay,” I whisper, my throat clogged with tears. “I don’t want to know.”
It’s already too real.
“Keeley,” she says, her voice soft, “you’re probably going to need some help, you know? It’s a lot.”
Which makes me cry the entire way home because she’s right…it’s a lot. And I’m going to be a disaster at it.
Graham calls that evening. I’m tempted to let it go to voice mail until I think of that tiny flickering heart I saw this afternoon. This isn’t about me or him, and I probably need to start trying a little harder.
“Can we meet this weekend?” he asks. “I’ll come to you.”
If he’s willing to fly all the way to LA, he either wants something or plans to demand something, and I’m not interested. “That seems like a lot of trouble for what you could probably say right here in thirty seconds.”
He exhales. A heavy, weary exhale. If he’s tired of me now, just wait ’til he gets to know me.
“There’s a lot to discuss, Keeley, and nuance is lost when you’re discussing things by phone. We’ll go to dinner, and that’s it.”
A dinner he’ll spend badgering me, pushing and pushing for whatever it is he wants. For that little flickering heart, though, I guess I can agree.
The restaurant he’s chosen is not, to my vast surprise, the all-you-can-eat, buy one-get-one-free buffet I’d expected.
And if Graham is shelling out for this place, he must be after something big.
“I’ve bought you this nice steak dinner , ” he’ll say, “and now I need you to sign a twenty-page contract agreeing to my demands . ”
It’s another tactic I remember from my childhood. “Your father is cooperating,” my mom would say with a sigh. “He must want something.”
And she was always right. So I don’t know what the hell Graham wants, but I wish he’d just texted his request from New York so I could have said, “no , ” and also, “fuck you , ” without this performative dinner.
I find him waiting in the bar, reading something on his phone.
His jacket is off, his tie loosened, his five o’clock shadow looking more like ten o’clock—and the effect is devastating.
While I have a thousand regrets about the way my life is currently unfolding, I’ve got to say that simply from a genetics standpoint, I didn’t do so bad.
If Graham was anyone else, someone I didn’t know to be a cheap, judgmental asshole, I’d say that he was appallingly hot, the kind of hot that probably had women doing double takes all the way through the airport this afternoon.
He looks up suddenly, catching me staring, and awkwardness descends; I’ve never had a guy fly across the country to see me without sex being the entire purpose.
I’m not sure how to proceed. Hug? Parisian almost-kiss to the cheek?
In the end, we opt simply for a nod—two business colleagues who hate each other but have accepted the position they’re in.
“No offense,” I tell him, “but I was kind of hoping you’d no-show.”
He frowns. “For Christ’s sake, Keeley, this isn’t a dispute in small claims court. It’s a child. Of course I wasn’t going to no-show.”
I’m wondering, again, if I should have just lied through my teeth the night he came to my apartment.
My mother’s life would have been so much easier had she just quietly slunk off to raise me without ever involving my father.
Instead, she spent the last fifteen years of her life being told, “no” to every single thing she wanted.
“No” to a summer in Morocco, “no” to letting me audition for a Disney show, and “no” to letting us tour with her boyfriend’s band.
Have I just signed up for the exact same future? One in which not a single decision is mine?
Graham walks over to the supermodels moonlighting as hostesses to tell them we’re here.
They’re the kind of women who act bored regardless of circumstance, but even they brighten a bit as he approaches.
Sure, they do—he’s big and broad-shouldered and disgustingly handsome, and they haven’t been forced to endure a ten-minute speech from him yet entitled: Just Because I Can Afford to Pay For a Tequila Luge Doesn’t Mean I Should .
He motions me in front of him as we’re led to the table, his hand briefly on the small of my back. When he holds my chair, the stupid fucking hostess has stars in her eyes.
“Your waiter is a little busy right now,” she says only to Graham. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Water, thanks,” he says.
“I’ll have the same,” I reply, not that she seemed to be asking me. She walks away, and I roll my eyes. “You could have gotten a drink. I’m not so tempted by alcohol I won’t be able to resist if I see yours.”
“I stopped drinking. Our night in Vegas was a wake-up call.”
Well, that’s flattering . Marrying me was so horrifying that it made him stop drinking. Of course, it made me stop drinking, too, but I’m a treasure.
“Ditto.”
His mouth tilts into a smug smile. “I assumed that weekend was par for the course for you.”
“You’re awfully judgy for a guy who got so drunk you don’t even remember marrying me. To be honest, it implies you might have some issues with alcohol.”
His jaw falls open. “ You don’t remember either.”
“And now you’re deflecting blame, which is also a sign of alcoholism.”
He laughs quietly. “Will murdering you be a third sign?”
I hold the menu in front of my face. “Well, it certainly wouldn’t be an argument against it.”