FORTY-SIX
COLT
Every morning I wake up and ask myself how I can make Blair happy that day. Most days, it’s easy. Gummy bears, or taking her to Cattleman’s for macaroni and cheese off the kid’s menu, or working on whatever project she’s added to the Honey Do List she put on the fridge for me.
Today, I think the best thing I can do for her is drive her to her doctor’s appointment and keep my mouth shut.
She’s thirty-seven weeks as of yesterday, which is full-term, as she’s told me no less than a hundred times, usually combined with the phrase I want this baby out of me!
The fifth time she said it, I tried to gently remind her that the baby would come when the baby was ready to come, because I thought it would help, considering she was so big on the mother nature of it all, but all it got me was a chip clip thrown at my head.
Blair has surprisingly good aim.
As soon as Dr. Abernathy enters the room, Blair is asking to be induced. I press my lips together as tightly as I can manage to avoid laughing in surprise, but he must be used to this because he just pats her shoulder and sympathizes.
“Excited to have your baby in your arms, aren’t you?”
“Excited to not be pregnant anymore,” she corrects him, already catching on to the fact he isn’t going to do what she wants. She huffs and leans back in her chair.
The doctor looks over the information the nurse gathered before he came in and then offers a cervical exam if Blair would like one.
She’s quick to agree, even though it leads to watery eyes when he tells her that her cervix is soft, the baby is in the right position, but she isn’t dilated even a smidgen.
“Do you want Cattleman’s?” I risk asking once the appointment is over and we’re both sitting in my truck.
“No,” Blair says with a sniffle. “I want the baby to come already. I’m so tired of being pregnant, it feels like it’s been going on forever.”
For me, it definitely doesn’t, considering I missed the entire first third of it. Regardless, my frustration about that doesn’t negate Blair’s discomfort, so I try to empathize.
“I know, mama. But right now, she sees you as the safest space in the whole wide world and she’s completely right. You are the safest space. I know because you’re my safe space, too.”
She sniffles again and won’t look up at me, but concedes, “That was cute.”
I huff out a laugh, reaching over to cup the back of her head.
“How about we go to the store and pick up some pumpkins and carve them? Maybe paint your belly and take pictures how you wanted? I’ll call Bailey over.”
“Tate,” Blair argues immediately. “Bailey’s busy tonight. She told me she had plans.”
That strikes me as odd, that she’s close enough to Bailey to know her schedule now, but I don’t press.
“Okay then. Tate. That’s even better, honestly, because I can bribe her with Cattleman’s. We’ll pick some up on the way home so we don’t have to go in and sit down. How’s that sound?”
Blair doesn’t agree that it’s the best plan I’ve ever had, instead changing the subject, which means she agrees but doesn’t want to say it.
“She likes their food a lot or something? ”
“Tate likes food a lot, period,” I tell her with a grin as I put the truck in drive and back out of the parking spot. There was something about being the last sibling born in a family of six that made one ravenous, I assumed. She’d break your fingers if you came between her and her supper.
Apparently, all it took was some macaroni and cheese in her system, some orange and black paint on her belly, and three pumpkins on our front porch to make Blair smile again. I made a note for the future. I doubted these things would work beyond October, but one could hope.
The next week, there’s a snowstorm that sends Blair into a panic. She has determined snow is more dangerous than rain, which is fair in some ways. Unfortunately, we’re in Montana and it’s November, so snow is something that’s happening quite a bit.
With rain, just the sound of it is enough to bump up her anxiety, but snow is basically soundless in most circumstances, so she stares out the windows and gnaws on her bottom lip at all hours of the day.
“Baby, we’re fine. Nothing is going to happen to us while we’re in this cabin.”
“There could be so much snow that it blocks the doors and traps us in here.”
I look out at the three inches of snow, but wisely keep my mouth shut about how we’d need feet of snow before that becomes a concern.
“And if, by some freak accident, that does happen, we have a lot of food stored up and you have plenty of books to read.”
“But if I go into labor?—”
“Then I’ll deliver your baby with the help of a 911 dispatcher and both of you will be fine.
But you won’t go into labor. Besides, if we were blocked in our cabin by snow, Maddox would make sure our cabin was the first to be unblocked because he knows you have anxiety and you’re pregnant,” I promise her as I massage her shoulders, though I think that might be giving my brother a lot of credit.
She bites her bottom lip and I think she might be feeling the same way.
“Do you want to call him and have him confirm he’d unblock our door first if we got blocked in by snow?”
“No,” she says with a sigh. “I don’t want to bother him.” I wait for approximately twenty seconds, and then, “Yeah, actually, can you?—”
“Already calling.”
“’Lo?” Maddox asks, voice just as gruff as it always is, so it’s hard to tell if he was busy or sleeping or what. I nod at Blair to speak, but she shakes her head with wide eyes and nods back at me. “Hello?” he says again, impatiently.
“Hey. If the snowstorm traps Blair and I inside our cabin, would you clear the door so we’d be able to get out in the event Blair goes into labor?”
“The fuck?”
“Blair is anxious that?—”
“Colt!” Blair hisses, apparently unappreciative of the way I’ve thrown her under the bus.
“Yes, I would make sure you were able to get out of your cabin.”
“First?” Blair asks quickly and then claps her hands over her mouth. I’d imagine she feels like she sounds selfish, but if I had to come up with a thousand adjectives for Blair, selfish still wouldn’t make the list.
“Yep,” Maddie says, not sounding the least bit impatient, which surprises me because he’s gotten irritated with me for less. “Promise.”
Blair breathes a sigh of relief .
“Okay. Thank you, Maddie,” she says and my lips twitch. I’m pretty sure it’s the first time she’s called him by his family nickname.
“Yep,” he says again, hanging up. Never been one for sticking around, that one.
“See, mama, I told you,” I say gently, tossing my phone over on the couch and wrapping my arms around her middle again as she stares outside. “But it’s important to me that you’re aware we’re not going to get stuck inside. The odds of that happening are like a million-in-one.”
“I think the odds of me getting pregnant despite being on birth control and through a condom were similar.”
I hide my grin in her hair.