The Excuse They Gave for Her

Chapter 1

KATHY

The girl in room four was nineteen years old, forty-one weeks along, ninety minutes into pushing, and she'd stopped believing a word I said.

That's normal. Somewhere around the ninety-minute mark the words go flat in a woman's ears — you can tell her you're doing it, you're so close until your throat dries out, and it turns into noise, a radio playing in another room.

What still works at ninety minutes is a hand, so I gave her mine and let her grind my knuckles into a shape God never intended.

"Hey. Look at me."

She looked at the ceiling.

"At me. Not the ceiling. The ceiling's not going to help you."

Her eyes came down. Twenty-two years on this floor and I still can't tell you why that works, only that it does.

Her mother sat in the corner chair with her phone face down on her knee, crying quietly, doing a decent job of it.

The father of the baby was out in the hall, where he'd been for twenty minutes, because he'd gone gray around the mouth and I'd sent him out myself. One patient at a time.

"Next one, I want you to stop yelling," I said.

"I'm not yelling."

"You're yelling. It's fine. It's just going up instead of down." I moved her hand to the low part of her own belly, under mine. "Push into my hand. Not up at me. Down."

The monitor climbed. She got that stubborn look nineteen-year-olds get when they decide to be furious at biology. She pushed down into my palm, and the baby's head came to crowning and stayed.

"There," I said. "That. Again, exactly that."

Fran stuck her head in at the wrong moment, the way Fran does, thirty-one years a charge nurse and she has never once knocked.

She read the monitor, read my face, and went away again.

Dr. Osei came in at the end with her gloves already on and got to be the one who caught, which is how it should be.

Eight pounds, one ounce. A boy, furious and purple and perfect, and the girl said oh like somebody had told her a secret.

Her mother stood up at the foot of the bed with both hands over her mouth and didn't come any closer. She was seeing two things at once — her daughter, and herself at nineteen.

I got the baby onto her chest, got the blanket, got the hat, and she looked up at me over the top of her son's head.

"Will you be here tomorrow?" she asked.

"I'm here Thursday."

"Okay," she said, like she'd be needing me Thursday.

That was four-forty in the morning. I charted until five-thirty, traded the last of my Diet Coke to a resident for half a bagel at six, and at seven I clocked out of a shift that had eaten the night before it.

The lot was going pink at one edge. I sat in the car with the key in my hand for a second before I could remember which direction my mother's house was.

Sunday. Pills.

She lives eleven miles north, in the house I grew up in, though since the stroke she lives mostly in the front two rooms of it — the recliner with the good lumbar support, the TV too loud.

Rhonda takes her Wednesdays, I take her weekends, and on Sundays I fill the organizer.

It's a plastic thing, four rows of seven, lids that snap.

Her eight prescriptions live in a shoebox on the counter next to the toaster, because she won't have them out where the neighbors might see, and no neighbor has come past that toaster in three years.

"You look terrible," my mother said.

"Thank you."

"I'm saying it as your mother."

"I know how you're saying it." I snapped the Monday lid shut. "Did you eat the eggs Rhonda left?"

"There was something wrong with them."

"There was nothing wrong with them."

"They were green."

"That's spinach, Ma."

She waved the hand that still does what she asks it to. The left one sat in her lap like a glove she was holding for somebody else. I got through Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The blue pill's the one she hides, so the blue pill I count out loud twice.

Twenty-eight lids. Nine dollars' worth of plastic between my mother and the hospital. I can do it in under fifteen minutes now, which I only know because Neil timed me once, being funny.

"Lauren called me," she said.

"Did she."

"She's getting married."

"She is." I smiled down at the Thursday row.

It still worked on me then — anybody could say it and it landed clean.

She's getting married. Twenty-six years old, and that boy Sam with the terrible truck and the good patient face, and a ring on my daughter's hand since the second Saturday in September. "June," I said. "They picked June."

"June's hot."

"June's beautiful."

"I'll be dead."

"You won't be dead."

"I might be."

"You're not allowed," I said. "Take the blue one now, I'm watching."

She took it with the face of a woman being poisoned by her own child.

"Has she got her dress?"

"It's October, Ma. The wedding's in June."

"In my day you had the dress first."

"In your day you had the dress your sister wore."

"It was a good dress." She reached over with the good hand and got hold of my wrist, not hard, just holding it. "You'll take her. For the dress."

"Of course I'll take her."

"Because your father was no help to me at all. I went alone. I've never once forgotten it." She let go. "Get the light in the hall when you leave, it's been on since Wednesday."

I got the light. I got the trash down to the curb because tomorrow was Monday. Then I sat in her driveway a minute with the heat blowing on my hands. After a double my hands go cold at seven-forty in the morning, which is a thing I've never mentioned to a doctor.

I got home a little after eleven. Twenty years in that house and the driveway still catches me on a Sunday, the particular sound of it. Two cars — Adam's, which meant my stepson had come by for food, and Neil's, which meant Neil.

He was at the stove in the gray T-shirt with the bleach spot on the shoulder.

Fifty-one years old, hair going at the temples in a way that suits him, weight still mostly on one leg from a knee he wrecked coaching a game that didn't matter.

He'd made eggs for Adam an hour earlier and started again for me when he heard the car.

"There she is," he said. "Sit down before you fall down."

"I'm fine."

"Sit down anyway."

I sat, and he put a plate in front of me.

Adam said hey from the couch without looking up, twenty-four years old and still sprawled over the furniture like a dropped coat.

A dryer was going somewhere upstairs. Neil has a rule about the dryer being done before noon on Sundays, the way other men have rules about lawns.

"Guess who I heard from," he said.

"Mm."

"Mon."

"Mm."

"She's got ideas." He said it the way you'd say a dog got out. "She and Lauren were on the phone forty minutes last night. Colors. There's a color."

"There's a color."

"There's a color, Kath. I wasn't told the color." He sat down across from me with his coffee, elbows on the table, pleased with the whole business. "She's going to be a monster about this wedding. In the good way."

I laughed with my mouth full, because it was funny, because it was true, because for twenty years Monica's monstering had been one of the good things in my life.

I came into that family with a six-year-old and a bad year behind me, and before Neil said anything else to his people he said one thing: she's not a step.

Nobody uses that word. Nobody says Kathy's girl.

And they did it. His mother did it, his brother did it, Monica did it hardest of all.

She turned up at Lauren's first-grade play with flowers too big for a six-year-old to hold.

She took her school shopping and put her on the fridge, and threw her a thirteenth birthday with a fondant cake in 2013, before anybody in our family knew what fondant was. I was so grateful I never once counted.

"She's going to want to do the flowers," I said.

"She's going to want to do everything."

"Let her do the flowers. I can't tell a peony from a cabbage."

"That's my wife," Neil said. "Delegating."

Rhonda called while I was rinsing the plate, the way she calls every Sunday around one, on her way home from the gym she goes to so she can complain about it.

"How's Ma."

"Hiding the blue one."

"She does that with me too. Did you sleep?"

"I'm going to now."

"You said that last Sunday." A car door, then the sound of her getting into hers. "Lauren texted me a picture of a tablecloth. Why am I getting tablecloths."

"Because you're her aunt."

"I'm an aunt with no opinion on linen." She blew out a breath. "Kath. That kid. I still think about her in that apartment. You in that apartment with her, down on the floor with that hair."

"Don't."

"I'm just saying. The braid. Every morning of the world."

"I know."

"I'm not doing anything. I'm just saying I remember it."

"I know you do," I said. "That's why I let you say it."

I slept from two until five with the fan on.

At six Neil brought me soup, because at some point he'd decided soup was a thing that could be brought, and we watched forty minutes of a show about restoring a lighthouse.

At nine I set the alarm for a three-to-eleven and put my scrubs over the chair, the navy ones, because the navy ones were clean.

The night bag was already by the door with the good pens in it, packed since Friday, the way it lives.

I was most of the way under when the phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Neil was already breathing slow. I turned the screen down against my chest and opened it one-eyed, expecting the hospital, expecting the schedule, expecting nothing.

Lauren & Sam — Bridal Shower Registry!

There was a photograph at the top, my daughter's face and Sam's, in a frame of little painted leaves.

Sunday, November 15 · 1:00 p.m. · The Garden Room at Ellery House.