Chapter 1
Six weeks after his girlfriend had twins, my husband got himself fixed. He billed it to my insurance.
Then he spent nine years driving me to fertility clinics. Two surgeries. Four rounds of shots. He held my hand every time and told me next time.
The whole town said it was my fault. His mother asked me every Sunday if there was any news.
I died at forty-four. Three days before the end I couldn't open my eyes, but I could hear them over my bed. The girl I bought a purple bicycle for called him Dad.
Then I opened my eyes and I was thirty-four again, on a gurney, waiting for them to open me up one more time.
Last time I lay back down and let them do it. I did it three more times after that.
This time he's paying me back for all nine years, one line at a time.
The nurse asked me to confirm my date of birth. I did. Then I told her I wasn't doing it.
I heard the pen before I heard anything else.
Colm had been at the foot of my bed signing things for three days. I knew the whole sound of it by then, the scratch and the pause and the flip of a page. Somebody set a cup down on the tray table next to my head.
"You want the one with sugar?" Sabine said.
Nobody answered her. She had been coming every afternoon since February and bringing coffee for whoever was in the room, and for a long time I thought that was a kind thing to do.
Sabine Ledoux moved back to Cutler Bend the year I turned twenty-six. Colm said she was an old friend from high school. I believed him for eighteen years, and I made her a plate at Thanksgiving, and when her twins were born I took a casserole to the house.
"Dad, can we go?" one of them said. "We've been here since eight."
Della. She was seventeen. I had known that girl since the day she was born, and I held her in the hospital parking lot while her mother went through her purse for her keys. When she turned five I bought her a bicycle, the purple one with the tassels on the handlebars, and I stood in their driveway and watched her fall off it four times and get back on it four times.
Dad.
"Della," Sabine said, and then, lower, "Seventeen years, Colm. You could have told her any time after you had it done."
"It wasn't her business," he said.
I had apologized to that man for nine years. In the car. In the kitchen. Once in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel outside Raleigh with my hands over my face, because the doctor had said unexplained again and I couldn't stop saying I was sorry.
The pen kept going.
Then the room got farther away, the way a radio does when you drive out of range of the station, and Sabine asked somebody if they wanted the last of the coffee, and that was the last thing I heard.
The next thing I heard was a woman asking me to confirm my date of birth.
I said it out loud before I opened my eyes.
The light was the flat white they use in pre-op, and there was a curtain on a track to my left, and a woman in scrubs was standing at my shoulder with a clipboard. She wrote it down. Then she snapped the plastic band around my wrist and I lay there and looked at my own name in small blue letters, and under the name was the date, and the date was ten years wrong.
Junia Ridgeway.
They were going to put me under and make two holes in me and look at my tubes again. They had done it once already, four years back, and found nothing, and I remember lying in recovery afterward feeling something close to happy, because nothing wrong meant it could still happen.
Nine years. Two surgeries, counting the one I was lying there for. Four rounds of shots I gave myself in the staff bathroom on the third floor, because the timing had to be exact and I didn't want anybody watching my face while I did it.
"Is somebody with you today?"
"My husband's got a roof in Sanford," I said. "Sabine's coming."
She wrote that down too.
I sat up.
"Mrs. Ridgeway, honey, you can't—"
"I'm not doing it."
I got my thumbnail under the edge of the tape on the back of my hand and peeled it off. She reached for my arm and I pulled the line out myself, and a bead of blood came up, and I pressed it flat with my thumb.
"I'll sign whatever you need me to sign," I said.
She stood there with the clipboard against her chest. I have worked in this building for eleven years. I have coded her department's claims. She knew my name before she ever put it on a wristband.
"Are you all right?"
"I need my clothes."
She got them out of the bag and set them on the foot of the bed and pulled the curtain, and I heard her go to the desk and start telling somebody, and I got dressed with my back to the curtain. My hands were fine. That surprised me. I put my ring on last and it went on the way it always had.
I took the stairs down because the elevator by pre-op comes out at the main desk, and I went out through the loading side, where the door doesn't need a badge.
It was the last week of August and still hot enough that the asphalt gave a little under my shoes.
Sabine's CR-V was parked in the third row with Colm's work jacket folded over the passenger seat. She was already halfway across the lot toward the doors with a coffee in each hand.
She saw me and her whole face opened up.
"Junie! I was coming to sit with you." She lifted one of the cups. "Decaf, no sugar. I remembered."
