Page 44 of Before You Can Blink
When he turned around, Buck’s lips pulled into a thin line, and his neck craned to peek over his shoulder to where Caroline made moon eyes at Wade. Gaze returning to meet mine, he said, “Pray your wife is carrying a boy. That way you only have to worry about one dick instead of all the other ones out there.”
While insightful, it wasn’t quite what I’d been hoping for when I asked that question. But at the same time, I sent up that silent prayer, just in case.
January
I squinted at the black-and-white shapes on the screen. I couldn’t tell this kid’s head from its ass. The images were blurry as hell.
Didn’t bother Daisy one bit, though, seeing as how her eyes overflowed with tears as she gripped my hand while Doc Stevens moved a wand through the gel smeared over her bare belly.
“How about the sex?”
My back went ramrod straight. “The sex is none of your damn business!”
Daisy stifled a giggle with her free hand as I shot a murderous glare at the town doctor.
“Honey, he’s asking if we want to know if it’s a boy or a girl,” she explained.
I tugged on the back of my neck. “Um, you can actually tell?” The monitor looked like static on a TV when the antenna got knocked off kilter.
Doc Stevens chuckled. “Bet this looks like a whole lot of nothing to you.” He could say that again. “But I’ve been doing this long enough that I can make out the parts just fine.”
Gently, I squeezed Daisy’s hand. “I want whatever you want.”
Eyes flitting to the screen, she folded her lips inward in thought. With a firm shake of her head, she declared, “I’d like to be surprised.”
Well, that settled it. What was another ten weeks in the grand scheme of things?
April
“This is taking too long.” I paced the confines of the tiny room, both hands pulling on my hair. “Something has to be wrong.”
Daisy smoothed a hand over her swollen stomach from where she lay in the hospital bed. “Everything’s fine. If you don’t believe me, come look at the heart rate monitor.”
Feeling helpless and completely out of control, I stalked over to the computer that displayed both my wife’s and baby’s heart rates while spitting out a printout that tracked the contractions.
We’d come in for an induction late last night at Doc Steven’s request because Daisy was almost two weeks overdue, and he feared that if we let things continue to progress naturally, there might not be enough time to make it to the hospital an hour away in Enid. He told us that while he had assisted in dozens of emergent deliveries in Rust Canyon, if my wife was at all interested in drugs for pain management—which she very much was—this was the best course of action.
Now it was closing in on noon, and after fourteen hours of labor, we still didn’t have a baby.
Eyes on the monitor that read a steady one-hundred-and-forty-three beats per minute, I grumbled, “Only takes a horse a few hours.”
Daisy huffed out a laugh. “Hate to break it to you, Jett, but in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a horse.”
I let out a displeased grunt. Her teasing did nothing to tamp down my anxiety surrounding this whole situation. “Can’t they do anything to make it go faster?”
She reached out to me, and automatically, I threaded my fingers with hers. “They already did. Now we wait for this little nugget to decide they’re ready to join us.”
I released a shuddering breath when her thumb rubbed soothing strokes over my knuckles. “You in any pain?”
“Nuh-uh.” Daisy shook her head with a smile. “They gave me the good drugs. I don’t feel a thing from the belly down.”
Thank God for small favors.
“Dad, we need you to help hold her leg back.”
In a daze, I watched as more medical personnel filtered into the room. How many people did it take to deliver one tiny baby?
“Dad?”
