“Thanks, Dell.” Frankie chose a scalpel from the instruments on her cart and handed it to the surgeon before he’d asked. The doctor made his incision.
Frankie blotted the blood that bubbled up.
“There it is,” Dr. Mark Lundberg said. “Going in. Tumor. Clamp.”
For the next two hours, Dr. Lundberg excised the tumor that grew in the patient’s stomach. When the surgery was over and the incision sewn up, the doctor pulled his blue mask down and frowned.
“Is something wrong?” Frankie asked, lowering her mask.
“He’s, what, Frankie, thirty years old? How the hell did he get gastric cancer?” He shook his head. “Send it to pathology.”
Frankie peeled off her gloves and tossed them in the trash. Following the patient into recovery, she went over instructions for his care with the nurse there.
Afterward, she studied his chart. Scott Peabody. Elementary school teacher. Honorable Discharge from the Army. 1966. Vietnam. Married. Two children.
She made notes on his chart and dropped it back in the sleeve at the end of the bed. As she walked back to her locker, past the Christmas decorations on the walls, she realized for the first time how badly her feet hurt, and there was a dull ache at the base of her spine. She was, what, a little more than two months pregnant and already she was feeling it? After changing out of her uniform at her locker, she grabbed her handbag and left the hospital.
With the windows rolled down, she drove home, veering onto the new Coronado Bridge with Jim Croce serenading her about time in a bottle.
As she turned onto her street, she saw a column of smoke rising from the chimney of her house, and she remembered that Henry was here to celebrate her birthday.
Twenty-seven.
She wasn’t so young anymore. Most of her friends from high school and college were already married, with children. Ethel sent so many baby pictures, Frankie had had to put them in an album.
She parked on the street and sat for a minute beneath a streetlamp, staring out at the black hump of the beach across the street.
It was time to tell Henry about the baby. She couldn’t handle this on her own anymore. The secret was tearing her up. And the loneliness it caused.
She would walk into the house, open the door, and tell him. She considered how to say it, turned the words over and over in her mind, rearranging them, trying first to soften and then to obscure and even to harden what she had to say, but in the end, it was simple and she just needed the nerve.
She opened the door of the cottage.
The place smelled of roasting meat and browning potatoes. No doubt it was Henry’s special recipe of chicken thighs, potatoes, and onion, browned in a cast-iron skillet and baked in the oven.
He was at the stove, wearing his favorite apron, which read LOVE MEANS ALWAYS HAVING TO SAY YOU’RE SORRY, over jeans and a long-sleeved California Angels sweatshirt.
“I’m home,” she said.
He spun around. “Happy birthday, babe!” he said, untying the apron, laying it over the back of a chair. He pulled her into his arms for a kiss. When he drew back, she was crying.
“What’s wrong, Frankie?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
His gaze searched hers. She had no idea what she wanted him to say. Nothing could make this moment what she wanted it to be. He was the wrong man and it was the wrong time.
“Marry me,” he said at last. “I’ll move in here. Give up my lease in La Jolla. You’ll want to be close to your parents.”
He looked so serious, gazed at her as if she were the very center of the world. Exactly how a man in love should look at the woman he adored. “Henry…”
“Why not? You know I’ve always wanted to be a dad. And this—love—it’s a thing I’m good at and you need it, Frankie, maybe more than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“I don’t…”—love you—“think I’m ready,” she said.
“This is one of those times in life where it doesn’t matter if you’re ready. I hear it all the time from people: parenthood is a plunge into the deep end. Always.” He looked so deeply, genuinely committed that it stirred her heart, gave her a glimpse of hope. People married for all kinds of reasons, in all types of situations. You never knew what the future might hold.
He was a good man. True. Honest. The kind of man who would stay, grow old with a woman, be there.
And she would need strength beside her for this. She wasn’t strong anymore.
“We could be a family,” he said.
She put a hand on her flat belly, thinking, Our baby. She had always imagined herself as a mother, a mom, but somehow her experience in Vietnam—that baby dying in her arms—had derailed her, planted fear where joy belonged.