“What are you looking at? Baby stuff?”
“Work stuff,” he said. “Can’t sleep.”
I didn’t push. Why would I? I was eight months pregnant, and my feet were the size of loaves of bread, and I just wanted a glass of milk and to go back to sleep.
I trusted him. That was the whole point of him. I trusted him with everything.
My labor started on a Thursday evening in late October.
I was standing in the kitchen stirring pasta sauce when I felt a pop, and then warm water ran down my legs and onto the tile.
“Ben,” I called. Very calmly. “Ben, I think it’s time.”
He came running in, took one look at the puddle on the floor, and said, “Oh. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.” He said “okay” maybe forty times. He grabbed the hospital bag, then put it down, then grabbed his keys, then put them down, then grabbed the bag again.
“Ben.”
“Yeah?”
“Turn off the stove.”
He laughed, a little hysterical, and turned off the stove, and kissed me, and called his mother, and we drove to the hospital with the hazard lights on even though there was no reason to.
The labor took eleven hours. The nurses said that was good for a first baby. It didn’t feel good. It felt like being pulled apart from the inside. But Ben stayed by my side the whole time. He fed me ice chips. He let me squeeze his hand until his fingers went white. He whispered, “You’re doing it, you’re doing it, you’re so strong,” until I told him to please stop talking.
Diane sat in the corner the whole night. Every time I looked at her, she gave me a small, tight smile.
At 6:14 in the morning, Evelyn was born.
The doctor held her up, and I saw her for the first time. Purple and furious and covered in white stuff, her tiny mouth wide open in a scream, her arms flailing.
