The Ultrasound That Ended Him
My coworker Mel was the one steady thing that whole stretch. Mel had trained me on the records system my first week at the hospital, six years earlier, and had never once in that time said an unkind word to a patient, a doctor, or, that spring, to me. Mel brought me a thermos of coffee every morning without being asked, sat with me at lunch when I could not make myself eat in the break room with everyone’s careful, pitying silence, and told me, more than once, “Paper does not lie, Gloria. Whatever he’s telling people, there is a piece of paper somewhere that tells the truth instead. There always is.”
Mel and a handful of women from the records department and the church threw me a small baby shower that June in the back room of the VFW hall, folding tables covered in paper cloths, a sheet cake from the grocery store, a stack of secondhand baby clothes still smelling like somebody else’s cedar closet. Nobody mentioned Nathan the entire afternoon. Somebody’s husband, a veteran who had known my grandfather in the Guard, stood up near the end and said he wanted to say something, and all he said was that my grandmother had fed half this town out of her kitchen at one time or another and that her people took care of their own, and that was that, and I cried into a paper napkin in front of thirty women who let me.
I did not know yet how right Mel was going to turn out to be, about the paper, or about anything else.
The Folder On The Exam Table
My twenty-week ultrasound was scheduled for a Thursday afternoon in July. I wore a blue dress and did my hair, not for Nathan, not anymore, just because some stubborn part of me refused to walk into that clinic looking like a woman whose life had come apart at the seams, even though it had.
I was three minutes into the appointment, still in the gown, when the exam room door opened without a knock.
Nathan walked in first. Helen came in right behind him, in heels that had no business in a medical building, holding a heavy black folder against her chest like a shield.
“You don’t get to be in here,” I said.
“I have every right,” Nathan said. “It might be my child.”
He set the folder down on the rolling table beside the exam bed and opened it. Inside was a waiver, pages of it, giving up my claim to the house, releasing him from any support obligation, agreeing that the pregnancy and the marriage would be handled quietly, privately, on his terms.