The Funeral Where My Water Broke

He got an arm under mine and half carried, half walked me to his truck, calling over his shoulder for someone, anyone, to get my coat and my purse, and it was Carol Jennings, a friend from the school where I taught, who ran it over and climbed into the back seat with me without being asked. Hank had his phone to his ear before the truck even started, giving the dispatcher the cemetery’s address in a voice gone flat and professional, the voice of a man who had seen enough emergencies to know exactly how to talk through one.

I looked back once, through the rain streaked window, and saw Sharon still standing at the grave in her wide brimmed hat, her gloved hands folded in front of her, watching the truck pull away with an expression I could not read from that distance and have spent months trying not to imagine. Glen had already turned back toward the line of cars, his coffee cup still in his hand.

Hank heard every word Sharon said to me that afternoon. I did not know yet how much that would come to matter.

I gave birth to my children seven hours later at Fairhaven General, with Carol Jennings gripping my hand on one side and a labor and delivery nurse named Denise Whitmore on the other, because Hank had done his job delivering me to the hospital and then, with the humility of a man who understands the limits of his own usefulness, had gone to sit in the waiting room with his cap in his hands and waited there until two in the morning just to hear that I was all right.

Nobody from the Carrow family called that night. Nobody from the Carrow family called the next morning either, or the morning after that.

What none of them knew, what I had deliberately not told them, was that I was not carrying one child. At my twenty eight week ultrasound, the technician had gone quiet in a way that made my stomach drop, before she smiled and turned the screen toward me and showed me two small, curled shapes instead of one. I had cried in that dim little room, from joy and from terror in equal measure, and then I had made a decision that I have turned over in my mind a hundred times since. I did not tell Sharon.