The Ring That Paid for Her Nights

“She just needs to eat better, Jess. Less pop, more vegetables. That’s all this is.”

Brent said it on speakerphone. I had set the phone face up on the kitchen table because my hands were full of the supper dishes, and because I thought, stupidly, that he would say yes.

Emma was sitting three feet from the phone. She was eleven years old, doing long division in a spiral notebook, with a roll of glucose tablets in the front pocket of her hoodie.

She heard every word. I watched her pencil stop moving.

I dried my hands on the dish towel, picked up the phone, took it off speaker, and walked out onto the back porch in my socks. It was the first week of March in Manson, Iowa, and the boards were cold enough to ache.

“Say that again,” I said. “Say it to me this time, not to her.”

“I didn’t know she was right there.”

“You knew. You always know where she is when you want her to hear something.”

He let out a breath, the long tired one he used to use when a customer at the boat lot wanted a lower price. “Jess, I’m not paying seventeen hundred dollars for a gadget.”

“It’s not a gadget. It’s an insulin pump. Her doctor ordered it. Carol at the clinic says it will stop most of the lows.”

“Kids lived with shots for fifty years.”

“Kids also died in their sleep for fifty years, Brent.”

He did not answer that. I could hear a television behind him, a basketball game, the squeak of shoes. I could picture his apartment in Fort Dodge, the leather recliner he had taken from our living room, the boat calendars on the wall.

“The decree says half of uncovered medical,” I said. “You signed it. I signed it. Page six.”

“Then take me to court,” he said, and he hung up.

The Nights

I want to explain about the nights, because nobody who has not lived them understands why I did what I did next.

Emma was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes the October she turned nine. She had been drinking water by the gallon and getting up to pee four times a night, and I thought it was a growth spurt. Then she threw up at school and could not stop.

By the time we got her to the hospital in Fort Dodge her blood sugar was over six hundred. They sent us on to Des Moines by ambulance. I rode in the front with my purse in my lap and prayed the whole sixty miles in one long sentence.

She came home five days later with a cooler full of insulin pens, a glucose meter, a stack of carb-counting books, and a mother who did not sleep anymore.

Brent and I were already separated then. The divorce went final that next spring. He kept the apartment and the recliner and every other weekend. I kept the house, the cat, and the nights.

The nights were the hard part. Insulin works on its own schedule, and a growing child’s body works on another one. Somewhere around three in the morning, the two schedules would cross, and Emma’s number would start to fall.

She wore a continuous glucose monitor on the back of her arm, a little white disc the size of a quarter. It sent her numbers to my phone every five minutes. When she dropped under seventy, my phone would scream.

I learned to sleep with it on the pillow next to my ear. I learned to be out of bed and down the hall before I was awake. I learned where every juice box was in the dark.

I would sit on the braided rug beside her bed with a flashlight and a juice box and wait. Fifteen grams of sugar. Fifteen minutes. Check again. If it was still low, fifteen more.

Some nights she drank it half asleep and never knew I was there. Other nights she woke up sweating and shaking, her pajamas soaked through, crying because she felt like she was falling.

In two years I do not think I slept more than four hours in a row. I worked the front desk at the family clinic in Manson on that sleep. I checked in patients and answered phones and scheduled flu shots, and some afternoons I could not remember my own address.

That winter it got worse. Emma grew two inches between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, and the lows started coming every night. Some nights twice.