Chapter 10 - MorningAt 6:14 a.m., after twelve hours of monitoring and two bags of fluid and one doctor telling me I was lucky in a voice that suggested luck had very little to do with it, they said I could avoid an emergency delivery if I stayed off my feet and under observation another day.
Our son kicked hard enough to make the monitor jump.
I put my hand there and waited until he did it again.
Jill was asleep crooked in the chair, one shoe off.
Rain had cleared.
The world outside the hospital window looked scrubbed raw.
Denise, the nurse from Walmart, had somehow gotten my room number from somebody and sent up that blue blanket. The same one. Tiny white stars. Folded neat in a plastic store bag with the receipt tucked inside.
There was a note in thick, slanted handwriting.
For your boy. Paid for already. Don’t argue.
I laughed so suddenly it hurt.
Then I cried, which hurt too.
Later that morning Wyatt came by before his shift. He looked awkward in hospital visitor sticker mode, shoulders too broad for the little chair by the bed. He told me the store had turned over all the footage. Said three customers had already volunteered statements and the old woman by the register, Mrs. Cora Gentry, had apparently called the sheriff’s office twice to make sure no one “let that slick-haired bastard wiggle loose.”
I said, “That sounds like her.”
Wyatt nodded. “It does.”
He stood to leave, then stopped. “One more thing. After they took him out, one of the phones kept buzzing on the floor. Screen lit up. I saw a message before the deputy bagged it.”
My stomach tightened.
“What did it say?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “It said, ‘If she knows about the storage unit, we’re dead.’”
Storage unit.
Just four words.
May you like
And there I was in a hospital bed, hand on my son, realizing the man I’d married had not reached bottom when he shoved me. Bottom was still somewhere below us, waiting.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody else. Sometimes people need to read the part where someone finally stepped in.
