Chapter 7: Three in the Morning

The real one came at one in the morning on Monday.

It didn't feel like the practice ones.

It started low in my back and wrapped around my belly until I couldn't speak through it.

I breathed through it the way the class had taught me.

Then it let go, and I lay on June's couch with my heart pounding.

Eight minutes later, it came again.

"June."

She was in the doorway before I finished saying it.

"Time it."

"I did. Eight minutes."

"Shoes. Now."

"It's too early to go in."

"You're a first-time mom with a breech baby and a husband who cancels surgeries on the phone," she said. "We're going in."

She had her scrubs on over her pajamas and her keys in her hand.

At the hospital she pushed me through the doors in a wheelchair, fast.

"Millicent Lowry. Thirty-eight weeks plus four. Contractions at eleven-minute intervals."

"Hi, June," the night nurse at the desk said. "She's yours?"

"Mine. And Dillon is on, right?"

"He's in four."

I was in a bed with two straps around my belly inside of ten minutes.

One was for the baby's heartbeat.

The other read the contractions as a gray line that climbed and dropped on a paper strip.

June stayed until the monitor settled, and then she went to find coffee that wasn't terrible.

"I'll be back in forty minutes," she said. "Do not do anything brave."

Dillon came in at ten to three.

He hadn't looked at the chart before he came, I could tell, because he looked at me first.

"Hi," he said.

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