His Lifelong Pleas Got Nothing novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Sunday Reading
Tillie kneels in the hallway with clean test results, Faulk calls the fifth baby cursed at the family table, and she says no in front of eleven people and leaves, until her card is declined at the pump.
I knelt on the hallway carpet outside the dining room with a folded sheet of paper in both hands.
Bancroft stood over me in his Sunday suit.
"Please look at it," I said. "I went to a clinic in Providence on Thursday, by myself. They did bloods and a scan."
He didn't take the paper.
"Everything is normal, Bancroft. The baby is healthy. It has a heartbeat."
"Tillie, get up."
"Four times I did what your family told me. Please let me keep this one."
His jaw worked. He looked at the dining room door, not at me.
"Mr. Faulk reads it today," he said. "Whatever he says, I can't stand in a hospital hallway and be told you're gone. I can't, Tillie."
"Then believe the doctors who looked at me this week."
"I'm doing this because I love you," he said. "Trust me. It will be over by Monday night."
That was what he had said the last four times.
He lifted me by the elbows and walked me in.
There were a dozen people at the long table in the Huntington house in Newport.
Odile Huntington sat at the head with her hands folded on the linen. She was Bancroft's mother, and she had set the rule before I ever married into the family.
When Mr. Faulk said a baby was cursed, the baby did not get born.
The Huntington doctor had driven Mr. Faulk up from Providence, as he did every time.
The two of them had spent ten minutes alone in the study before dinner, as they did every time.
Now the doctor sat at the far end with his black bag by his chair, and he didn't look at me.
Mr. Faulk stood behind my chair.
He was a thin old man with white hair and a gray suit, and he had never once asked me how I felt.
He held his palm over my stomach and closed his eyes.
The soup went cold in front of everyone.
I stared down at the spoons on the table, because I could not look anywhere else.
"Cursed," Mr. Faulk said.
Somebody at the table breathed out.
Nobody at that table was surprised.
Odile slid the bread basket toward me. "Eat something, dear. You've gone white."
"Monday, nine o'clock," she said, as gently as she would give directions. "The doctor will have the room warm. Bancroft will drive you."
Bancroft put his hand over mine.
"It's for the best, sweetheart," he said quietly.
I looked at his hand and thought about the hallway.
I had begged on my knees, and he had walked me in anyway.
I took my hand out from under his.
I pulled the folded paper from my lap and set it on the tablecloth, next to the soup, where every one of them could see the clinic's name.
"I had a scan on Thursday," I said. "Eleven weeks and two days. Normal heartbeat, normal everything."
Nobody spoke.
"I'm not coming on Monday."
"Matilda," Odile said, "sit down."
"I'm already standing."
Bancroft half rose from his chair. "Tillie. Please. Don't do this here."
"You did it here," I said. "Four times, in this room, and I sat in that chair every time."
Mr. Faulk had stepped back from me. His eyes went to the doctor, then to the floor.
I noticed that.
I didn't know yet what it meant.
I picked up my coat from the back of the chair, and I took my own paper off the table.
The Huntington doctor said, "Mrs. Huntington, your uterine wall is thin. I have told you what happens."
"You told my husband in a hallway," I said. "You never put it in front of me."
I walked to the door.
Odile did not raise her voice. She never had to.
"She'll be back by Monday," she told the table. "She always comes back."
Behind me, I heard Bancroft's chair scrape.
I did not turn around.
So I stepped out.
It was a mile down the drive to the road, and I walked it in my good shoes with my coat open over my cardigan.
My car was in the garage. The keys were on the hook in the hall.
I had left them there.
At the gas station on Bellevue Avenue, I stood at a pump in the dark and held out the only card I had on me, the one Bancroft's accountant had given me.
The screen said DECLINED.
I tried it again.
DECLINED.
I stood there with $212 in my coat pocket and the clinic's paper folded small in my fist.
My phone buzzed.
It was a message from Bancroft.
Come home, sweetheart. Mom is only trying to help. We closed your accounts so you can't hurt yourself.
I put the phone in my pocket and started walking toward the highway.
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