Chapter 23: Birth

Maddox was out of bed before I finished the sentence.

He stood in the dark in his boxers with the bag in one hand and the truck keys in the other.

He had put his sneakers on the wrong feet.

"Maddox."

"I know."

"Your shoes."

He looked down.

"Right," he said, and did not change them.

It was a twelve-minute drive to the hospital, and he did it in seven.

I held the handle over the door with one hand and my stomach with the other.

The first real contraction hit at the second red light.

"Maddox, that's a red light."

"I see the light."

"Stop at it."

"I am stopping at it. I am the best driver in Colorado."

I laughed, and the next one took the laugh away.

At the hospital the night nurse took one look at us and put me in a wheelchair.

She told him to go and park the truck.

He parked it across two spaces and ran back in, still in the wrong shoes.

Teddy was already in the waiting room.

He had a bowl of cereal.

"Ma'am," he said solemnly, from a plastic chair at three in the morning. "I'm here for moral support."

"How did you get here before us?"

"I live four minutes away. I've been sleeping in my jacket since June."

The hours went the way hours go in a place like that.

The nurse put me in a bed with a monitor strapped to my belly.

The doctor was a brisk woman with gray braids, and she checked me and said six centimeters.

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