Читать книгу Oh, Baby! - Judy Baer - Страница 12

“How’s my favorite Irish lassie?” Tony DeMatteo grinned at me and dangled a Snickers bar in front of my nose. “Want to share?”

“Of course I do, but only if you promise to quit calling me a lassie. I feel like you’re talking to a dog every time you say it.” I took a swipe at the candy bar, and he pulled it neatly away.

“That’s the last thing you are, Molly.” His dark brown eyes twinkled with warmth. “But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Tony is the only male nurse on the ob-gyn floor, a Shakespeare buff and an incorrigible romantic. Combine that with his unquenchable enthusiasm for living, passion for good food and lots of fun and Tony is virtually irresistible. All the single women in the hospital are, or have been at one time or another, madly in love with Tony. He has a knack of dating and breaking up with women and leaving them still loving him. He is a professional bachelor and masterful at it. At one end of the spectrum, Tony is the ultimate charmer. Dr. Reynolds, according to the hospital rumor mill, is the other. The men at Bradford Medical Center run the gamut.

I love Tony, too, but as a friend. I might have succumbed to his charms myself if I hadn’t watched him sweep woman after woman off her feet and then, after a few weeks or months, let her down gently. It was easier, I decided, to go directly to friendship with Tony. I’m glad I did. He might have been harder to resist than Hank had he decided to propose to me and move to Mississippi.

“I have Almond Joys in my locker,” he whispered seductively. “An entire unopened bag of miniatures. Want to go to the cafeteria with me and eat them with whole milk?”

“What are you trying to do, make me fat?” It’s a joke around the hospital that Tony can eat anything and not gain an ounce. That’s another reason I’ve avoided a romance with Tony. The women who date him usually gain ten to fifteen pounds during their relationship.

“Why don’t you ever fall subject to my charms?” he asked conversationally as we walked toward the lunch room.

“You’re a slippery slope, Tony. I just don’t get too close to the edge.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “But you could be coaxed a little nearer, couldn’t you?”

I glared at him. “Don’t get any ideas in your head about romancing me, big guy. I’ve got your number. You love women and you love dating. You just hate committing.”

“Commitment. Such a problematic word.” He sounded put-upon just saying it.

We entered the cafeteria and picked out our lunch. Cottage cheese and a pear for me, three slices of pizza, a strawberry shake and a Dove bar for Tony. Oh yes, and several Almond Joys—with milk.

“I just haven’t found the right one yet, that’s all. Once I do…” He gazed thoughtfully toward the large aviary outside the cafeteria’s glassed windows. “‘Journeys end in lovers meeting, every wise man’s son doth know.’”

“What’s the Shakespeare stuff, anyway? Why do you always quote it?”

He grinned. “I figured out by the time I was fifteen that girls love romantic junk, poetry, flowers, candy. I could get ‘older’ women, the seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds, to date me with that stuff.”

It probably didn’t hurt that you looked like a young Adonis, either, I thought.

“The unexpected part was that, while I was researching good pickup lines, I discovered I liked it—Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, Shelly.” His eyes twinkled again. “Better yet, I found I couldn’t go wrong with those guys.”

“You are an incorrigible, totally irredeemable, unmitigated flirt.”

He leaned back to look at me and put his hands behind his head. The fabric of his white uniform stretched tight over a great set of pectorals. “I know. Ain’t it grand?”

Tony’s gaze flickered from me to something just over my shoulder. I turned to see what had attracted his attention.

It was what—or rather, who—was attracting everyone’s attention these days. Dr. Clay Reynolds.

“Have you worked with him yet?” I asked.

“He’s a perfectionist,” Tony said, “and a control freak during delivery.”

“I just had my first experience with him.”

“How’d it go?”

“I didn’t feel very welcome. It probably didn’t help that my client kept telling Dr. Reynolds that she wouldn’t have been able to get through the delivery without me. She didn’t exactly praise him for his part in it all. In fact, I think she included him with all the other men in the world who should be shot by a firing squad. You know how touchy these mothers get when they’re dilated to nine. The birth went well, though.”

“Maybe you’ll grow on him,” Tony said encouragingly. “You help with Lamaze classes here all the time, and the volunteer program at the free clinic would fall apart without you. He’ll get used to you.”

I could hardly disagree with Tony. He’s fought some uphill battles himself as a male nurse in the utterly feminine obstetrics ward. His competence and professionalism ultimately win people over. I had to do the same.

Of course I’m hopeful for a little more than that, like a good working relationship and a shot at starting an agency and clearing house for doulas right here at Bradshaw General.

It was late by the time I got home. My German shepherd, Hildy, was standing, legs crossed, by the front door dying to get out. We took a quick run through the streets of my neighborhood, a quiet little area that is slowly and inexorably being absorbed into the city. It is still, however, a quaint and quiet haven for me to retreat to and regroup after a long, intense labor with one of my moms.

I live life simply. Home, family, friends and faith are what is important to me. Someday I want a family of my own, but until that happens, I live vicariously through my clients bringing new life into the world. Oh, yes, and animals. I adore animals.

Hildegard, Hildy for short, led me on a circuitous route through the neighborhood to sniff at fire hydrants, shrubs and a popular squirrel hangout before bringing me back to my front door. I put out her dog food and fresh water and walked through the house to my bedroom.

Knowing I wasn’t alone in the house, I went looking for my other roommate. Geri usually hangs out in the sunroom when I’m not home. I found her there, looking out the window, dressed in her glitzy denim jacket studded with rhinestones.

“Bedtime, Geri.”

She moved away from me.

“Come on, Geri, don’t give me any trouble tonight. I’ll help you take your jacket off.” Feeling bone weary and ready for bed, I wasn’t ready for an argument. Geri is a bit of a night owl. “You aren’t going to a fashion show, you know.”

She grunted in protest and planted her hefty backside on a floor pillow as if to say, “Make me.”

“Let’s take off the jacket.”

Geri looked at me as if to say, “Who, moi?”

She can be so willful and obstinate sometimes—especially when I’m already exhausted. “Okay, you stubborn, vain, egotistical sow, I’ll teach you!” And I lunged for her thinking I could wrestle her to the ground, but Geri squealed and escaped like the proverbial greased pig. She ran into the bathroom and skidded into the side of the bathtub.

Geranium is never very good on tile. Her little hooves just can’t get a grip.

It’s not every woman who owns a pig—or wants to—but I’ve never considered myself an ordinary woman.

Geranium was, for a time, a preschool mascot at the private school at which I taught. When I announced my resignation, the staff and children voted that Geranium should come with me, a bit of tender pork by which to remember them. This was much to the relief of the administration, who had been wondering how to break it to the kids that Geri’s feed bill had been cut out of the budget.

Although my mother did become hysterical for a while upon learning her first grandchild was actually a potbelly pig, she’s come to appreciate Geranium. Pigs are very smart. Geranium is capable of similar reasoning and mischief making to that of a four-or five-year-old child. She needs me. Having been a kindergarten teacher, I’m able to stay one step ahead of her most of the time.

I wrestled her out of her little denim jean jacket with the industrial snaps on the arms. Geranium loves her jacket. She’s very vain and self-important for a pig.

Once she realized I wasn’t going to back down, she willingly let me unsnap the jacket, and trotted outside through the pet door that leads to her sandbox-size litter box and her bed. Geranium is small, which is fortunate for me. She weighs about sixty-five pounds and stands just over a foot tall and approximately two feet long. Pigs are very compact and have hard bodies, so Geri actually takes up very little space—not much more than a large footstool. She’s at least twenty pounds lighter than Hildy and has no tail to sweep everything off coffee tables. In truth, she’s a lot easier to handle than Hildy, who, when I enter the front door, sometimes jumps up and puts her paws on my shoulders to lick my face.

That was another thing about Hank that made me know we’d never work out as a couple. He thought pigs belonged in pigpens in the state of Iowa and nowhere else on the planet. He’s going to have a bad shock when he sees his first pig farm in Mississippi.

He also bought into all the clichés and fallacious stigmas about pigs, and wouldn’t be convinced that the term “dirty as a pig” is pure falsehood. Pigs are very clean animals if not forced to live in untended stys. In fact, even under those conditions, a pig will use only one corner of the pigpen as a toilet. It’s where they’re forced to live, not the pigs themselves, that is to blame for the phrase “stink like a pig.”

Pigs have no odor. I tried to make Hank smell Geranium once to find that out for himself, but he refused. Yet another chink in our relationship.

The other public relations problem pigs have is that they like to roll in the mud. They don’t like being warm and can actually get sunburned if they’re exposed too much. Therefore they roll in the mud to cool off and keep the sun off their skin. Does anyone criticize a woman for using sunblock? I think not.

The telephone rang just as Hildy and I were settling in for the night. It was Mandie, a young single mother whose parents had just hired me to be her doula. She was crying.

“Molly?”

“What is it, honey?”

“I’m so scared. I went to the doctor today, and he says that I could give birth any time now. I don’t want to give birth, Molly.” She hiccuped tearfully. “I want it to stop!”

It’s a little late for that now. Tactfully I didn’t point that out.

“Things are going to be fine,” I assured her. “You’re a healthy young woman. You have a wonderful doctor to care for you, and I’m here for you, too.”

“I’m not a woman, I’m just a kid!”

Truer words were never spoken. Babies having babies. I see far too much of it and it breaks my heart. But it’s not my place to judge. I’m called to be salt and light to these girls, Jesus embodied in me.

“How do you feel?” I asked. “Are you having pain?”

“No. I just keep thinking…”

“How about if I talk you through some deep-breathing exercises? It might be time to give your brain a rest.”

I stayed on the line until Mandie was calmer and ready to sleep.

Hildy snuffled wetly and shifted so that her legs were rigid, managing to take up two-thirds of the mattress. I could hear Geranium rooting around in her pen for nonexistent truffles and the tick of my grandparents’ old clock in the living room. All was right with the world.

The telephone rang at 8:00 a.m. I tried to ignore it and let my answering machine pick up, but then I remembered Mandie. She might be in labor.

“Hullo?” I snuffled into the phone, my voice scratchy from disuse.

“Wake up, sleepyhead! It’s play day!” Lissy sounded annoyingly chipper.

Saturdays are always play days for Lissy. She tries to pack an entire week’s worth of fun into eight or ten hours and always wants company doing it—me.

“I might have a baby coming today.”

“Then we should go soon so we can get a few hours in before you have to be at work.”

“I need to do laundry,” I reminded her. “I’ve had a busy week.”

“Nonsense. We’ll just buy you new clothes. If you can’t go two or three weeks without washing, you’re definitely short.”

“I thought we were going to a museum one day.”

“Fine, be cerebral and dull. How about the Science Museum? That’s my speed. They’ve got lots of dinosaurs.”

“Do we need to borrow a child to go there?”

“Nah. We’ll just pretend ours are already there, running around. That place is always stuffed with kids. You shop with me, I’ll go to the museum with you. Deal?”

Why fight it? Lissy is a lot like Geranium and Hildy. It rarely pays to argue with hardheaded females.