Raising Hope (27 page)

He didn’t answer me, and I said again, “Hope. Do you like Hope?” Even before he answered, I was kissing Hope’s forehead, whispering, “Hope, Hope.”

“Sure,” he said. “Hope is fine.”

He was gone the next morning. I found a note in the bowl of fake fruit on the kitchen table—the place we used to leave messages when we were growing up.

Ruth:

Sorry, but I have to go away. It just hurts too damn much to stay here after everything that’s happened. I’ve made you and Sara Lynn Hoffman guardians of the baby. Hope, I guess you’re calling her. Mr. Dawes downtown has all the papers you’ll need to sign. Thank you for doing this for me, and for understanding why I just can’t do it myself.

Bob

I read the note a second and then a third time. “Sara Lynn Hoffman?” I said aloud. “Sara fucking Lynn Hoffman?” I glanced down at Hope and said, “Sorry, honey. I’ll try and watch my mouth.”

I read the note again. I knew Bobby had thought he was in love with Sara Lynn, but letting her raise his baby? Was he crazy? I adjusted the blanket around Hope’s feet and leaned down to her in her car seat as she sucked her pacifier. “We’ll just see about that,” I whispered.

I hefted Hope out to the car and, after about ten minutes of cursing and fiddling with seat belts, strapped her seat in. Then I drove to Mr. Dawes’s office. I didn’t call ahead or anything, just barged in on his secretary with my hands full of Hope in her car seat and the diaper bag full of all her baby gear. “Is he in?” I asked Candy Flores.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked as if she didn’t know me. That was Candy all right. Acting above herself just because she put on heels and a suit to go to work in a lawyer’s office.

“Candy,” I said, shifting the damn diaper bag on my arm, “this is an emergency. Just tell him I’m here.”

She turned her little nose up at me and picked up the phone. “Ruth Teller is here to see you,” she said. When she hung up the phone, she said, “Go in.”

I marched into Mr. Dawes’s office, and he stood to welcome me. “Have a seat,” he said. I parked myself in a chair across from his desk and set Hope and the diaper bag down beside me. I fumbled through my jeans pocket, took out Bobby’s note, and handed it to him. “What in hell is going on here? Bobby left me this.”

He glanced at the note and said, “Mmm-hmm. Your brother came in yesterday and had me draw up papers naming you and Sara Lynn as guardians of the child.” He stood and reached into a file cabinet next to his desk and pulled out a folder. “Here are the papers you need to sign.” He sat back down and peered across his desk at me. “Is Miss Hoffman aware of the situation?”

“No,” I said. “And I don’t think she needs to know about it, either. This is my niece we’re talking about; she doesn’t have any relation to Sara Lynn Hoffman.”

Mr. Dawes sighed and rubbed his nose. “I told Bobby yesterday it didn’t make sense. ‘Pick one or the other,’ I told him. ‘This arrangement you’ve proposed will never work.’

“‘No, sir,’ he told me. ‘I know both of these women will make it work.’”

I sat limply, trying to take it all in.

“Well, I should probably call her,” said Mr. Dawes, one hand picking up the phone and the other flipping through his Rolodex.

As he dialed, I stood up and held out my hand for the phone. “I’ll do it,” I said. “It might as well come from me.”

“Hello?” Sara Lynn answered in her cool, rich-girl voice.

“Hi,” I said. “This is Ruth Teller. I’m calling you from Mr. Dawes’s office. You know, the lawyer? You’d better come on down here. I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just spit it right out. It seems Bobby has named both of us guardians of his baby girl.”

She gasped. “Is he . . . is he dead?”

“No,” I told her. “Just run off someplace.”

“Oh,” she said calmly, as if we were having a perfectly normal conversation. “Well, I suppose I’d better come down and meet you at Mr. Dawes’s office, then.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll see you in a few.”

I hung up the phone and sat back down in my chair. “She’s coming,” I said. “Hope and I’ll wait right here for her, if it’s all the same to you.” My tone of voice said it had damn well better be okay with him.

He nodded, shuffling some papers. “I’ll just do a little work while we wait.”

He didn’t have to busy himself too long before Miss Sara Lynn herself strutted through the door, wearing a white sleeveless blouse and black pants. She was carrying a black leather shoulder bag and had a pair of sunglasses perched back on her head. Miss Fashion Plate. Well, that was Sara Lynn.

“Hi, Dick,” she said, extending her hand to Mr. Dawes. “And this must be the baby!” she cooed, bending and putting her face right up to Hope’s. “Hi, sweetie-pie! Hi, little girl!”

“Hi, Sara Lynn,” I said, reminding her I was in the room as well.

“Ruth.” She stood up straight from where she was cooing over Hope. “Hello. Mama asked after you.”

I nodded curtly. “Well, I’ll see her Wednesday, I guess, when I come to clean.”

As she bent over Hope again, she marveled, “She’s the spitting image of her father.”

“I don’t know,” I said, just to be contrary. “I think she looks like Sandra.”

“No.” Sara Lynn shook her head. “She’s Bobby all over.”

“Suit yourself.” I shrugged. “Although I think I’d know whether she looks like my own brother.”

“Hmmph-hmmph,” Mr. Dawes cleared his throat. “Should we get down to business?”

Sara Lynn sat in the chair next to mine and folded her hands on her lap. Mr. Dawes looked back and forth at both of us. “As you know, Bobby Teller has named you guardians of his child. This”—he held up two packets of paper—“is the paperwork. It’s very general. You two have to work out arrangements for where she’ll live, how she’ll be raised, et cetera. Bobby made it clear that you two were to have equal authority. Not one or the other of you will have more say than the other. Clear?” He looked at me as he said that last bit, as if I were the one in the room used to bossing everyone around and getting my own way.

“Here you are,” he said, pushing the paper packets and pens to our side of the big desk. I picked up the pen and signed right away. I didn’t need to read any papers to know I’d be happy to look after my own niece. Sara Lynn was more deliberate, taking her sweet time to read through all the papers.

“This seems fine,” she said, a questioning tone in her voice. She looked up at Mr. Dawes like she wanted him to reassure her.

“I can’t tell you what to do, Sara Lynn,” he said, raising his hands in the air. Mr. Dawes was being nice to her just because her father had been a big-shot lawyer in town. It was making me mad.

She hemmed and hawed some more, flipping through those papers with a line between her eyebrows, and finally I said, “Sara Lynn, did you ever hear that expression about either shitting or getting off the pot?”

She frowned and said in her high-and-mighty voice, “This is an important decision. I’ll take all the time I need to think it through.”

“That’s very wise,” said Mr. Dawes, looking at her as if she’d just come down the mountain with ten more commandments.

I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Here.” I reached into the car seat and picked Hope up, then shoved her into Sara Lynn’s arms. “If you’re having trouble making up your mind, you should at least hold her to see what you’re dealing with.”

“Oh, my,” she said, tightening her arms around Hope. “Oh, my.”

I sat watching, my arms folded against my chest. There was a jealous part of me that didn’t want her holding Hope. But there was another part of me that was glad. Glad that Sara Lynn, for once in her life, could see I had something precious, something worth having.

Sara Lynn handed Hope back to me, picked up the pen, and clicked it. “I’ll do it,” she said, signing the papers.

“You’re sure?” Mr. Dawes asked her.

“Yes, I am.” She straightened the papers and handed them back across the desk.

“All right, then,” he said. He stood to shake her hand. “Good luck.”

I put Hope back in her car seat carrier and buckled her in. As I picked up the carrier by its handle, Sara Lynn sidled right over and said, “Why don’t you follow me over to my house so we can discuss this. We’ll need to make a solid plan.”

“Let’s go to my house,” I said, sticking out my chin and gripping that car seat tightly. I wasn’t going to have Sara Lynn Hoffman telling me how things were going to be.

Her face froze for a minute, as if she had to take in the fact that I was telling her what to do, but then it cleared and she said, “Fine. That’s just fine.”

“Ruth Teller,” the nurse calls. Jesus, could she say it any louder? I hop up and walk over to her quickly, so she won’t say my name again.

“Hi,” she says. She hands me a cup and some wipes and rattles off her orders in a bored voice. “We need a clean-catch specimen from you. Instructions are on the door of the bathroom. Give me the urine when you’re done, and I’ll take you into the examining room.”

I walk into the bathroom she points toward, shutting the door behind me. By the time I read and follow all those directions about how and where to wipe, I’m so nervous that I can’t pee. I turn on the sink faucet and make it drip a little. An old trick of Ma’s. Come on, come on. I close my eyes and out it comes. Oh, Jesus, put the cup underneath.

I hand the cup to the nurse when I come out, and she takes me into the examining room. “Gown’s on the table. Opening’s in the back. Doctor’ll be with you in a minute.” When she shuts the door, I take a deep breath, strip, and put on the gown.

I sure as hell am not going to sit on the table with the stirrups while I wait for the doctor, so I hold my gown together in the back with one hand and sit on a chair next to the table. A brisk knock on the door makes me about jump out of my skin.

“Hello, Ruth.” It’s a small lady with dark hair and glasses, looking at some papers in a folder. “I’m Dr. Stearns.”

“Hi,” I say weakly.

“We think we’re pregnant?” she says, looking down at the papers and then up at me.

“I don’t know about you, but I think I am.” I laugh, but she doesn’t even crack a smile.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s have a look at you.”

I know what that means, and I drag myself over to the table and sit on it. “Feet in the stirrups, now,” she says. I put my feet in those cold metal contraptions and steel myself while she flicks on a bright light and points it at my private parts.

“All right,” she says, snapping on a glove and then sticking her hand inside me. “Just a little discomfort . . .”

How in hell does she know how it feels? Maybe to me it’s a big discomfort, a big old pain in the ass. Literally.

“Yes,” she says. She takes her hand out and nods at me. “I’m guessing eight weeks.”

It’s hard to have a conversation with someone when your feet are up in stirrups and your private parts are exposed to the world. “Eight weeks,” I whisper.

“Is this good news or bad news?” she asks briskly.

“Can I . . . ?” I motion to my feet in the stirrups, thinking I can’t say another word until I’m sure she’s looking at my face instead of my ass.

“Sure,” she says. “Why don’t you get dressed, and I’ll come back to talk in a minute.”

I get myself down from the torture table and slip out of the gown and into my clothes. I’m sitting back in the regular chair when she knocks and comes in again.

She sits on her little stool and wheels it closer to me. “So,” she says, smiling. She actually looks a lot nicer than I originally thought. “You’re pregnant.”

“Yes, I am,” I reply.

“Any questions for me?”

“Nooo, I don’t think so.”

“You seem a bit overcome by this,” she says, placing her hand on mine. “I’m guessing this was not a planned pregnancy.”

“You can say that again,” I tell her.

“Would you like termination information?”

“No!” I say right away. “No! I . . . you know, what in life is planned? You take what comes, right? Besides, I want this baby.” I test the way that sounds on my tongue, and I like it. “I want this baby.”

“I’m glad for you, then,” she says, and she smiles at me like I’m a real person, not a vagina she’s getting paid to look into. “Would you like to hear the heartbeat?”

“Can I do that?” I ask in amazement.

“Sure can,” she replies. “Sit up on the table again.”

I look at her like she’s asking the impossible, and she laughs. “No stirrups this time. No getting undressed. Just pull your top up.”

I do as she says, and she rubs some gel on my belly and puts a wand with a rolling tip to my stomach. She rolls it around a bit and then holds it still. The room fills up with a strong, rapid
thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump,
and I don’t move a muscle as I listen to the rhythm of a heart inside me that belongs to somebody else.

Chapter 19

D
ang! I have a humongous zit on my chin. It’s the size of Texas, I swear. I tilt my chin up to the bathroom mirror and lean in to look at it real close.
Don’t pick it. Don’t pick it. Don’t pick it.
Oh, rats, I can’t help it. I squeeze it, first gently and then hard, and some white stuff comes out. I wipe it off and look again. Great, now instead of a raised white spot, I have a big blotchy red spot. Yuk!

I grab a washcloth and swish it under the hot-water faucet, then put it up to my face. When I remove it, I half expect to see the pimple gone, but it’s not. It looks even worse. “Damn,” I say under my breath. “Double, triple, quadruple damn.”

“Hope!” Sara Lynn calls from downstairs. “You’ll be late for your lesson.”

“Hold on!” I yell. Man, she’s so impatient.

I dab the washcloth on my chin again and take it off. I look in the mirror. No luck. I throw the washcloth in the sink and pull down my shorts to sit on the toilet. I check my underwear as I’m sitting there and, as usual, nothing. I put my head between my knees and sigh. I’ll be the oldest girl in school with puny breasts and no period.

When Mamie broke her hip two years ago, she had this nurse who kept telling her to visualize her healing. “Now, Mrs. Hoffman,” she’d say, “I want you to close your eyes and picture yourself walking. Picture yourself putting your right foot in front, now your left, now your right. You’re not feeling any pain; you’re just walking.”