All the Good Parts (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

Nursing 320 (Online): Community Health

Leona A:
I’m Leona and I—

Maria S:
Hi, Leona! Welcome!

Jenna F:
I hope we’ll get to know you better in class, ha-ha ha!

Kate M:
What were you going to type? I’m dying of curiosity.

Mike G:
Hey, mystery lady!

Darryl K:
Really? That’s all you’ve got?

Well, you can stick it, Darryl K,
I thought, and started typing.

Leona A: My name is Leona and I have a habit of accidentally clicking SEND before I’m ready. I’m a Chicago girl, born and bred, an artist, and a perimenopausal harridan susceptible to uncontrollable hormone-induced rages. Oh, and I also like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain.

SEND.

I clicked over to Professor Larmon’s lecture and started reading, only to be interrupted a few minutes later by a high-pitched chirp announcing I had a response to my post.

Actually, two responses.

Darryl K:
Well, that’s better.

Professor Larmon:
Class, let’s take this opportunity to discuss perimenopause and its effects on personal, familial, and community well-being. Care to take the lead, Leona?

Ugh.

“So, Dr. Bridget is a little shit-stirrer.” Carly shook her head, but her tone was one of admiration. Bridget Rafferty had delivered their youngest, and both my sister and her husband, Donal, adored her. “She dropped that bomb and then pushed you into a room full of preggos? That was cruel . . . and brilliant. You didn’t fall for it, did you?”

“Fall for what?” I busied myself clearing the detritus of after-school snack time from the kitchen table. It was a nice afternoon, sunny and warm in that late Indian summer, zero-humidity kind of way, and through the window I could see the older kids, sweatshirts tossed to the side, playing basketball on the driveway.

Carly poked me in the shoulder with a sippy cup. “I can see that wistful look on your face. You totally fell for it! The feeling will pass, Leona. Let it.”

“You don’t think I should even consider having a baby? My ovaries stumbled. Next thing you know they’ll fall down the stairs and break a hip.”

Carly swept her youngest, Josie, from the floor, interrupting an intense search-and-rescue mission for abandoned Cheerios. She brought the baby’s button nose to mine and said in a creepy-high voice, “Aren’t I enough for you, Auntie Lee?”

“That is the stuff of nightmares.” I took Josie from her and inhaled that unique baby smell no laundry detergent company could manage to replicate. She squirmed in my lap and reached for her mother, but Carly handed her a large plastic spoon to keep her busy.

“Yesterday you were trying to figure out how to get the money to buy a pair of leather boots and complaining about how difficult it’s going to be to juggle your job with this new class,” she said. “Today you’re talking about having a baby. It seems impulsive, doesn’t it?” She kicked the kids’ discarded backpacks into the mudroom and handed a broom to Donal, who’d just gotten home from work. “The idea of a baby didn’t even enter your mind until Dr. Bridget mentioned it. How could you not want a baby this morning and want one now?”

Donal raised an eyebrow at the topic but kept his mouth shut.

“It’s always been on my mind,” I said, matching her snippy tone.

“Has it?”

“It’s always been
in
my mind. Sitting quietly. Patiently waiting for me to notice.”

“Having a baby is not something done on a whim,” Carly said, nose in the air.

At this, Donal laughed. Carly had met her future husband, a not exactly legal Irish immigrant, in a downtown bar one sultry summer night, and Maura was conceived a week later. Donal, a walking cinnamon stick of a man—tall, lean, and gingery—turned out to be great, the kind of solid, caring person I always hoped both my sister and I would marry. He had only one fault as far as I could tell—the inability to maintain any kind of financial security. But that was okay. We did the best we could to work around it.

I bit my tongue and didn’t bring up Maura’s inauspicious start. When our father passed three years ago, Carly and I decided to be nice to each other whenever we were tempted to be mean, as we no longer had anyone to referee our disagreements. Donal lobbied for the job, but we agreed he’d be unconsciously biased. We made a pact to at least try to behave ourselves, but our history was long and our tempers short.

Josie helped me resist the snarky comment at the edge of my tongue. She was gently tapping my forehead with the spoon and giggling, her blue, long-lashed eyes twinkling with delight.

“It’s not always like that and you know it,” Carly said, watching us.

“Sometimes it
is
like this,” I said, and kissed Josie’s smooth forehead to punctuate my statement, fully aware I was overdoing it a little. Truth be told, my nieces and nephews regularly shredded my nerves like confetti. But they could also send my body into hypoglycemic shock with their surprising sweetness, and my love for them felt more than unconditional; it felt unquestionable.

“I’ve held all four of your kids like this,” I told Carly, wrapping my arms tighter around Josie’s belly, “my heart bursting as I did. I used to wonder what it would be like to hold my own, if it’d be possible to love someone more. Are you saying I should live the rest of my life without knowing?”

“Plenty of people do, and some quite happily . . . ,” Carly said, trailing off.

A sudden, uneasy silence filled the kitchen, and I focused on the kids outside, their play sound tracked by the whoosh of Donal’s broom hitting the hardwood floor.

“Jesus,” he said, a note of false exasperation in his voice, “it’s like you two were crossbred with German shepherds.” A natural peacekeeper, Donal’s primary tactic was distraction. “I could make a hair shirt with what I’m picking up. You’ll both be bald before you’re fifty.”

Though Carly had inherited our Italian father’s mass of dark curls and I’d gotten our Irish mother’s straight auburn hair, we both shed like crazy. Donal was always chasing after us with a broom, and his comments usually made me laugh, but today I was too sensitive to anything age related. “My hair looks fine,” I muttered.

Carly didn’t say anything, her attention captured by the scene outside. Patrick, their oldest boy, had stretched out over a basketball and was balancing on it, tummy down. Laughing, his younger brother, Kevin, kicked at the ball, running like crazy when Patrick pushed himself off the ground and chased after him. Carly tensed, releasing a strained breath when she noticed Patrick slow down, unclenching his fists as Kevin escaped to the neighbor’s yard.

With a sigh, Donal finished his chore and joined us at the table. “Maybe Pat should pop Kev in the nose. Just once, to put him in his place.”

“That’s your brilliant solution?” Carly said. “It’d turn into a death match and you know it. I’d be cleaning blood from the streets like a mafia wife.”

Donal shrugged. “Always worked when I was a kid. With boys at least. One scuffle and then best of friends.” He gestured toward Josie. “With girls the weapons are far more brutal. Psychological warfare.”

“Not this one,” I said, nuzzling the baby. “She’ll be above all that.”

He smiled and gently ran his thumb down the slope of Josie’s nose. “When they’re that little you can’t help but be full of hope. It’s how the human race persists. It’s a beautiful thing.”

“Oh, come off it, Donal,” Carly said. “Don’t encourage her.”

“I’m telling the truth as I see it. Any idiot knows babies bring hope to a household.”

Carly shot him a look I couldn’t quite read.

When Donal spoke again, he addressed me. “You’re thinking of having one of your own, are you?”

“I am.”

He ignored Carly’s snort. “Tough decision.”

“Can be.”

“When I’m trying to decide something for my business, I jot down a quick list of pros and cons.”

Carly rolled her eyes. “She isn’t deciding on whether to buy a new power tool.”

“I thought it’d be helpful.”

“It is,” I assured him. “It’s the most helpful thing that’s been said.”

“Having a baby is a serious commitment,” Carly stated, with a note of finality.

“I’ve been around for four of yours! Don’t you think I know that?”

Josie squealed at the anger in my voice, her chubby arms raised and insistent. She wanted her mother. Donal leaned forward, but she gave another sound of displeasure—Mommy, and no one else would do.

Carly glanced at me as she lifted her daughter. I caught her eye and was sorry I had. My sister’s face could never hide what she was thinking.

It said I
didn’t
really know what it was like. That I could walk away if I wanted to.

That I could hand them back.

I begged off dinner and hid out in my basement apartment for the rest of the night. It was small but not at all gloomy, with pale gray walls and a sturdy queen-sized bed, built to last by Donal. I’d decorated to distract—why not try to forget that I lived underground?—covering the walls in colorful prints, the bed in an oversized, fluffy white comforter, and the tile floor in a bright, haphazardly dyed cotton rag rug. It worked, in a bohemian, this-is-my-first-college-apartment kind of way, and I was fine with that. Technically, I was a college student, and this was my first apartment since I had returned to school. Also, it was free. In exchange for room and board, I helped with the kids, ran errands and cleaned up, and kept Carly company. Sometimes I bought groceries; sometimes she paid for my gas, and we’d fallen into a rhythm, a soothing, agreeable give-and-take that didn’t breed resentment or dissatisfaction.

Was she worried a baby would disrupt this? And . . . was that a selfish concern or a practical one?

I stretched over the bed, listening to the sounds coming from above. Usually, the foot stomping and screeching and giggling would bring me back upstairs to join in the fun, but tonight I wanted to be alone. I needed to think.

Carly’s opinion mattered, and I knew her concerns stemmed from experience. To a certain extent, her life as a parent had always been outlined in struggle. She and Donal were just managing to keep their heads above water now that Carly could work part-time—her job as an office manager for an insurance company supplemented Donal’s unpredictable income as an independent contractor. Still, I sometimes covered the utilities or lent her part of my paycheck until she got hers at the end of the month. They tried to hide their strain from the kids, “but they know,” Carly always said. “When there’s not enough money in the house, you try to cover it up with noise and activity, but every time your kid hears no when the other parents say yes, they know why.”

My child would be hearing a lot of nos. In six months, I’d be the proud owner of a BS in nursing, a slip of paper I coveted but did not guarantee a job. My part-time home-health job currently paid me $14.68 an hour. To anyone with a brain, Carly was right—I had no business getting pregnant.

Dr. Bridget had made it sound so easy, but then she probably cleared more in a year than Carly and Donal’s house was worth. Plenty of money to keep those three towheaded girls from hearing no very often.

Having a baby simply did not make sense for someone like me.

I lay on my bed for a while, hand on my flat, barren abdomen, and watched a house spider wander aimlessly across a crack in my ceiling. I thought some more, circling back again and again to my financial insecurity, and just as I was ready to shove the whole idea into the pile of indigent dreams huddling under my bed, something Dr. Bridget said stuttered my brain.

Regret was worse than grief.

I’d lost my mother, and then my father. I knew what grief felt like when its claws tore my heart to shreds. It never fully mended—the stitching left bumpy scar tissue and parts forever misaligned. Regret was worse than that?

I sat up, found my Community Health notebook from a pile on the floor, and tore out a page. At the top I wrote:

Should I have a baby?