Detour For Emmy by Marilyn Reynolds

Author:Marilyn Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Teen pregnancy; Teen parenting
Publisher: New Wind Publishing
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter

16

I was getting ready for bed, checking out an ugly purplish-red stretch mark which had worked its way across my abdomen. Was it below the bikini line? I couldn’t be sure. The house was so quiet I could hear myself breathing as I continued the stretch mark search. I nearly jumped out of my discolored skin when the phone rang.

“Emily?”

It was a guy, but not Art, the voice I most wanted to hear.

“This is Carl. Carl Saunders. From choir.”

“Oh, Carl. Hi.”

“What’re you doin’?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said. I didn’t think he wanted to hear how I was examining my hideous stretch marks.

“So, I just wanted to tell you we’ll miss you on tour.”

Tour. May 21st to the 26th. I still had it marked on my calendar, as if I were going.

“Don’t rub it in,” I said, half pleased, half irritated.

“No. I’m not . . . I mean . . . I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I just . . . we just . . . miss you.”

Poor Carl. He was more shy than I’d ever been.

“I’m not sure everyone misses me.”

“I don’t know about that. But a lot of people do. We don’t sound as good as we did with you, I know that . . . Anyway, I thought, if you don’t mind, I’d like to send you a postcard from New York.”

I gave him my address, and it wasn’t until after we hung up that I thought about how rude I’d been not to even ask how he was, or what was going on with him. Camille says we have to be careful not to get so busy feeling sorry for our­selves we forget to care about anyone else. Carl was a really nice guy. Tammy still thought he bordered on nerdiness, but then Tammy had thought Art was Mr. Super Cool, so she may not be a great judge of people.

The day I would have been boarding United Airlines with the Hamilton Harmonics was the day I felt my first labor pain. I’d been home from school for an hour, and I was stretched out on the couch reading a mystery story. Just as the main character got shot in the gut, I felt a tinge of pain across my lower back.

At first I thought my pain was only in sympathy with Detective Stoneman, but then, about thirty minutes later, when Detective Stoneman was well and back on the street, I felt another pain. I was already two days overdue so labor pains should have been no surprise to me, but at first I didn’t believe it anyway.

For one thing, the pains weren’t very close, and they weren’t very painful, either—nothing like when Candice had gone into labor at school that day. False labor?

My mom had been coming home right after work for the past two weeks, in case I needed her. Our childbirth prepa­ration class had helped us both to understand each other a little better. I saw that she was trying.

I went to bed and tried to sleep, but instead I lay listening for my mom’s car.

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