Morning by Nancy Thayer

Author:Nancy Thayer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780553391053
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-23T12:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Seven o’clock in the morning.

Again.

Sara had been waking up at seven o’clock every single day for centuries, it seemed.

Steve moaned and turned on his side, pulling most of the covers with him. Sara reached for the thermometer and put it in her mouth. The five minutes took forever to pass. There was something urgent she needed to do.

At last she rose from the bed, slipped the thermometer into its blue case, pulled on her robe, and hurried into the bathroom, putting the thermometer on her Plexiglas table next to the accompanying chart and pen.

And there was the kit in all its blue-and-white plastic glory.

Usually the little table held crystal decanters full of pastel bath oils, Royal Doulton china dishes full of scalloped soaps, perfumes, dusting powers, body lotions. All that had been pushed aside, jumbled up in a corner to make room for her new treasures: the thermometer, and now this kit.

It was an ovulation-indicator kit. Ellie had called to tell her about it. The thermometer, Ellie had said, only told a woman when she had ovulated. This kit would tell a woman just before she ovulated that she was going to, so there wasn’t the chance of missing the day as there was with the thermometer.

She had been using the kit for several days now. She had the routine down pat. She took the small plastic cup and crouched over it, urinating, grinning as she did so, thinking to herself: I’m mad, I’m mad, I’m the mad scientist. She set the cup on the table and hurriedly washed her hands.

With a clean medicine dropper, she took some of the urine from the cup and put it into a tiny tube already containing a clear liquid. Then she had to wait for fifteen minutes. She looked at her watch. It was ten minutes after seven. She had to time this portion of the test very carefully.

While she waited, she noted her temperature—the same as the day before—and marked its spot on the temperature chart. She was beginning to see the black line that recorded her temperature as an endless repetitive road to nowhere. For five months now it had jigged and jagged along, rising when she ovulated, only to plunge when she started her period. If she was to get pregnant, the temperature would stay high, would not take that dreadful fall that carried her emotions with it. Ellie had reassured Sara that she should take great comfort from the chart: it proved that she was ovulating regularly, that her system was functioning nicely.

“But not nicely enough!” Sara had replied.

Today was the fifteenth day of her cycle. Today her temperature should have risen, but it hadn’t. What did that mean? Sara sat on the carpeted bathroom floor and leaned back against the tiled wall, closing her eyes for a moment. The ovulation-indicator kit said that the day she ovulated her urine specimen would turn bright blue and that the change on that day from the color on previous days would be the most extreme.

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