32

“Hi, this is Jennifer Fulwiler. Could I get Dr. Wolfe to call in a new round of Lovenox for me? I’m . . . well, I’m pregnant.”

A rustling sound filled the line as the nurse fumbled with the phone. “Mrs. Fulwiler? I’m sorry, I’m confused, it says here that you already had the baby.”

“I did. This is, umm, another one.”

She told me to hold while she got my chart, and when she came back she mumbled a few details about my medical history and asked, “You have Factor II, right? Homozygous?”

“Right. Dr. Wolfe said that I should call him right away if I ever became pregnant.” Well, technically he told me I shouldn’t have more kids at all, but he did mention that in the crazy event that I found myself pregnant, I should call him right away.

“Hang on, please.” After another round of light jazz hold music, she came back on the line. “Dr. Wolfe wants to see you right away. Can you come in today?”

I switched a sleepy baby Elaine to my left arm so I could type, and I pulled up my calendar. “I could do anything before noon,” I said.

She booked it and told me that he would call in a prescription right now so that I could start giving myself the shots immediately.

I grabbed my purse and headed out for what I thought would be an uneventful visit to the pharmacy. A girl in a white technician’s coat rang up the medicine while I worked up some good dread for the trip to Dr. Wolfe’s office. She announced the total, and I handed her my card. Just before she grabbed it, the number she had just given me registered in my brain. I pulled back the card.

“Nine hundred and twenty eight dollars? Is that what you said? So my insurance doesn’t cover it?”

She glanced nervously at the computer screen in front of her. “No, your insurance does cover it. That’s your portion.”

“How many shots does that get me?”

“Your doctor called in a thirty-day supply.”

I felt dizzy. “I want to make sure I understand you correctly: You are telling me that this medicine I need is going to cost me nine hundred dollars a month for the next nine months?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I told her to put the medicine back and sat down on the bench at the blood pressure station to call Joe. As the phone rang, it occurred to me that I’d probably set off some sort of siren if I were to use it to check my vitals right now.

“Do you have any idea what Lovenox costs?” I hissed as soon as he came to the phone.

“Yeah, I did,” he said. “But last time it wasn’t so bad because we only needed one month’s worth, and they threw in some samples to help with the cost.”

“Well, now we’re looking at almost a thousand dollars a month for the next nine months, in addition to paying for a high-risk pregnancy and hospital birth out of pocket. What are we going to do about that?” Before he could respond, I jumped in to add, “And don’t say God’s going to work it out.”

He laughed. “Is there any other solution?”

* * *

When Dr. Wolfe glided into the room, I became acutely aware that I looked like a slob. I’d been in such a rush to get to the pharmacy before this appointment that I hadn’t brushed my hair or put on makeup. For that matter, I also hadn’t changed out of the sweatshirt that had a crusty spit-up stain running down the shoulder.

He sat down on the rolling stool, looking tanned and refreshed, as if he’d just come back from a Caribbean vacation. “Did my nurse take this message right that you’re expecting again?”

It seemed like there should be a better answer than just “yes.” But that’s all I could come up with.

“How old is the last baby?”

“Almost six months.”

“Wow, okay,” he said, and I tried not to imagine what he might be writing on my chart. “You’ve started taking the Lovenox, right?”

“No. I can’t afford it.” I didn’t even try not to sound pathetic and defeated.

“There really aren’t any reliable alternatives to Lovenox that are any cheaper. Is there something you can do about that?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Well, you should have already been taking it. Call me tomorrow if you still haven’t gotten it covered.” He flipped to the next page and read for a moment. I passed the time by imagining that he might be reading a page titled: HOW TO RUIN JEN’S DAY.

He turned his attention back to me and said expectantly, “Contraception.”

“What’s that?” I joked.

He smiled and looked at me with genuine sympathy. “Okay, last time you didn’t give an answer about what the plan was. I think it’s safe to say that whatever it was isn’t effective. Now it’s time to get serious.”

“Okay, I’ll think about it,” I said. My arms were folded, and my legs were crossed, my knees pointing to the door. It was the sort of body language usually only seen by prisoners in interrogation rooms.

“After this baby I want to talk about you taking Coumadin on a longer basis, and obviously you’ll have to find something reliable before then. There’s also the issue of your health—each pregnancy is putting you at risk.”

It was tempting to lay out all the details of my failed attempts to learn Natural Family Planning. It would be embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as his current perception that I had evaluated my condition as a broke slob with a pregnancy-exacerbated blood disorder and decided that this would be the perfect time to have another baby.

“I just need a little more time.”

Dr. Wolfe fidgeted. “We’ll set you up with another appointment for two weeks from now. But you really need to decide by then. I know you have a while before it’ll be an issue, but we need to start making plans to keep you healthy over the long term.”

“Okay. I’ll have an answer in two weeks.”

I drove back to the house, numb from anxiety burnout, and when I got home I could hear the baby’s cries from out in the driveway. I opened the door to an explosion of sound. Irma paced around the kitchen, whispering and cooing at Elaine. Dr. Wolfe’s office had a strict “no children” policy because some patients had compromised immune systems, which made my appointments all the more difficult since I had to arrange child care every time.

Elaine was turning out to be what some parenting experts called a “high needs” baby, meaning that Joe received a lot of phone calls in which I screamed that I was going to be dead by the time he got home if this child did not stop crying all the time. Irma gave me a sympathetic look as I scooped Elaine out of her arms and took her into my office with me.

I laid her on my lap, gave her fluffy red hair a kiss, and implored her to be extra quiet for just a little while. The Jaworski case had finally settled. Because of the blurry lines of the fake business partnership, the con artist Eric Rayburne didn’t face jail time; he was ordered to give Mr. Jaworski a monetary repayment, though he had so little money left that everyone knew Jaworski would probably never see a dime of it. It was beyond frustrating to see Rayburne get off so easily, but Mr. Jaworski seemed at peace. He stopped by the office one time when I happened to be there, looked at me with his soft, watery eyes, and told me what a difference it made to him that someone stood up for him. I wiped a tear out of the corner of my eye and wondered how I could have ever questioned whether we should’ve taken that case.

Unfortunately, now we faced a backlog of work that had been put off over the months we were focused on Mr. Jaworski, in addition to the flood of tasks that came with revamping the firm to bring in more money. The most urgent project was a password-protected area of the website where our clients could upload and retrieve documents. It required intensive coding, and now I was behind deadline. First I said we’d have it at the end of the previous week, then that got pushed to this morning.

Elaine wiggled on her pillow and grunted in displeasure, grabbing my hair and yanking on it as I typed. There was one function in particular that was snagging the whole program. No matter what I did, every time I loaded the page it said, Error on line 156. I rewrote the line. Error on line 156. I rewrote the lines of code before and after it. Error on line 156. I rewrote the entire function. Error on line 156. Now I resorted to shouting directly at the monitor, calling my computer a liar and defending the immaculate honor of line 156.

There was only an hour before the end of the business day. More than a few clients were waiting on this feature going live, and these delays were putting me behind deadline on other projects. Feeling panic inflate within me, I cut away a couple dozen lines of code to paste into a backup file and started the section from scratch. I copied in snippets from other pages, but wrote most of it by hand, with Elaine growing more and more discontented with every line.

“Shhhhh, just a second,” I soothed, not taking my eyes off the monitor. “Mommy’s almost done.” She arched her back and grunted in displeasure, becoming an angry, squirming ball of muscle. “Ooooone more second”, I cooed, finishing one of the last four lines of code.

I removed my hands from the keyboard to adjust her to a more comfortable position, and at that exact moment her strong, chubby arm slammed onto the keyboard. The code screen disappeared. I stared at my naked computer desktop, not daring to think where my work might have gone.

When I reopened the program, I saw half my work. The code stopped at a line I’d written half an hour before. Elaine had managed to hit just the right place to enter a keyboard shortcut—utterly unnecessary and obviously created by an evildoing madman—that would close your work without saving it.

I went to pull up the backup code I’d cut out earlier, but realized that I’d been so focused on getting to the new program that I’d forgotten to save it. I looked at the clock just as Elaine’s cries reached an eardrum-rattling crescendo. End of the day.

I stood up and paced the room with the baby tucked in the crook of my left arm, using my right hand to call Joe. Voicemail.

The baby’s cries lessened enough that I was pretty sure I heard the beep. “Joe? If you can hear me, we have a problem. A big problem. I lost the code—” Elaine’s crying now ratcheted up to DEFCON 2, and I couldn’t even hear myself talk. “I AM CALLING TO SAY THAT WE ARE TOTALLY SCREWED! THERE WILL BE NO DOC UPLOAD FUNCTION ON THE WEBSITE TODAY! MAYBE NOT EVER!!”

I turned off the phone and threw it against the wall, then ran outside with Elaine before she interrupted my mom’s work. As I paced the brick-paved front porch, each step triggered a surge of pain in my right leg. The pregnancy had made my blood thicken again, and without the Lovenox I could feel it pooling at the damaged part of the vein.

Elaine finally drifted off in my arms, and I went back inside. As soon as I slid her into her crib, I went back to my desk. I couldn’t hit the end-of-business deadline, but I could at least have it ready by the next day.

A tap at the door behind me interrupted my thoughts. I whipped my head around to see what Irma needed; instead of her face, it was Joe’s. I checked the clock on my computer screen. “What’s going on? It’s only five o’clock. What are you doing home?”

“I got your voicemail.” He took a seat on the twin bed behind my desk.

“I know. Look. I tried to get it to work, but this stupid line—”

“You can relax,” he said. “The firm is doing great. That functionality on the website is not going to make or break us. We’ve added a bunch of new clients, and I actually have more work than I can handle.”

“Oh, wow! That’s great!” Hope rose within me. “So you came home early to tell me we can get the house?”

“Well, that’s still an option.” He leaned forward on his knees and clasped his hands. “But there’s another option on the table.”

“What do you mean? Another option for what?”

He drew in a long breath, and I could tell he thought that what he was about to say was going to make me mad. “I’ve been talking to another attorney in the building, who has a family-owned firm that’s been around for sixty years. He’s a great guy, and he’s helped me a lot. He needs another lawyer to work for him, a low-level gig, not a partner or anything.”

“One of our guys is going to leave?”

“No,” he said, waiting for me to understand. “No, I was thinking . . . I was thinking that I might take it.”

“You’re not serious, are you?”

He held up his hands. “Hear me out: It wouldn’t be a lot of money, but it would be a steady paycheck. I would only have to work fifty hours a week and could probably get it down to forty. And we’d have health insurance.”

I recoiled into my desk chair. “It sounds like you’ve already been talking to him.”

“I have. He needs to fill the position soon, and I told him I’d let him know by next week.”

I stuttered as I asked for details about the salary and then stuttered again when I heard what it was. “That’s less than I used to make as a web designer! We’ll never get the house with that!”

“I know. It would mean that the house is out.”

The news hit me like it had been delivered by taser. “It would mean that moving anywhere in central Austin is out altogether!”

Joe nodded. “You’re right. And we couldn’t afford Irma either. But you wouldn’t have to keep killing yourself with all this administrative work. His firm has people that are awesome at billing, bookkeeping, all that stuff. I could get home before the kids went to bed each night. I think it would be a lot better for our spiritual lives, too.”

“I don’t see why we can’t own a business. Plenty of religious people own businesses.”

“I’m not saying that owning a business is objectively bad. I’m saying that I don’t think it’s where God wants us right now.”

I barely heard him. “But I thought that Fulwiler Law was what you’d been waiting for all your life! I thought this was your big dream!” I said, my voice sounding more pleading than I’d meant for it to.

“It was. It’s not now. I don’t care about being king of the world anymore.” He rolled his eyes at the word king. “I no longer see the point in working myself to death so that I can become rich and powerful.”

“You just landed a bunch of clients. It’s all working. It wouldn’t bother you to walk away from what you’ve always wanted, just when you finally got it?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” he replied. And I knew by the look on his face that he meant it.

“Is this a done deal?” I asked.

“No. If you really still want us to have the law firm, we can keep it.”

“I can’t believe we’re even having this discussion.”

Joe grabbed one of my business cards from the desk, which had been half-hidden under a pile of code printouts. He held it up, and I looked at my name under the glossy veneer, next to the elegant logo that said Fulwiler Law. “Do you think that this is what’s going to make you happy?”

“Having business cards? No.” Before he could retort, I continued: “I know what you mean, though. And no, I didn’t think that owning a business was going to make everything perfect. But moving back to central Austin? Throwing parties with Clifford Antone? Having a house by the lake? When you put all that together with owning a thriving business . . . yeah. Yeah, I do think that would make us happy.”

“So you want me to turn down this other job?”

I massaged my aching forehead. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. Can I think about it?”

“Sure. But we need to decide by next week.”