Joella kept groaning and holding her abdomen.
I said the only thing I could think of. “Don’t push. Wait till we get to the hospital. Everything will be all right. Don’t push!”
Joella gritted her teeth. “Easy for you to say. You’re not the one . . . trying . . . to hold back a . . . rocket ship about to launch.”
“Think soothing thoughts. Ocean waves. Birds singing.”
“What does it feel like when your water breaks?”
I had no idea. Sixty years old, I’d be the matriarch in any primitive tribe, the wise old woman. But, product of civilization and caesarean that I am, I knew nothing!
We whipped into the parking area, then under the covering that sheltered the emergency entrance. Fitz ran inside. Thirty seconds later he was back with two guys in white and a gurney. They loaded Joella onto it, and I followed them inside while Fitz went to park the car.
He caught up with me in the emergency room a couple minutes later, as I was giving the woman at the admitting desk information.
She frowned. “You don’t have an insurance card or any-thing for the patient?”
“No.” I was pretty sure Joella had no insurance, but I didn’t want to reveal that. “We were out at the park on a picnic—”
“Did they take her directly to the delivery room?” Fitz cut in.
“The patient is your daughter?”
“No, but—”
“You are family?”
“Well, in a way.”
“What way?”
“Joella lives in my duplex.”
“You’re roommates?”
“No, I’m the, uh, landlady.” Which came off sounding not even third-cousin-once-removed close to being family.
“Please wait over there.” The woman motioned in the direction of the chairs arranged around the room, only two of which were occupied. Good. That meant Joella should be getting priority attention.
So we sat. We waited. The chairs had apparently been chosen for longevity rather than comfort. I kept thinking about all that food we’d eaten. Could wieners and onions and chili induce labor?
There was a coffee machine in the corner. Fitz went over and brought back Styrofoam cups of stuff as black as my impounded limousine.
“I guess it’s coffee,” he muttered, peering at the dense liquid. “Unless it’s something they’re using to resurface the parking lot. I could run up to one of the espresso stands.”
“This is fine,” I assured him. I didn’t want him to leave. We weren’t doing much talking, but his presence was comforting.
“Matt arrived three weeks early,” he offered once. “And look how big and strong he is now.”
But Joella was almost two months early.
God, Jo says Your timing is always perfect, no matter how it looks to us down here. Please make it perfect this time!
After an hour and forty-five minutes, I approached the reception desk. “Can we find out anything about my friend, Joella Picault?”
“I’ll check.” The woman returned a little later with the information that they were still running tests.
“Is there a problem? Has she had the baby yet?”
All I got was a repetition of the “running tests” information, which is apparently all landladies were entitled to in this day of CIA-level privacy regulations.
After almost three hours, the swinging doors opened, and a woman in a white pantsuit pushed a wheelchair through. Joella stood up, still obviously pregnant.
I rushed over to her. “Jo, what’s going on? Why are they letting you go? Are you okay? Are they kicking you out because of money? I can come up with—”
“I’m okay. The baby’s okay. I need to go out to the car and get my checkbook. The lady inside said I need to pay something on the bill today and make arrangements about the balance.”
“I’ll go get it,” Fitz offered. He headed out the double glass doors.
“They did something to stop the baby from coming too soon?” I asked anxiously.
“They didn’t stop anything. She never was coming. My water didn’t break, and I wasn’t even dilated.” Joella sounded both embarrassed and frustrated.
“But all your pain—”
“I am here in the emergency room, recipient of every test known to pregnant womankind, with a huge, enormous, industrial-strength case of indigestion. A big, bad bellyache.”
“Indigestion!”
“With my breath smelling so strongly of onions, I practically asphyxiated the doctor. He asked me what I’d been eating.”
I went down the list. “Burned weenies. Garlic-flavored buns. Onions. Pickle. Mustard. Pepper-jack cheese. Greek salad . . . with kalamata olives. Chili. Chocolate cake. Fudge frosting.”
“That’s what I told him. He said I could have found a healthier menu in a dumpster.”
I slammed a palm against my forehead. “It’s all my fault. What was I thinking?”
“You were thinking of what would make the day fun for me, and I chose most of that stuff. And it was a glorious picnic.” Joella gave me a hug. “The best birthday ever. And if I hadn’t been such a pig and eaten about three times as much as I should have, I’d have been fine. But the baby was never in any danger. I just . . . panicked, I guess, when I started feeling a little pain.”
“You’re sure it’s just indigestion? They’re sure? Doctors make mistakes.”
“They did ultrasound, blood, EKG, urine, the works. Indigestion. They gave me some medication. I can’t believe it. Telling you the baby was coming when it was just a dumb stomachache.” She shook her head in disgust. “What am I going to do when I have real labor pains?”
Laughter came from the other side of the swinging doors.
Joella rolled her eyes. “One guess what they’re laughing about back there. They’ll be making onion-breath jokes for days.”
Fitz returned then and handed Joella her purse, and she dug out a checkbook. I knew today must have run up a mammoth bill.
“I can help out—”
“I’ll manage.”
She had to take the check to a different desk, and it took quite a while getting the financial arrangements made. I don’t suppose they can repossess the baby if you can’t pay a bill, but I was pretty sure they could make life miserable. Would “man- aging” mean she’d have to accept her parents’ ultimatum about adoption to get financial help? And though I could and would help her out, I doubted I could do enough to make much of a dent in this bill. Is this God’s way of helping her make a decision? I wondered with a stab of dismay.
I put a hand over my mouth and breathed into it as we went out to the car. Now I knew why she’d almost asphyxiated the doctor. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? Maybe because it was like a skunk-on-skunk situation. If you’re a skunk, you probably don’t smell the other skunks.
But thank You, God, thank You for indigestion instead of tragedy. Please, please take care of Joella and her baby.
Odd, I thought, how much I was talking to God here lately.
NEXT MORNING I brushed my teeth twice as long as usual, rinsed my mouth with Listerine, and took a breath mint for good measure. I had enough problems without burying innocent bystanders in an onslaught of onion-breath hangover.
Joella had already left for the coffee shop by the time I went out to my car. I’d checked on her earlier, and she was fine, no pains. We were both still apologizing, Joella for her mistake about thinking she was in labor, me for not using better judgment about limo-dog revelry. Fitz was bringing his fish over to cook this evening.
I visited the county personnel offices first, only to find out the hiring situation had changed there. A big sign said all job vacancies were posted on their Web site. A similar situation with the school offices, although I did pick up an application form there. By that time I’d had it with the advances in technology and decided to work on something more productive and perhaps even more important than a job.
Keeping myself out of jail.