Callie looked at her watch once or twice on the way, timing the pains. She sat too close to the rattling door.
“Holding up all right?” he said.
“ ’Course I am, Henry. You?”
His right hand let go of the steering wheel as he shrugged. “I’m fine. Jim dandy.” He laughed. It was so cold in the car that their breath made steam. He pulled at the toggled wire heater control and the heater fan clanked into motion.
The tamaracks up on the mountains were bare, like dead pines. This year — every year — the bareness looked final. He let his hand fall to the seat between them, and after a minute, as if she’d thought it over first, Callie touched his fingers. Her hand was warm. The warmth surprised him, seemed out of place, mysterious.
The road curved sharply and they reached the bridge into town.
2
The waiting room at the hospital was small and cluttered — coffee cups, floor ash trays, magazines. It was like the lobby of a cheap hotel. The wall paint was dark with age, and up on the wall over the magazine table a stuffed owl stood staring on a hickory limb.
The woman at the desk said, “I’m sorry, but, just as I’ve told you, we have to collect when the patient enters.” She looked them over.
Henry pulled at the fingers of one hand. He leaned forward and said, “I’ll have to go home for the damn money then. But you’ve got to let my wife in right now. She’s in labor.”
“Don’t cuss, Henry,” Callie said. She smiled at the woman.
The woman at the desk said, “It’s a hospital rule. I’m sorry.” She was big-jawed and had colorless, close-set eyes.
“Write them a check, Henry,” Callie said.
Henry wet his lips. He looked at the woman and hunted through his pockets for the checkbook he never carried with him, then took the blank check the woman slid across the desktop and filled it out. She held it up to look at it. She was suspicious, but she said: “Through the double doors and turn right and straight down the hall to the end. Mr. Soames, you wait here if you like.”
Callie smiled at her again, politely, looking through her.
For fifteen minutes Henry sat with his hands clasped together, leaning forward under the stuffed owl, and every now and then he turned his head to look for the doctor, but he didn’t come. A young nurse came up, with her square head slung forward and down like a bull’s but her mouth was gentle, and led him to the labor room and opened the door for him. Henry went in. It was a drab green room with two beds, one of them empty, and shelves along one side of the room, with bedpans, washpans, colored bottles, towels, sealed gray bags. At the far end of the room there was a window, and he could look out and see dirty snow and a street and old houses and a dark, thick pine.
“You all right?” he asked.
She nodded. “Has the doctor come?”
“Not yet.” He pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down.
“It’s all right,” she said. “He’ll come.” Henry slid his hand under hers and she patted it and looked out the window.
He held her fingers, feeling the warmth, and after an hour he got up and got the dominoes out of her suitcase and dumped them on the bedside table. Henry still held her hand as they played. Every five or six minutes she looked away and shut her eyes, and Henry stared at the dominoes, feeling out as if with his hands their gray, cracked surfaces and yellowing dots. They’d belonged to his mother and father. A car started up on the street right outside the window and then another one farther down, and a boy carrying a box moved past on the sidewalk, running four steps, sliding, running four steps, sliding; then two men passed in long coats. Directly across the street an old woman backed out of her front door dragging a faded Christmas tree with bits of tinsel still clinging to the branches. The doctor didn’t come. A nurse came and took Callie’s pulse and put her hand on Callie’s stomach, then left. The pains were sharper now but not closer together. Henry stacked the dominoes neatly and put them away in their battered white tiebox and fastened the rubber band. Sweat prickled under his arms.
“You all right?” he said.
She nodded.
At eleven o’clock the doctor came in and examined her.
When he came out to the hallway where Henry stood waiting he didn’t say how she was. He put his hand on Henry’s arm, smiling, looking at Henry’s forehead, and said, still holding onto the arm: “You had your breakfast yet?”
Henry nodded without thinking. “How long will it be?”
The man tipped his head down, the smile still there, and he looked as if he were thinking it over. But he was studying the pattern in the floor, moving his gaze tile by tile down the hall. “No telling,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day for it.” He waved toward the windows at the end of the hall. Sunlight streamed through the diamond-shaped panes and gleamed on the brown and white tiles and on the leaves of wilting plants in the planter by the desk.
Henry kept from moving, because of the hand on his arm. He said, “Will it be today, then, you think?”
“It’ll come,” the doctor said. “Don’t worry yourself. It’s all right, I’ve been through it too.” He winked slowly, the way a woman would, and gripped Henry’s arm more tightly, then left, walking with his toes pointing outward, his head tilted to one side and back. Henry went in again. He stood heavily, balanced on his heels, his fingertips in his tight hip pockets, watching a pain take her. Then he sat down by the bed. “Poor Callie,” he said. She frowned and met his eyes as though he were a stranger, then turned her face away.
He looked for a long time at the side of her face, the line of her jaw, and he felt somehow uneasy, guilty, the way he felt on the long afternoons when he sat in the diner watching cars and trucks and buses pass on the highway, glittering in the sunlight, not stopping. He would feel uneasy, for some reason guilty, as though it were his fault they didn’t pull in, but then evening would come, suppertime, and somebody would come — truckers, or somebody like George Loomis, who would talk about things he’d seen in the Service — he had spells when he came sometimes four, five times a week, maybe because he lived all alone in that big old house — or Lou Millet would come, with gossip — or sometimes Willard Freund. But not Willard any more. Henry locked his fingers together and looked at the floor. Callie pretended to sleep.
At seven that night Doc Cathey came in with coffee and sandwiches. “Henry, you look worse’n her,” he said. He opened his eyes wider, as if it helped him focus, and the loose red netting on the whites made Henry look down. “I bet you ain’t eaten a bite all day long.”
“I’m all right,” Henry said.
Doc Cathey ignored him, holding Callie’s wrist, ignoring her, too, taking her pulse and watching the door as if he were afraid they’d run him out if they caught him. Callie compressed her lips and Doc Cathey glanced at her, then slid his hand under the bedclothes and onto her stomach. “She ain’t moved it down much,” he said to the room in general. “Looks like what they call primary inertia, maybe stiff cervix.” He looked at Henry. “You told Costard she’s a bleeder?”
Henry nodded. “He said he’d give her some kind of vitamin.”
Doc Cathey scowled and looked at the door again. “He will if he remembers. They don’t know one damn patient from another. Eat your sandwiches, Henry.” He looked back at Callie and grunted. “You lie here and keep at it a while, girl. See Henry gets some sleep.”
He went to the door and stood there, hunchbacked, looking at the doorknob. “She’s Rh negative too, ain’t she? What’s—” he paused “—the daddy?”