Page 100 of High Density

“Janey’s in with her,” I quickly explain, cutting him off. “Room fourteen. I’ll take Aspen.”

The little girl isn’t too pleased being handed off so abruptly, as her father darts down the hallway, and starts crying.

“Don’t cry, little one. Wanna go for a walk?”

I bounce her in the crook of my arm and pace up and down the hallway outside the waiting room. It doesn’t take her long to settle down with her thumb in her mouth and her head resting against my shoulder.

I like the weight of her in my arms, and wonder how it would feel to carry a child of my own like this, when I see Janey come through a pair of doors at the end of the hall. She’s wearing a bright grin on her face.

“He made it in the nick of time,” she whispers when she sees Aspen nodding off in my arms. “The head was already crowning.”

I get a flash of a visual I quickly shake off.

“Good. Thank you for dropping everything.”

“No need to thank me,” she shares. “It was a privilege.”

I hook her behind her neck with my free hand, and with a sleeping Aspen between us, drop a kiss on her smiling lips. Then I lead her into the waiting room and pull her down to sit beside me. With my arm around Janey and the baby asleep on my chest, I lean my head back against the wall, close my eyes, and wait for news.

Ma shows up shortly after, asking a ton of specific questions, most of which Janey answers since she’d been in the room with Sloane. She also tried to pluck Aspen from my hold, but the little girl grumbled a protest in her sleep and grabbed on to my shirt with her little fist, so we left her where she was.

Half an hour later Dan walks in, proud as punch with tear tracks on his face, holding the tiniest little bundled-up baby boy in his arms.

Janey

“Hey, Mom.”

I hear the sharp inhale on the other end of the line, followed by some muffled rustling.

That would be the sound of my mother pressing the phone against her ample chest. She does that so whoever is on the other line doesn’t hear her hollering for my father. It doesn’t work, but I’m not about to tell her.

“Father! It’s our Janey on the phone!”

I swallow a chuckle. I swear, it’s the same every time I call.

My parents aren’t even that old, only in their sixties, but you’d swear they were remnants of the fifties by the way they call each otherMotherandFather. I think it may have started as ajoke—mimicking my grandparents, who did the same thing—but it stuck somewhere along the line.

The yelling is fairly new though, it started after my dad had his stroke. Not that anything happened to his hearing, as far as I know it’s as sharp as it always was, but Mom seems to think since he now struggles with his speech, he must be hard of hearing too.

I can almost see my father rolling his eyes at my mother’s foghorn voice. That voice used to come in handy calling Dad in for dinner when he was out on the farm, but it’s wasted in the tiny bungalow they call home now.

“I’m putting you on speaker,” she informs me next.

“Hey, Dad,” I greet my father.

“S-squirt,” he mumbles with his unwilling mouth.

Hardly a squirt anymore, but it still makes me feel like a little girl.

It also makes me feel guilty, because I can’t really remember the last time I called my parents. Life has been busy, and these past few weeks chaotic, to say the least. I’m not even sure what motivated me to call now, although it may have something to do with the large group of people I just left behind at the hospital.

Family by blood but also by choice, all gathering to greet the newest addition to the High Mountain Trackers clan, little Samuel David Sullivan Blakely. A name way too big for the six pound seven ounce baby who is already loved more than he knows.

Growing up as an only child, we didn’t have a big family. Just Mom and Dad, and my father’s parents. I never really knew my grandparents on my mother’s side, and I know I have a couple of cousins on that side of the family still living in Ireland, but I’ve never met them.

I’m all my parents have, and I really should include them in my life more.

Which is why I called them as soon as I got in my truck.

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