Page 86 of Castings & Curses

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“Lana,”A nurse called out as soon as I stepped into Dr. Booth’s office for my appointment.

Looking around, I caught sight of the blue haired lady, the one who always glared at me at the park. Awkwardly, she stood and took her toddler's hand before heading toward the nurse at the door. She hadn't seen me, which was good.

I wasn't in the mood to deal with anybody's judgmental looks. Well, Lana’s. So now I had a name to go with the hair and the glare.

I checked in and sat down and started playing with my phone. Uncertainty roiled through my entire body. Was I making the right choice by staying in Belvoir County? This is the right thing to do, right? Or was I questioning my decisions based on the feelings I seemed to have developed for Eric? Would I be sitting here planning on sticking around if I hadn’t met him?

I didn't want to have to up heave our lives yet again. Especially not when I was about to enter my third trimester and the hardest, heaviest, most uncomfortable part of being pregnant.

When the nurse called my name, I followed her into the back room. Got on the scale. Listened to her sigh. Yes, I was overweight, but by whose standards really? Everyone knew that the BMI thing was made up by insurance companies. I didn’t have gestational diabetes, and all my other health indicators pointed at me being healthy. I exercised and I ate healthy, balanced meals. Whatever had set my self-doubt spinning was doing a bang up job of it.

They really need to train the nurses not to have any kind of reaction even if they aren't related when somebody is standing on a scale. It was such a defeatist feeling. And then she asked how my weight was compared to the last time.

It took a great deal of will power not to snap. “I haven't been tracking my weight. Otherwise, I get obsessive. And then I either don't eat properly or I eat everything.”

“I guess that's a reasonable plan,” she said, and then she yawned. “Sorry, I didn't sleep well, and I'm trying not to yawn, and it's not working very well.”

Her jaw cracked open in a very large yawn. Instantly I felt guilty for having judged her professionalism about reacting when I got on the scale. She was yawning, not judging.

“I almost can't make it until lunch, work and get a good solid dose of caffeine to get me through the rest of the day.”

“I miss caffeine,” I said.

“Well, your baby doesn't, so that's a good thing. You not drinking caffeine, I mean.”

She led me down the small hallway and into a room. She asked a few more questions and took my vitals. Apparently my records hadn't shown up yet. So they needed to know if there was anything out of the ordinary that I was aware of. My blood pressure had been fine. How was my weight? I reminded her I wasn't tracking, but nobody had ever said anything to me, so I assumed it was fine. Did I have the twenty-week ultrasound yet? Did I know if I'm having a boy or a girl?

I stared blankly at her. “No, not yet. Is it time? I’m sort of running behind on a lot of things these days.” I tried to joke.

“That's something that should have happened.”

“My divorce got finalized, and I moved back here. So I guess that needs to happen,” I explained.

“Divorced? So there's no father in the picture?” Something about the way she asked rubbed my nerves wrong. I certainly wasn’t the first single mother to be seen in this office, so why did she make it sound so mortifying?

She had me lay back, and made a bit of a show about getting a bigger belt for the baby monitor. Maybe that huff I had heard when I was on the scale had been a judgmental commentary. The way she was acting now certainly felt like she did not approve of my choices.

When she came back with a belt that “should go all the way around” me, like I was the globe, I lay back on the bed and adjusted my clothing, so she could strap the monitor on. My future professional soccer player was behaving, and staying in only one place. The nurse found the wish-wish-wish sound of the baby's heartbeat rather quickly.

She left me buckled up and relaxing. So that their equipment could monitor what they needed to see. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about my predicament. Divorced, two children, back home in a small town that I thought I escaped from, only to realize that maybe escaping from here had been the wrong perspective. Duchamp and Belvoir county weren't something to escape from. But there were roots that I could rely on and come back to.

I wasn't certain. All I knew was it was going to be a struggle to find clients as a designer in this small town.

I wasn't particularly thrilled that my only option was a male obstetrician, but I also felt that at the moment, I really couldn't be too picky.

He mostly asked the exact same questions the nurse did, we needed to schedule the ultrasound. And I had to answer the same kind of questions on whether I was married and where my husband was. When I explained that I had just moved back to Belvoir County because my divorce had been finalized the previous month. The doctor paused, and he looked at me with puppy dog eyes and asked me if I was safe now.

I was stunned.

Dylan was a jerk, Dylan was an asshole. Dylan was the world's biggest mistake.

But was I safe now? I know what the doctor meant.

“It wasn't an abusive situation. It almost would have been easier to handle if it had been. But thank you for asking.” I pasted on a fake smile, teeth together and blinked hard and blinked hard a couple of times, trying to prevent any visible tears from forming.

When I stepped back out into the lobby, the panic and overwhelming misery of being alone and not having Dylan to see me through this took over. He had been all I had wanted for so long. Even if it wasn't real. My breath just left me and all I could do was stand there. I didn't think I could take a step forward without falling over.

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