Page 42 of The Surrogate Mother
Monica ultrasound – 1 PM.
Oh my God, how did I get it wrong? I had in my head the whole day that it was at two. Did I really manage to screw that up? What’s the matter with me?
“Why didn’t you text me?” I say to Sam, desperate for this to be someone else’s fault but mine.
He shrugs helplessly. “You’ve been so busy lately with that Cuddles baby food stuff. I didn’t want to bother you. I figured you couldn’t make it.”
I feel like bursting into tears. I can’t believe I missed the ultrasound. I wanted to be there so badly. And the worst part is that Sam and Monica don’t seem to care in the slightest. I wouldn’t expect Monica to care necessarily, but Sam doesn’t seem to feel all that bad about it either.
“Everything looked good, they said,” Sam adds.
I guess that’s all that matters. The point of this ultrasound was to make sure the baby is okay, not for entertainment purposes. “Well, that’s good.”
He holds up the row of images. “Do you want to see?”
I snatch the pictures from his hand. My anger fades slightly at the sight of them. The images are mostly black, but in white is an outline of the baby’s face—a tiny nose, a tiny chin, and the curve of the baby’s skull.
Sam grins at me. “Great, right?”
“Can…” I look up at them. “Can we keep this?”
Sam and Monica exchange looks. “That’s mine, actually,” she says. “But they’re printing out a second copy. They just had an issue with the printer.”
“Oh.” I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that if there’s only one copy, why doesMonicaget to keep it? After all, it’sourbaby. “Our” meaning mine and Sam’s.
Before I can get worked up, the receptionist calls out, “Mrs. Johnson?”
Monica smiles at us and walks over to the reception table, where the woman is holding another set of images. She hands them over to Monica. “Here’s an extra copy for your husband.”
“Thank you,” Monica says.
“Enjoy! And congratulations, you two!”
Wonderful. This woman just referred to Sam as Monica’s husband and nobody felt a need to correct her. The best thing I can say about Sam is he’s looking down at the images of the baby and not really paying attention. He probably didn’t hear the receptionist call him Monica’s husband. But still.
Monica flashes us both a big smile. She’s wearing lipstick again. She’s been wearing makeup a lot more lately, and dressing less like a nun. Today she’s wearing a low-cut black blouse that clings to her breasts. And of course, she’s still barely showing.
“We should celebrate,” she says. “How about coffee?”
“I’ve got to get back to work,” I mutter.
She doesn’t seem surprised or perturbed by my refusal. “What about you, Sammy?”
No. She didn’t just ask my husband out for coffee without me. That didn’t really just happen.And why is she still calling him Sammy?
“Um,” Sam says, glancing in my direction, “I actually also need to get back to work.”
She raises her eyebrows. “I thought you said you were done for the day?”
“Done with classes.” He smiles awkwardly. “But I’ve got, you know, research.”
“Oh, really? What sort of research?” she asks with what appears to be genuine interest.
Sam brightens the way he always does when someone asks him about his research, which doesn’t happen too often in social situations. “I’m studying random integral matrices and the universality of surjectivity and the cokernel.”
She looks thoughtful. Did she actually understand that? “So what specifically about the cokernal?”
“Well,” he says, “I’m looking at the probability that the cokernel is isomorphic to a given finite abelian group.”
