Page 73 of Sexting the Cowboy
Can’t afford to think about that now.
Instead, I stare at the centrifuge timer and count backward from sixty in fours, then sevens, then primes. Childhood habit. When the whine winds down, I open the lid, and everything is important and nothing is sacred. I work like I do for strangers—gloved, precise, efficient. Three minutes.
Three minutes to consider baby names and alternatives to pregnancy. To motherhood. To all of it. Three minutes to choose a new path in my life, or find a medical solution to my conundrum.
I look at the cheap little poster I taped above the sink the day we opened—Preventative Care Saves Lives—in that half-sincere, half-accusatory font that feels like it came with the frame. I’d meant it in the broad, good way. Come in before it’s an emergency, let me keep you from the edge.
It stares back at me like a scold now.When’s the last time you took your pill, Annie?
Two minutes.
I stand and pace a tight square because motion lies sweetly. The plan—myplan—shows up like a ghost with a clipboard and starts reminding me of who I say I am. Open a clinic where people really need one. Sliding scale because people don’t stop being sick when they stop making enough money. Build trust with the old ranchers who hate hospitals and would rather pull their own teeth and get on with the day than talk to some woman about their problems. Young mothers who don’t have time to schedule a day off from work.
Keep the doors open. Keep the lights on. Keep going.
That plan is hard. It’s expensive. A baby would blow the plan wide open, human dynamite.
I think of Brick’s face on the cot and my hands staying steadier than my heart. He makes me feel…not smaller. Not bigger. Just more like myself. How many people get to have that in their lifetimes?
It terrifies me how quickly I got used to having a person on the other end of the phone who answers when I write the truth in my worst shorthand. It terrifies me more that I don’t know if I’m strong enough to say no to that feeling when the rest of my life asks me to. It terrifies me most that I might not get to choose.
One minute.
My phone buzzes on the counter like it’s been waiting for me to look at it the entire time. I don’t. It buzzes again, insistent as a child tugging a sleeve.
Fifty-five seconds.
I check the message anyway, because I’m weak and want is a muscle that grows every time you let it flex.
Brick. Four texts.
You okay?
Ford says I scared you.
I’m fine. Head’s loud. Shoulder’s mad. Doc says 24 hours.
Tell me where you are. I’ll send lemonade.
I want to respond. I don’t. Not yet.
Thirty seconds.
I watch the countdown and think about next year’s vaccine ordering and the rude note insurance sent last month about “out-of-network considerations.” The way my mother used to say the word “grandchildren” like she was describing her own future plans instead of mine. I think about my father’s hands on a steering wheel the summer he taught me to drive, the way he’d say “make your decision, baby” too gently for how hard that was.
Fifteen seconds.
The night I decided to be a doctor and not a poet or an anthropologist. Every version of me who packed a bag instead ofpacking a crib. The sound Brick’s voice makes when he says my name like it’s a thing he earned.
I hate that I remember all of it at once. It’s like crashing into my own memories in my head. Can’t avoid them. Is this what a panic attack is like?
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
