“Then it’s not a bad lot. That happens sometimes. A tainted batch of vaccines goes out, affecting a whole group of children. Four years is too long a span, however.” He clicks his pen. “The Minnesota Department of Health is sending a medical crew through the state. Their primary aim is to collect blood samples in each community, but they’re recording disease immunity, too. You may want to mention the scar you share with the father of your child.”

I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less, other than this exam. “Thanks for the recommendation. I do have to be at work, though, so if you don’t mind.”

Dr. Krause’s eyes narrow behind his glasses. I shrink from his anger as the nurse did. “How many hours are you working?”

“Not many,” I say truthfully. Dennis requested that I phone the Gazette offices before noon every weekday to find out if there’s more articles for me to write or more information on Paulie. There hadn’t been either. The good news is that Dennis approved of my first piece, though he’d changed the title to “Lilydale K–4 Music Program Is a Hit.”

He also let me keep my byline.

“That’s fine if it’s not more than ten hours a week,” Dr. Krause says, picking his clipboard back up. “You want to avoid exertion, particularly in the third trimester.”

I ask, because Deck wants me to, “What about drinking alcohol?”

“Forbidden.”

That sets me back on my heels. I hadn’t wanted to drink, but now that I learn I’m not allowed, I’ve never desired anything more. “Not even one cocktail on special occasions?”

“No alcohol.”

“In public, at least.” I say this as if I’m joking, but the cottony sensation in my throat tells me there’s something at stake here, the same thing that made me stand up to the bartender at Little John’s. That if I walk out of this office without asserting myself, I will have walked past a piece of me that I can never return to.

Dr. Krause gets that eye-narrowing look again and scratches something at the bottom of my chart. “Nowhere. Forbidden. You’re welcome to smoke, but no more than four cigarettes per day. I’ll prescribe Valium if you require more to calm your nerves.”

“What?” My mother had taken Valium. I’d seen it in the medicine cabinet. “Won’t that hurt the baby?”

“No. It also won’t hinder your milk production, which is crucial the first week of the baby’s life. You intend to breastfeed?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Nothing to think about, at least that first week. After that, you can switch to formula.”

It’s a command, not a suggestion. I have never felt more insignificant in my life. I’m not a breeder cow, I whined to Ursula in the Dayton’s Sky Room back when I lived in a world where women had choices. But did we? I’d been glossed over for the promotion at the Star, attacked on the streets. Maybe my sense of control has always been an illusion.

“Yes, sir,” I say, hanging my head.

“I’ll see you in four weeks.”

“What?” My heartbeat picks up. On the one hand, that sounds like a reprieve. No examination! On the other, is it best for the baby to leave without the doctor taking so much as a cursory glance inside? “You haven’t . . . looked at me.”

“It’s not necessary,” he says, setting down the clipboard and picking up a prescription pad. “My nurse will request your records from your examining physician in Minneapolis, and that will be enough for now. If there are any changes in your condition, come back immediately. Otherwise, four weeks.”

“Thank you.” Now it’s just relief. I don’t have to let this unfamiliar man put his fingers inside me.

“Of course. Is there anything else?”

“No.”

He scribbles on the pad, rips off the prescription, and hands it to me. “You can get this filled at the Ben Franklin. Good day.”

Once he leaves, I dress, folding the gown and resting it neatly on the edge of the examination table. The prescription is written in a crisp cursive, five milligrams of diazepam, take as needed, three refills. I insert it into an inner purse pocket and am about to exit the room when I notice Dr. Krause has left my chart behind.

I hesitate. It isn’t meant for my eyes. They’re his private notes.

But they’re about me.

I grab the clipboard.

It’s my writing on the top half—name: Joan Elizabeth Harken. Birth date: July 4, 1940 (you came out with a bang! my mom would joke around Independence Day every year). Address: 325 West Mill Street, Lilydale, MN. Employer: Lilydale Gazette. Reason for visit: five months pregnant.

The bottom half is Dr. Krause’s penmanship.

Patient is uncooperative. Possible risk.

CHAPTER 21

“Joan! Wait up.”

Someone is repeating my name as I stumble down the street, but it sounds distant, muddy lumps ricocheting off the cold, wet walls of a deep well.

Uncooperative. Possible risk.

I suddenly crave my own mother so badly that my chest seizes. She was impossibly frail at the end, the canvas of who she had been stretched across brittle bones, hardly recognizable. The cancer took her quickly, start to finish four months. I moved home with her, worked during the day to pay both our bills, and spent every evening and weekend with her. Rubbing her arms. Brushing her hair. Reading to her.

“Remember the good when I’m gone, Joan,” she’d said to me one of those final endless, too-short days.

I’d startled. I thought she’d been sleeping. This was in her last week, when she spent most of her time unaware. It was better, except when the coughs wrecked her, waking her, and it’d take longer and longer for her to remember where she was.

But this time, she’d been awake. Watching me.

Her gaze was gentle, cloudy.

“Mom.” I reached for water and held it to her. “How are you?”

Her eyes traveled to the pack of cigarettes at her nightstand. She’d stopped smoking a year earlier, before the cancer was diagnosed. Now that it was consuming her bit by bit, she insisted on the cigarettes always being nearby.

I want to curse those damn things every remaining day of my life.

“Dying,” she said, but there was a spark in her eyes. “You?”

The barest smile creased my cheeks. “Fine. Work was fine.”

“You get your byline yet?”

“No, but I will, Momma.”

“I know you will.” She closed her eyes. I set the water down, thinking she was falling back asleep, but then her lids snapped open. “I want you to remember the good things.”

I didn’t tell her she’d already said that. “I know, Momma.”

“The traveling. All the places we got to explore together. How I kept you safe. Remember that.”

I stroked her thin hair, a by-product of her medication, the one vanity she’d allowed herself now more gray than red. We really had had grand times, been everything to one another. When I got offered a scholarship to the University of Minnesota, she moved to live near me.

I met Ursula and Libby there.

All that moving meant I wasn’t particularly good at making friends, but I wanted to so bad. I stopped spending time with Mom, except for the occasional dinners and phone calls. I landed temp and secretarial jobs when I graduated with my journalism degree, but then I got hired at the Minneapolis Star when I was twenty-five—my dream job. They had me working in the women’s section, but I was going to claw my way up, I knew it, and I was always looking for my big break even though I felt dirty having that much ambition. I tried to hide it, but I think I failed. A lot. I was bad at being a person, but Mom was always steady, and I’d been ignoring her, acting like she wasn’t everything to me.