“It’s much more convenient. Really,” she argued convincingly. “I can catalogue goods as they come in, check them against the manufacturers’ invoices and inspect them before they’re ever sent to their departments.”
“But, Kathleen,” he protested, “we have subordinate employees who do all that.”
“I know. They can help. But I like to do most of it myself, or at least supervise.” In the end, she got her way.
The first week of October was upon them and she was anticipating the trip to New York scheduled for the end of the month. She was unloading a box of evening gowns, hanging them on hangers to be steamed before consignment to the after-five department, when a wave of dizziness assailed her.
For a moment, she gripped the edge of a nearby table and shut her eyes, hanging her head in an effort to supply it with the needed blood. Finally, she straightened up slowly and took a deep breath.
The girl operating the hissing steam machine had noticed. “Kathleen? Are you okay? You look like you’re about to faint.”
“N—No. I’m fine. Just a little dizzy. I think I may need to start eating a bigger breakfast.” Sometimes she became so involved with her work that she delayed lunch or forgot it altogether, so that toward the end of the day she was shaky with weakness. The problem was that she had never been a big breakfast eater, and lately, the last thing she wanted in the morning was food.
Only this morning when she was brushing her teeth, the flavor of the toothpaste nauseated her to the point of gagging. Besides the morning queasiness, an annoying indigestion had plagued her evenings. Each afternoon, it seemed that her stomach enlarged, crowding her lungs and making her feel stuffed when she was really hungry.
Kathleen hadn’t put all these symptoms together until they persisted and had now developed a pattern that couldn’t be ignored. Almost blacking out at work for the third time in one week brought them to the forefront. For the rest of the day, she took things easy and went to bed as soon as she got home, determined to feel better by the time she woke up the next morning. But the moment she opened her eyes, she knew she wasn’t well.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she had murmured to herself as she stared down perplexedly at the meter on her scale, which indicated she had lost another two pounds. Then her eyes glazed as she looked at her ten polished toenails and they multiplied to twenty before her blurred eyes. Slowly, her eyes traveled over the bathroom fixtures until she was looking at her own pale face in the mirror over the small sink. “No,” she mouthed. “No, it can’t be.”
Instinctively, she placed her hands on her abdomen and felt only the flat, taut muscles that were usually there. But she knew that something was vastly different. It was no longer supple, but turgid. She had thought her swollen, tender breasts were harbingers of her long-overdue period.
Her period! When had she last had one? June? July? Yes, the first of July. She remembered that she was having one during the Fourth of July celebration at Mountain View.
And Erik had arrived a week later. The middle of July. And she hadn’t had a period since then. She had attributed its absence to the emotional turmoil she’d been through.
She looked at herself in the mirror and raised a frantic hand to smother the small scream she felt on her lips. Then she forced out a laugh that sounded hollow even to her own ears. “You’re being silly, Kathleen Haley. Hysterically jumping to the wrong conclusion. Things like this don’t happen to grown-up women like you. They just don’t. It’s something else. Besides, everyone knows that you gain weight when you’re—It’s something else.”
But it wasn’t.
She telephoned a gynecologist she found in the Yellow Pages, not wanting to ask for a recommendation from one of the ladies she worked with for fear of stirring up curiosity. Luckily, the doctor had an appointment open the next day at noon. She took it, glad that she could go on her lunch hour and be back in the office for the rest of the day.
The next thirty hours were the longest Kathleen had ever spent, with the possible exception of the long hours she had sat waiting in the hospital emergency room in Arkansas.
Almost in defiance of her upset stomach, she ate a huge dinner that night at a Chinese restaurant that had been praised as one of the best on Grant Avenue. It was a stupid thing to do. Because of the volume of food, one should never go to a Chinese restaurant alone. But she cleaned the silver serving dishes they brought her after eating all of the wonton soup and two egg rolls as an appetizer.
Feeling that she had proven her worst suspicion was just that, she drove home. But her confidence was short-lived when she raced to the bathroom the moment she opened the front door and emptied her full stomach with violent spasms. Depleted and sick with worry, she went straight to bed, already dreading to hear the doctor’s verdict.
Lunch hour finally came, and she took her car out of the garage and drove straight to the doctor’s office only a few blocks away. She hadn’t eaten since her bout with nausea, and her hands were trembling as she gripped the wheel.
She walked into the comfortable office in the high-rise medical building, introduced herself to the nurse behind the glass window and then sat down to fill out the forms required of all new patients. When that was done, she returned them to the nurse, who said, “Thank you, Ms. Haley. We’ll send for your records in Atlanta soon. Now, if you’ll have a seat, the doctor will be with you shortly.”
It was another nurse who opened the door and called her name. Kathleen jumped in startled reaction. She had been watching a young woman with a very active toddler sitting in her lap. The mother was trying to read a Raggedy Andy book to the restless little boy, but he was more interested in terrorizing the gold fish in the aquarium.
Kathleen followed the nurse down the hallway and went into the room with a large red “2” stenciled on the door. “Are you having any problems, Ms. Haley? Or is this a routine checkup?”
“I think…” She bit her lip. “No, a routine checkup.” As ludicrous as it was, she thought it better not to bring up the subject of pregnancy. It was a childish game—to deny what one didn’t want to believe.
The nurse made a notation on the chart in the folder. “Why don’t you undress, and then we’ll do all the preliminaries before the doctor comes in. There is a drape in the cubicle.”
Kathleen went into the small enclosure, undressed and pulled the square of printed cotton over her head. It barely covered her hips. “Charming,” she muttered as she stepped from behind the curtain.
“Let’s weigh you first,” the nurse instructed her. When that was done and her weight duly noted on the chart, the nurse took Kathleen’s blood pressure and a sample of blood out of her pricked middle finger. Her hands were so slippery with perspiration that the nurse teased her about being nervous and commissioned her to relax. Kathleen smiled weakly.
“Are your periods regular?” the nurse asked as she leaned over the chart.
“Yes.”
“Your last menses?”