Read Online The Midwife by Jolina Petersheim - Free Book Online

about it. You said the ultrasound machine’s in Cookeville?”
    She nods.
    “That’s on the way to Split Rock Community. Perhaps he can pick it up on a produce run.”
    “So   —we’re going to get electricity?” Alice doesn’t look at me, but picks at the venison roast.
    “I never said that.”
    She stands again, this time to take her plate to the kitchen. The antagonist in me cannot keep from saying to her retreating back, “I noticed Uriah’s been spending too much time with Lydie Risser. When he comes home, I’d appreciate if you’d speak to him about it.”
    Alice stops walking but does not turn. “He’s almost eighteen, Rhoda. I don’t have that kind of say over him anymore.”
    “Then perhaps he should move out from beneath this roof.”
    Alice clutches the swinging door that leads into the kitchen. She looks back at me and sighs, “Is this really about Uriah?”
    “I don’t know.” I scan Alice’s face, trying to shift the attention away from me so I can conceal the jealousy I have always felt about her close relationship with her son. “Is there something else you’d like to talk about?”
    Alice shakes her head. Kapp strings swat her softly in the face. She passes through the door. I watch the darkness of the kitchen swallow her whole before I turn and make my defeated way up the stairs. I yearn to open my heart to Alice and to Looper, and to this sheaf of hurting girls tucked in bunk beds beneath this roof. But I can’t. My eyes have tainted love until my mind views it as synonymous with pain. From the day my mother left until the day my second child was taken, I have used anger and inhibition to ward off anybody who might try to love me   —just to find out that I am wanting, and then leave.
Beth, 1996
    Pressure stretched across my abdomen in a thin, taut band. When it snapped, I knew this was not Braxton Hicks or merely my round abdominal muscles trying to accommodate the expansion of my womb but a tidal-wave contraction threatening to pull me under. Letting the bowl float down into the water, I wiped the suds on the towel foldedover the spigot. Straightening my back, I breathed out through my mouth, trying not to panic. I walked over to the chairs circled around the kitchen table, dragged one across the linoleum, and sat down.
    I was only at seventeen weeks. I had just started to feel the tiny fluttering kicks of the baby. Besides the bimonthly checkups, I rarely allowed myself to think about this new life cradled inside my womb. For ten minutes, I remained seated on the chair. I watched the clock embedded in the stove, as I had taken my watch off to do the breakfast dishes. When another contraction struck at eight fifteen, I folded my curved stomach over my legs and touched my forehead to my knees in desperate supplication. I cried out for my roommate, Jillian, although I knew she was gone. I cried out for our neighbors   —for anyone   —but the small apartment just echoed with my own high-pitched keen of fear.
    Sweating and nauseous, I stumbled into the living room with the beige walls and forest-green curtains that, in the ten years since the renovation, the sun had leeched to a dingy moss. I dug past the jumble of textbooks and paperback novels stacked under the coffee table and pulled my wallet out of my purse. I searched through the card section for the slip of paper Thom had given to me the day we heard the baby’s heartbeat. Another band of pressure pulled across my abdomen. I returned to the kitchen and sat on the pine chair again. But then I stood   —rocking back and forth, side to side   —gouging my nails into the back of the chair and swearing beneath my breath as if afraid someone could overhear.
    Hunching over, I staggered toward the TV stand and dialed the numbers on the old rotary telephone. It rang three times before he picked up. “Thom,” I said. The m of his name was drawn out as another contraction hit.
    A clipped female voice said, “This is not