My left knee had been clicking like a loose gate latch for three weeks, so I finally drove the truck down to the county clinic on Elm Street just to get some grease in the joint.
The waiting room smelled like stale floor wax and seventy years of old copies of Field and Stream left on the radiator.
Doctor Miller had retired back in October, which left the practice in the hands of whatever young fellow the board managed to hire straight out of Charleston with a clean tie and a brand-new stethoscope.
His nameplate on examination room four said Doctor Hayes, and he looked about twenty-four years old, with hair parted so sharp you could have cut salt pork with it.
I sat on the paper-covered table with my purse clutched in my lap, waiting for him to poke my knee and hand me a prescription for some anti-inflammatory pills that would tear up my stomach lining.
Instead, he stood by the sink washing his hands for a full minute, humming some tune I couldn’t place, before he turned around with a little plastic pen tapping against his metal clipboard.
“Mrs. Selly, let us go over these recent lab results before we look at the joint,” he said, and his voice sounded entirely too cheerful for a Tuesday morning in a drafty clinic.
I told him my knee was the only thing giving me trouble, but he just shook his head and tapped the paper twice.
“Well, your knee is the least of our concerns right now, given what these markers are telling us,” he said, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses so he could squint at the bottom corner of the sheet.
I figured my cholesterol had finally caught up with me after forty years of frying bacon in lard, so I just waited for him to lecture me about butter.
“You are looking at a complete lifestyle change starting today, because your body is going through some remarkable shifts,” he said, and he didn’t even look up from the page to see how I was taking it.
“Just give me the pill for my knee, son, and let me get back to my garden before the sun gets too high,” I said, shifting my weight on that crinkly paper.
“Pills won’t help what is happening here, not when you are sharing your bloodstream with another person,” he said, and he finally looked up with a wide, proud grin like he had just solved the mysteries of the universe.
I sat there for three full seconds while my brain tried to translate what his mouth had just formed.
“What did you just say to me?” I asked, and the room felt suddenly very small and very hot.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Selly, you are about six weeks along,” he said, tapping the clipboard one more time as if I needed physical confirmation of my own funeral.
I didn’t answer him, because my lungs stopped working right then and there.
Sixty-five years old, a widow since the Bush administration, with two grown children living in Columbia and four grandchildren who call me on Sundays like clockwork, and this boy in a clean white coat was telling me I was expecting.
My husband Arthur has been buried out behind the Baptist church since 2011, and unless the good Lord decided to run a modern-day miracle through a retired seamstress in York County, Doctor Hayes had completely lost his mind.
I stood up off that paper table so fast the metal frame screeched against the linoleum floor.
“You have got your head screwed on backward,” I yelled, and I shoved past him before he could even lift his pen to defend himself.
I wrenched the examination room door open with enough force to bang the brass handle right into the drywall.
“Are you out of your absolute cotton-picking mind?” I screamed, taking off down the narrow hallway toward the front desk.
My boots hammered against the floor tiles, and I didn’t care who heard me, because the whole world had tilted sideways in those four minutes.
The nurses behind the glass partition jumped up like they had been stung by yellowjackets, knocking over a stack of yellow intake folders that scattered across the counter.
“Mrs. Selly, what on earth is going on?” someone shouted from the records room, but I didn’t stop running until a heavy hand caught me by the elbow near the water fountain.
It was Doctor Vance, who had delivered half the county and known my family since my oldest boy was born with a head full of red hair.
He had gray hair curling out of his collar and spectacles hanging off the end of his nose by a black cord, and he looked at me like I was a runaway heifer that had gotten out through the barbed wire.
“Eleanor, stop running before you break a hip, what’s gotten into you?” he asked, holding onto my arm just tight enough to keep me from bolting out the front glass doors.
I could barely catch my breath, and my chest felt like someone had cinched a harness around my ribs two holes too tight.
“That boy in room four just told me I’m pregnant,” I gasped, pointing a shaking finger back down the corridor where the new doctor was probably still tapping his clipboard.
Doctor Vance stared at me for a second, his mouth opening just a fraction, before he let out a long, wheezing sigh that sounded like an old tractor dying in a dry field.
“He told you what?” Doctor Vance asked, his voice dropping an octave as the color started rising up the back of his neck.
“You heard me, he sat right there and told me I’m six weeks along and need to change my lifestyle,” I said, my voice shaking so hard the words tumbled over each other.
Doctor Vance looked down the hall toward room four, and I saw his jaw muscles knot up tight enough to crack a walnut.
“You sit right down in that vinyl chair by the window and don’t you move an inch until I get back,” he told me, pointing a thick finger at the waiting area.
He didn’t wait for me to answer, and he didn’t walk either, because he marched down that linoleum hallway with heavy, purposeful strides that made his white coat flare out behind him like a turkey’s tail feathers.
I sank down into the green vinyl chair, pressing my palms against my knees to stop the trembling that had started in my wrists.
Down the hall, a door swung open and shut with a sharp click.
Doctor Vance didn’t bother knocking, and I could hear his boots squeaking on the floor all the way from where I sat by the radiator.
“What in the name of God is the matter with you?” Doctor Vance’s voice boomed down the corridor, rattling the framed posters of the food pyramid on the walls.
“Excuse me?” the new doctor said, sounding all high and mighty through the open transom.
“Mrs. Selly is sixty-five years old, she has two grown children and several grandchildren, and you told her she was pregnant?” Doctor Vance yelled so loud the front desk receptionist winced and covered her ears with both hands.
I leaned forward in the vinyl chair, straining to catch every word through the heavy oak door.
Doctor Hayes didn’t sound scared, which made me want to go back down there and shake him until his teeth rattled.
“Well, her chart was right here on the counter,” the new doctor started to explain, his voice dripping with that smooth college arrogance.
“Her chart is on the bottom shelf where the elderly care files go, and you were supposed to be reviewing the morning intake for the twenty-year-olds from the college annex,” Doctor Vance cut him off, and the sound of paper rustling came through the transom.
Doctor Hayes didn’t lose his rhythm one bit, and he kept right on writing with that little plastic pen of his as if he had just diagnosed a common head cold.
“Does she still have hiccups?” the new doctor asked, and his voice didn’t have a single ounce of shame in it.
I sat there in the green chair, staring at the scuff mark on my left boot where I had kicked the examination table leg.
Doctor Vance let out a sound like a wet log hitting the dirt, half a groan and half a curse that you wouldn’t say in front of a preacher.
“What on earth does her diaphragm spasms have to do with telling a grandmother she’s expecting a baby?” Doctor Vance shouted back, and I heard him slam his hand down on the metal filing cabinet.
“Well, she came in complaining about her stomach jumping, so I looked up the wrong patient profile on the terminal,” the boy said, still scratching away with his pen.
I didn’t wait to hear Doctor Vance read him the riot act any further, because I stood up and smoothed down the front of my floral blouse.
The waiting room was dead quiet now, with the two ladies in the corner chairs staring at their laps as if they were reading a church bulletin.
I walked back down the hall toward room four, my boots making a slow, heavy rhythm against the floor that sounded entirely too much like my late husband’s walk when he was mad about the tractor transmission.
Doctor Vance was standing in the doorway with his face as red as a ripe tomato, shaking his head while the new doctor just kept his eyes glued to his paperwork like nothing in the world had happened.
“Eleanor, I am so sorry about this nonsense, we’ll get your knee looked at right now by someone who can read a screen,” Doctor Vance said, holding his hand up like a traffic cop as I reached the threshold.
I looked right past him at the young fellow behind the desk who had nearly cost me sixty years of peace and quiet.
“Next time you decide to check a woman for hiccups, son, you might want to make sure she’s not old enough to be your grandmother,” I said, and I didn’t raise my voice even a little bit.
Doctor Hayes finally stopped scratching with his pen, but he didn’t look up from his clipboard, and the silence in that little room felt heavier than forty bushels of wet corn.
I turned around and walked back out to the truck without looking back once.
