A Little Hope(55)

“It’s a listening device. Now I can hear Phoebe’s heartbeat whenever I want.” She turns the small white machine over to see if it needs batteries.

“Phoebe. You’re still going with that?” Melinda lifts her eyebrows. “Where’s Davey?”

“At the store.”

“Buying you a ring?”

“Please.” Iris opens the battery compartment, and there are two factory batteries already inside. Jackpot. “The stroller arrived at the baby store, so he borrowed his mom’s SUV to pick it up.” She thinks of Dave leaving that morning. Quiet Dave, with the small ponytail, who broke her rule about men in ponytails. Dave with glasses sometimes. Dave who now kisses Phoebe goodbye, too, bending to smile at Iris’s belly.

Melinda’s high heels click as she walks. Iris knows her mother thinks the apartment should be vacuumed, that the kitchen counters have too much clutter. Whatever. She’s pregnant. She’s in grad school with an internship at the hospital. She does what she can.

Melinda sniffs for a moment. She is always sniffing, ready to point out any smell: dust, garbage, the neighbor’s cat. She is a good-looking woman for sixty, but her style got stuck at some point in the late eighties. For one, her bleached hair is overprocessed. She wears clothes that are too tight, even though she’s in good shape, and today she wears jean leggings and a long-sleeved bodysuit. Dave calls it her Flashdance attire. Iris smiles. Once, in a horrible fight, Iris called Melinda trashy, which she regretted immediately. Melinda’s mascara smeared with tears as she slammed the apartment door. “Go to your father’s uptight wife then! Go see her on rich bitch lane,” Melinda had screamed.

“What are you looking for?” Iris says now.

“Scissors.”

“I can’t have a sticky bun, Mom. Please don’t.”

Melinda opens drawer after drawer, clicking her tongue with each one. She finally rummages through the junk drawer and finds the scissors with the blue handle that barely cut. “Honey, don’t believe everything they tell you. They always go with the worst-case scenario. Baby diabetes. I never heard of such bull.”

“It’s not baby diabetes. It’s gestational diabetes. The baby doesn’t have it. I do, as a side effect of pregnancy. When the baby comes, everything should be fine.”

“Tuh,” she says, and slides the scissors into the bottom of the white box. “So we’ll hear our little girl’s heart with that thing?” she says as she breaks the tape. “Imagine: I didn’t even know what you’d be or what you were doing in there. I just hoped you’d be happy. Just be happy, that’s what I kept whispering.”

“And healthy.”

“Of course healthy.”

“We should be able to hear it. It got good reviews.”

“Here.” Melinda pulls out a sticky bun. The goo from the bottom drips back into the box. The nuts are syrupy and shiny, and the smell demobilizes Iris. Dear. God. She wants to pull it apart. She wants to bite into the sticky soft baked taste. She wants to wash it down with a freezing cold glass of milk. She could shake her mother for doing this to her. “Let me get a little plate.” Melinda prances through the kitchen, holding the sticky bun out in front of her and opening cupboard door after cupboard door with her left hand.

“Mom.”

“Huh?” She finds a stack of saucers and slides one out. She puts the sticky bun on the saucer and licks her fingers.

“I cannot. I can’t have one.”

Melinda puts the plate in front of her and smirks. “Just a bite.”

Iris looks down. She knows exactly how it will taste on her tongue, how her teeth will feel biting into its softness. She hasn’t had any dessert in weeks—since the diagnosis. Since the hospital nutritionist gave her a printout of what her daily meal plan should be: a bowl of Cheerios here, a turkey sandwich on wheat there, a small dish of blueberries before bed. She has thought about a sticky bun—just like this one—every day. But she wants Phoebe to be healthy. It’s more important. Every time she pricks her finger, she worries her numbers will be too high. She knocks the plate to the side. “Stop. Do you know how crazy this is?”

“Honey.” Melinda picks up another sticky bun with her red nails and bites into it. She shakes her head. “You’re missing out.”

Iris stands. She could have one. This morning her sugar was the lowest it’s been since being diagnosed. Back to normal, she could almost say. She goes to the refrigerator and lets ice fall into her glass. She presses the button for water. She watches her mother eat the sticky bun, the glaze around her lips. She hears birds outside and the buzz of a hedge trimmer down below. She comes back to the table and fiddles with the monitor. She slips the headphones on and holds the white wand, rolling it over her belly.

“Let me listen, too,” Melinda says.

“I don’t hear it yet.”

“You’re not a doctor, that’s why.” She taps her fingers and watches Iris. “They shouldn’t even sell those things.”

“I just want to hear her. I like the sound.”

“Don’t you need that jelly to make it work?” Melinda’s nostrils flare as she talks. She clicks over to the sink and grabs a paper towel to wipe her lips.

“It’s not that sophisticated.” Iris holds the wand and keeps sliding it slowly. Piece of junk. She is frustrated, disappointed. She hears nothing but static.