Marie Ferrarella - The Second Time Around

“You,” Jason said.

“Me?” He had completely lost her. “What about me?”

He turned away for a moment, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. Searching for words.

“Look, I don’t want to have to do without you.”

Was that it? He was afraid of losing his maid? Over the years she’d taken a relatively self-sufficient man and gotten him used to having everything done for him.

“I’ll still do everything I’ve always done,” she assured him, trying hard not to let her annoyance show. “Get up, throw up and move on. Your meals will still be made, most likely on time, you—”

“I don’t want to have to do without you,” Jason repeated, saying the words with more feeling. “If something happened to you, I wouldn’t be able to go on.”

For one of the very few times in her life, Laurel found herself truly speechless.

wrote her very first story at age eleven on an old manual Remington typewriter her mother bought for her for seventeen dollars at a pawn shop. The keys stuck and she had to pound on them in order to produce anything. The instruments of production have changed, but she’s been pounding on keys ever since. To date, she’s written over 150 novels, and there appears to be no end in sight. As long as there are keyboards and readers, she intends to go on writing until the day she meets the Big Editor in the Sky.

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Dear Reader,

Considering that I never liked playing with dolls, I was very surprised to discover that I loved being a mother. Loved the whole concept, from diapers to midnight feedings to reading bedtime stories and even to homework-helping at the last possible minute. I was blessed with two children, a girl and then a boy. Sadly, although they’ll always be my children, they are not little people anymore. They grew up (it was the daily watering that did it). I miss little fingers wrapped around mine, miss little bottoms nestled on my lap (my dog still sits on my lap, but it’s not the same).

And I have to admit, if it wouldn’t send my husband into something akin to anaphylactic shock, I would love to have another baby, even though both my kids have graduated college. I know a lot more now (or so I tell myself) and I would be a much more self-assured mother than the one who called the hospital hotline in a panic at two in the morning because her one-year-old was coughing.

But since I can’t have another short person of my own, I decided it might be fun to write a story about a couple who thought they had the rest of their lives completely planned and knew what was coming around every corner—only to find themselves pregnant. It’s not as upsetting a situation as you might think. After all, they don’t call it the miracle of birth for nothing.

As always, I wish you love and I thank you for reading.

Marie Ferrarella

To Dr. Anne Lai, for helping Rocky

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

If there was anything she looked forward to less than her annual visit to her gynecologist, Laurel Mitchell didn’t know what it was.

It wasn’t that her doctor was heavy-handed with the examination or made her uncomfortable. On the contrary, Dr. Rachel Kilpatrick, the same doctor who had seen her through all three of pregnancies, had a gentle touch and a fantastic bedside manner. And she was a kind, understanding woman to boot, someone she could talk to about anything that bothered her. Rachel Kilpatrick was not the kind of doctor who just roller-skated by, taking pulses and collecting fees. She genuinely cared for her patients.

No, it wasn’t Dr. Kilpatrick that she minded. What she found upsetting was the whole awful experience: sitting there in a cool room, wearing a vest that was made out of thin tissue paper with what could have passed as an extralarge paper towel draped around her lower torso. That was what she found so off-putting.

That and the stirrups.

Whose idea were they, anyway? Necessary or not, they made her think of something two steps removed from a torture rack from the Spanish Inquisition.

But she endured it all like a good little soldier. Because that was what women were supposed to do once a year: troop in, strip down and lie there, thinking of other things while cold steel instruments were inserted in places women of her grandmother’s generation never talked about.

Finally the probing and the scratching were over. Dr. Kilpatrick removed the instruments and put the prize she’d secured between two glass lab slides, then placed that on the side counter. Laurel lost no time in dismounting from the stirrups and sitting up. She tried her best to pull her dignity to her and ignore the goose bumps forming on her flesh from the room’s cold temperature.

When she raised her eyes to Dr. Kilpatrick’s face, she saw that her gynecologist was frowning.

Not a good sign, Laurel thought. The queasiness in her stomach increased, reminding her that the cereal she’d had for breakfast was not resting well. But then lately, very little had. She chalked it up to stress and told herself it would pass.

Dr. Kilpatrick pushed the stool she’d been sitting on back into the corner. She held Laurel’s file against her chest and moved closer to the examination table, and to Laurel.

Her eyes were kind as she asked, “How have you been feeling lately, Laurel?”

Laurel bit back a flippant answer. Whenever she was nervous, she tended to make jokes, a habit that drove her husband, Jason, and her sons, crazy. This time, she shrugged.

“Okay, I guess. A little run-down but that’s to be expected. I’m not twenty anymore.” Her suspicions began to multiply, conjuring up awful images. Her neighbor, Alexis Curtis, had been feeling run-down and she was diagnosed with cancer. The chemo treatments had made her chestnut hair fall out.

Laurel sat up straighter, drawing her shoulders back. “Why? Is something wrong? Tell me if something’s wrong,” she requested, hoping that wasn’t a tremor she heard in her voice. “I can take it.” She scrutinized her doctor’s face, trying to uncover what the woman was thinking.