(Photo credit: @agsttne)
The road from Bozeman to Fargo is flat and lifeless. Rudy is determined to get the long drive behind them. He pushes the speed limit, rushing past the dreary blur of empty plains.
Helen drinks some water. “Honey? I’m not feeling very well. I need to get out of this car for a while.”
Another stop. Damn. He knows that making the drive in one day was optimistic, with Helen in her second trimester. Damn anyway. Rudy hasn’t seen a town for at least 50 miles, maybe more. “We’ll look for somewhere to stop, then. What a wasteland.”
He glances over at Helen. Her face looks pale and ill in the cold November light. Her pregnancy has been rough. Rudy would snap his fingers to get it over with if he could.
He thinks of his grandmother’s admonition, as he sat by her bedside in her last days, back in September. Her gray-blue eyes lit up a little when he told her about the baby. She spoke in a whisper. “Savor it. Every little bit. Or you may wish it all away.”
He wonders if perhaps she was making an underhanded reference to his brother Todd, who wouldn’t change a diaper if his life depended on it. Never gets home in time to say goodnight to his kids. And his famous line is, “I will get to know the kids when I can have an adult conversation with them.”
Rudy admits quietly to himself that Todd’s approach makes sense. All they do when they’re little is eat, shit, cry and sleep, right?
Finally, with night coming on, he sees signs for a small town. “Look Helen, there’s a town called Reality. How about that?” As they slow to the town’s speed limit, they see that the shops are closed and dark, perhaps due to the Thanksgiving holiday. He pulls into the parking lot of the only open diner.
Helen climbs out of her seat, visibly stiff from the long drive, and holding her belly. “Thank God. I think I have bed sores.” Rudy notices for the first time how much her belly protrudes, and is shocked to think how quickly he’ll have a son.
Inside, the diner is dim. An elderly couple emerges from the kitchen. The old woman walks bent over, clearly in the advanced stages of osteoporosis. The wizened old man has craggy lines etched across his face, like an ancient rock creature, and he uses a walker.
The man gestures toward a booth. “Welcome to Reality. Please, have a seat. Gladys will bring you menus.” He walks slowly back to the kitchen, thumping his walker.
Gladys, bent and looking sideways like an odd bird, shuffles to their booth with menus and a small candle in a red glass jar. It casts a blood-red spherical glow onto the table top.
“Sure is quiet in this town,” Rudy says.
Gladys sucks something from a back tooth, and squints at him. “It’s a dead town. All the kids are grown up and gone.” She shuffles back to the kitchen.
Helen peruses the menu, but glances up. “That’s sad. About the town. How do they even keep a restaurant like this open?” She looks back at the menu. “Typical diner food.”
When Gladys returns with a pad and pen, Rudy orders the beef stew. Helen orders the turkey dinner.
“You might like the peach cobbler,” Gladys says. She watches Helen’s stomach as if the baby is growing right before her eyes. And indeed, with Helen sitting, she does appear to be much further along. Her stomach bumps the table.
“We’ll see if I have room after turkey and mashed potatoes.”
But Helen finds she does not have room, and cannot even finish her dinner. “Shoot, I was hoping for that cobbler. This baby is squeezing out my stomach.”
Helen props herself against the counter as they pay the old man for their meal. “Would you mind telling us if there is an open hotel here in town?”
The old man grimaces darkly. “You best get on out of town.”
“I think we need to stay here tonight,” Helen says. “I feel so full and just so… tired.” She is holding her belly again.
Rudy wants nothing more than to get this trip over with. But for what? Just to get to his parents’ house in Fargo, where he will wish the Thanksgiving weekend was over with so they can make the painful drive back.
“My wife is very tired. Please tell us how to find a hotel.”
The man rubs his grizzled face. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
“Excuse me?”
The man’s voice is ominous now, a warning. “That baby is coming tonight. Before dawn. Get yourselves to Fargo, lest I should deliver it for ya.”
“Honey?” Helen looks at Rudy with fear in her eyes. “What is happening?” Her belly is immense now, her maternity dress stretched to the ripping point.
“I don’t know,” Rudy says. “But he’s right. We should go.”
In the car, Helen moves the seat back to give her belly more room. They drive east out of town just as the labor pangs begin.
“Oh!” Helen grips her belly. Rudy tries to count the intervals, but in moments, the labor pains are coming hard and fast. Helen pants and wheezes.
Rudy has no idea what to do. Deliver a baby in the middle of nowhere? To his surprise, they crest a small hill and see the lights of Fargo splayed out before them, a pink tinge in the pre-dawn sky. The night and the miles have passed in some crazy time warp.
At the hospital, things happen quickly. There is no time for an epidural. “We call this rodeo labor,” the nurse says as their baby boy emerges, amid Helen’s wails.
But then all goes silent. And then Rudy is holding his son in his arms. His beautiful son.
The nurse is smiling. “Your baby is perfectly healthy. Cherish him. They grow up so quickly.”
Thank you for reading! This short story is an entry in @gmuxx’s art prompt contest #7.
