Seven Minutes to Noon

since Friday. Dr. Matteo listened gravely.
    “Yes, I heard about that, but I didn’t know the woman was your friend. I’m sorry.”
    “Lauren was my sister.” Alice began to cry. “Like a real sister.”
    Dr. Matteo scrawled a prescription, tore it off the pad and handed it to Alice.
    “You take this tonight and get into bed. Let’s start by sleeping; then we’ll see about the nausea.”
    “Sleeping pills?” Alice looked at the doctor’s black scribble on the small white page. “Is this safe?”
    “Perfectly safe. It’s very mild. It’ll make you and your babies sleepy, that’s all. But for you, Alice, it could make all the difference.”
    As Alice’s eyes focused, elements of the scribble became decipherable. The doctor was right; she was deliriousand had to sleep. She would take just one pill, she decided, then put them aside unless she really needed them again.
    Dr. Matteo tucked Alice’s file folder under her arm. “Alice, your job is to rest. Mike, you’re on duty tonight, dinner, kids, everything.”
    “Aye, aye, Captain.” Mike took the prescription out of Alice’s hand, folding it with a sharp edge down the middle and slipping it into his T-shirt pocket. Beneath the stripe of grease on his forearm, Alice now noticed a thick, pulsing vein.
    “My mother’s coming today.” Alice struggled to sitting and pulled the paper gown closed over her swollen middle. “She loves to take over.”
    “Now would be a good time to let her.” Dr. Matteo leaned forward and placed a hand on Alice’s belly. “Maybe you can’t hear this right now, Alice, but I’ll say it anyway. Dealing with grief when you’re pregnant is a terrible thing. But please, let’s see if you can find a way.”
    Alice and Mike left the hospital arm in arm, he detaching to open every door for her, she thanking him quietly each time. But beneath his gallantry and her appreciation of it, a silence loomed between them. They had always been good — too good — at politely avoiding tension, keeping it to themselves until its elements had formed into digestible nuggets. They held their silence on the drive home, until Mike suddenly veered the pickup around a pothole, startling Alice.
    She looked at him, his sharp profile edged in sunlight as the pickup passed from under a shade tree. “How are you feeling, Mike?”
    “Fine.”
    “No, I mean feeling, about Lauren. Not ‘do you have a cold.’”
    His response was strange, she thought: sad eyes, a self-deprecating shrug of his shoulders as he steered them onto Court Street. “Kind of numb, I guess,” he finally said. “I don’t know what to feel. I mean, it’s kind of terrifying, Alice, isn’t it?”
    “Kind of?”
    He turned left down Union Street and stopped at a red light. Looked at her. In the harsh noon sunlight that poured through the windshield, his skin looked rich and imperfect as handmade paper. Raw, without color. He hadn’t shaved that morning.
    “Are you going back to work today?” she asked him.
    “I don’t think so,” he said, glancing at the back of the truck with its load of oak.
    “You just picked that up?”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    But she knew his deadline for the furniture show was looming; she knew how much it meant to him to do well there.
    “Go,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Mom’s on her way.”
    “No, Alice, I don’t want to leave you alone.” He turned onto President Street and found a parking spot on their block.
    “I’m okay. I’ll rest until she gets here.”
    In his moment of hesitation, she knew she was giving him what he wanted: to be alone with his inchoate sadness.
    “You sure?”
    “I think it’s better if you work.”
    He took a long breath. “Maybe just for an hour or so. I could deliver the wood, and Diego could get started on the table.”
    She kissed him good-bye and got out of the pickup. Walking along the sidewalk, up their front stoop, she could feel him impatiently waiting for the click of the front door. She turned and waved to him. He waved back. As soon as the door closed behind her, she heard the truck drive away.
    She went straight to the bedroom and lay down in the quiet early afternoon, waiting for time to pass, grateful to have been forgiven by blind luck for causing an accident that could have cost her and others so much. She lay there, wishing Mike had chosen to come inside with her, but glad she hadn’t made him. She lay there, missingLauren and realizing it was an ache that would not