Lymber craft's Arc

Chapter 10 of 70

A few months passed. Paul stayed in the guest room across the hall. He drove Lymber to every appointment in the borrowed truck, and Polly rode in the back seat with a notebook on her lap. The twenty-week scan sat on the calendar in red pen. Lymber had stopped counting shares on the old post. Her stomach had a shape now she could not hide under a sweater. She wanted a name to attach to the shape. She wanted to walk out of the clinic knowing one more thing that no one online could take from her. The tech pressed the wand into the gel and turned the screen toward the bed. Lymber saw a spine, a hand, a foot pushed up under a rib. The tech moved the wand lower and held it there. She said it was a girl. Paul leaned forward in the chair and put his hand flat on the sheet next to Lymber's arm. He said hi to the screen. Then he bent down close to Lymber's stomach and said he was sorry it took him so long. He did not say anything after that. Polly wrote the date and the word girl in her notebook and closed it. She said, well. She said Lymber would need to pick a name before the drive home or she would pick one herself. Lymber laughed once, wet, and said Violetta. Polly wrote that down too. In the truck Paul kept both hands on the wheel and kept looking over at Lymber's stomach at the stop signs. Polly sat in the back and scrolled her phone. She said the town would find out the sex by Monday whether they posted it or not, so they might as well post it themselves and keep the story theirs. Lymber nodded. She opened her phone and typed the name into a draft. Violetta. She did not hit post yet. She set the phone face down on her thigh and put her hand on the curve under her seatbelt. The baby was a girl. The baby had a name. The crown was still on the shelf in her room, and the due date was still wrong on paper, and a girl she did not know yet was going to arrive in the spring with her face on the internet before she could speak. Lymber decided she would learn how to be someone's mother the way Polly had learned, without saying so out loud.