Freedom of Choyce
“Somethin’ cold to drink, Woodrow. I couldn’t eat nothin’ and I’m not stirrin’ out of this seat again ‘til we get to Dublin. Is your Aunt Millie’s place far from th’ bus stop?”
“Honeybun, this ain’t you,” Woodrow had said, as he climbed over her pregnant form at the last rest stop on the turnpike.
By the time they did arrive at the new bus terminal beside the middle school, Honeybun’s ankles had swollen to the point that Woodrow had to help her to back, immense and barefoot, down the steps of the bus. Her belly seemed to have slid down somehow with the long, vibrating ride, so neither of them had eyes for the shouting mob which had closed the channel behind the arrival of their bus. Honeybun turned when her feet touched the warm asphalt and clutched behind at the metal handrail on the folding door of the bus. With a small cry, she swayed.
“Woodrow, it’s started,” she shouted into the din.
“What’ll I do?” asked Woodrow, his bristly jowls shaking.
“Get me to that bench,” Honeybun said, her voice reduced to a grunt this time. She staggered as she reached for his arm.
There were people everywhere, but none who looked available to help with their problem. Woodrow used his height to scan over the parking lot, which, he suddenly understood, was the staging ground of what a banner described as
**Dublin ~ Dublin ~ LABOR DAY ~Dublin ~ Dublin ~ **
**PARADE**
The parade was a paper flower folded to fit in the nutshell of the new bus terminal lot instead of the old middle school, and the bumbling bus they had arrived on was the only intruder.
“Honeybun,” Woodrow said, “I’m going to see if the bag-guy can help.” Honeybun had her eyes closed and, slumped there on the planks of the bench, Woodrow could not be sure she heard him. Rather than disturb her, he pushed between a group of cub Scouts and several sequined high-school girls, toward where a man was half swallowed by the luggage bay in the side of the bus.
Honeybun gasped as another convulsion stole her breath. When she opened her eyes, she found her vision swimming, but one welcome sight emerged from the confused scene. Someone had sent an ambulance. But it looked like the stretcher people were being delayed by another group of people, who were trying to argue with them and she was in no mood to wait.
“What you like and what you don’t like, don’t make no never-mind a-tall, doctor,” said a skinny old man in the yellow plastic over-vest of a parade marshall, separating each word for emphasis. He showed discolored teeth in an imitation smile, directly in the face of a middle-aged woman who wore a real frown and a white, medical lab coat. “They got a permit to march just like you got a parade permit. They march number eight. You march number nine.” Beneath a square of poster-board bearing the words, “DOC– Dublin Obstetric Clinic,” the doctor growled futilely. The sign was carried by a second woman in laboratory coat. Just ahead in the compacted parade assembly, a large group of seniors hoisted signs reading It’s a Life, Not a Choice! and Abortion is Murder! and Right to Life! and a long cloth banner that jumped restlessly between two staves, Aren’t You Glad Your Mother Didn’t Have An Abortion?
At the head of the assembly, base drums of the high-school marching band flourished, almost together, then the brass hit the first bar of Stars and Stripes as if it were the shores of Iwo Jima, convulsing the parade into movement. Like progress in a caterpillar, the parade’s motion lifted the stretcher and moved it ahead. The doctor gave a heave and began to follow the flapping banner out of the parking lot and into the street, when a hugely tubby woman suddenly appeared and flopped half across her wheeled table.
“What th’....” The doctor cut off her irritable question and exclaimed, “M’gosh, lady, you’re not faking this, are you?”
Honeybun looked up with desperate eyes at the doctor, who had placed her hands on her shoulders. “I think I’m havin’ a baby,” she said.
“Lorraine!” the doctor shouted. Behind their obstructing stretcher a Cub Scout Pack fell into chaos, but it was a state the scouts were cheerfully comfortable with. “Lorraine,” the doctor snapped to her receptionist, “put those brochures down and help me with this woman.” The astonished receptionist blindly thrust her stack of glossy print-outs into the nearest pair of arms. The surprised scout looked without comprehension at the boldface heading: “A Woman’s Right to Choice.”
Honeybun was grateful to feel herself heaved up from behind onto the waiting stretcher, where she settled onto her back, feeling like a beached whale. Her abdomen rippled with such pain that it entirely circled her, digging a claw into the small of her back. She could feel that her legs were wet. She lost awareness of the crowd which surged around her.
“We have to get this lady to the hospital,” the doctor said, sounding anxious but determined. The parade and the crowd of watchers served to channel them into a slow progress down Giles Avenue toward Main. “Help me push this thing,” she said to the receptionist. “She weighs a ton.”
Lorraine, the receptionist-dressed-as-nurse, being only certified as a medical assistant, was less prone to assume personal responsibility for problems. She glanced around and shouted, “Hey, you scouts, get up here and let me see how strong you are. Do your good deed and help this lady across the street.” Cub Scouts surged eagerly to the stretcher’s sides.
The same parade marshal appeared again at Honeybun’s feet. He turned white about the lips at what he saw there and stalked around the Cub Scouts to where the doctor was braced to steer the stretcher. “You ain’t going to commit no abortion right here in this parade?!” His voice slid back and forth between exclamation point and question mark.
“Unless we get this woman to the ER damn fast, I’m going to deliver a baby, Mr. Minniver. Don’t stand there, get us out of this crowd.”
The righteous flush of outrage drained again from the parade marshal’s face and down his wattled neck. In desperation he cast about for a course which would lead to safety, or at least lead out of this deepening moral swamp. With a final glance, suggesting that the doctor had arranged this on purpose to annoy him, he hurried forward to collar the leader of the right-to-life group just ahead.
“Jacobs, you ain’t going to believe this, but we got a female about to throw a litter on that confounded stretcher right behind us. We got to get her the heck out of this parade. See if can’t you get your folks to clear a way up to the corner. Jimmy-John Hedricks got a patrol car there and he can take her up to the hospital. It’ll give him an excuse to use that siren of his. He always likes that.”
The frowning man to whom all this was addressed, came out of his brief catalepsy with a burst of action. He pointed at one of his group with the hand holding an “It’s A Child’s Life” placard and bawled, “Lawson, Beamer, Treichler, form a wedge.”
The last few Cub Scouts, who had not been able to crowd in to lay a hand on the wheeled stretcher, found glossy brochures stuffed into their grasp. They were not interested in what might be written on them, but dutifully began to hand them out to parade watchers as they followed their Den Mother and the jouncing gurney along the curb. Ahead of them, in the van, the less grey-haired right-to-lifers battled the mob in the gutter with the quarter-staffs of their Murder Starts at Conception! signs. Their serpentine banner had slithered from across the street to length-ways, as the man holding one end hooked on to the front end of the stretcher. It looked as if, Aren’t You Glad Your Mother Didn’t Have An Abortion? were emphasizing its point by pulling Honeybun up the street, away from the abortionist clinging to the back of her stretcher. Behind them all, not really paying attention to the scouts handing out Right to Choice, pamphlets, the assistant Den Mother distractedly shouldered together placards which read, Free Choice– A Woman’s Right and Stop Abortion Now! while trying anxiously to keep count of the little blue uniforms surging ahead almost over the toes of parade watchers lining the sidewalk.
When they all reached the corner, their mini-parade slowed and made to stop, as all eyes scanned in vain for the patrol car which was to have been their salvation.
“Don’t stop, for crying out loud,” shouted the doctor. “Keep moving. This woman has to get to the hospital. Mush!” Turning into the sloping side street, the clot of helpers which had coagulated about Honeybun on her stretcher put their heads down to encounter the grade. Bat-voiced Cub Scouts got shouldered out by growling Right-to-Lifers, but they would not have abandoned the procession for double their allowances for a year.
When Woodrow finally got the man with his head inside the luggage compartment to listen to him, it turned out he wasn’t much help anyway. Then, when he went back to where he was pretty sure he left Honeybun, she wasn’t there. Everybody was busy, so he couldn’t think what else to do but follow the crowd down the street to the heavy beat of the VFW drum and bugle (one drum, one bugle) corps. After several blocks, he found a policeman sitting in his patrol car on a little side street, nosed right up to the edge of the parade.
When he explained his situation to the police officer, he was told, “Hop right in. There’s only just the one place they could’ve took her. I’ll get you to the ER in no time flat.” The first thing the policeman did was turn the patrol car’s siren on, which added a lot to the business of making a six-point turn in a small street filled with pedestrians. Once clear of the crowd, the officer cut his vehicle loose, and they streaked down empty streets at high speed.
“Gosh, we got here fast,” Woodrow said, giving up on the tricky seat-belt buckle as they slowed into the semi-circular hospital drive and stopped just short of the ER entrance.
The policeman flipped on his radio and spoke some codes to the radio room. “I’m up at the ER, doing a transport. Looks like there’s another one of those demonstrations by the anti-abortion crowd going on. They supposed to be here today?”
Woodrow let himself out of the patrol car and wandered toward the jittering throng as they hesitated before the variety of automatic doors with their injunctions about Ambulances Only, and All Others. Then he heard a scream that sent his blood somewhere he didn’t know about.
“Honeybun,” he called in a voice no one could hear, “that you?”
“Great...,” Mr. Minniver choked on the only word that came to him, “she’s doin’ it right out in the open!” He pounded on the shoulder of the physician, who had moved to the foot of the stretcher in order to assess Honeybun’s situation. “Don’t you touch her, for gosh sake!” He pushed his way between the stretcher and the doctor. “I’m here to tell you that this baby is not going to fall prey to any abortionist, not if I have to raise it myself.”
The doctor straightened and slowly considered him. “Why don’t you,” she savored some thought, “go boil some water, would you?” Turning to the weary faces of the stretcher-pushers, she spoke philosophically, “Women have been having babies out in the open for a long time.” And then, more decisively, “Get her through that door and let the ER people deal with her.”
But just at that moment a bulky young man blocked the stretcher’s way. His plump and rumpled face was a study in worry. “Honeybun?” he muttered uncertainly. “Honeybun?”
The parade marshal stepped forward to assert authority. “Who’re you? What d’y’ think you’re blocking the door for?” He took a handful of Woodrow’s damp shirt-front and walked him to the side.
As Honeybun’s stretcher slid past, Woodrow turned with relief to this man with authority in his voice. “That’s my Honeybun.”
“That so?” the parade marshal responded sharply. “And who’re you, anyway?” He allowed the handles of a collection of placards and some pieces of paper to be thrust into his hands by some Cub Scouts without looking at them.
“Pack 162, assemble over here,” a voice was crying. “Pack 162, over here.”
“Me? I’m Woodrow Cheevy. Me and Honeybun come down here lookin’ for my Aunt Millie, cause Honeybun’s havin’ a baby, you know.”
The parade marshal opened his mouth, but once more internal pressure caused his vocal cords to lock. He raised his hand to gesture in Woodrow’s face and in blind disgust slapped the brochures in his grasp against Woodrow’s chest, where they half-stuck through the effects of perspiration and the slope of Woodrow’s front. In reflex, Woodrow placed one hand over the papers.
“Millicent!” the marshal shouted, turning all about in search for someone. “Where the.... C’mere,” he snapped, throwing the placards over a shrub. He hurried Woodrow through the automatic ER doors by his elbow. “Millicent,” he called out, just slightly lower in tone. “Millicent!” he demanded, raising one hand as he caught the attention of a rail-thin woman in a decent perm and polyester knits. She made her way quickly through the crowded waiting room. “What do you know about this?” he demanded of her, as soon as she could hear him without his shouting.
“That you, Aunt Millie?” Woodrow cried out in hope. The woman stared at him with an expression which would have been totally blank, if all sign of distaste were removed. He extended his right hand with the intention of offering a handshake. But, seeing the forgotten brochures he had in that hand, the woman took one under the impression that he intended to give it to her. Glancing at the words, “A Woman’s Right to Choice,” she thrust it back into Woodrow’s fingers, saying, “I suppose you think it’s smart to come down here from wherever to hand out trash like that.”
Woodrow didn’t quite know what to say. “He give it to me,” was the best he could come up with, poking the wad back tentatively at the parade martial.
“Who is this young man?” she demanded.
“Last week I sent you a letter Honeybun wro...” Woodrow’s voice faded off mid-word and he reached into his back pocket, from where he brought forth a very sat-upon folded envelope. “Here.”
Her sweated hair in dark snakes against the white hospital pillow-case, circles of fatigue under her half-closed eyes, Honeybun received Woodrow’s aunt and uncle with less interest than she would usually have shown. Anyway, they were over with Woodrow, looking into the small basket on trolley wheels that held her daughter.
“Married, young man, I said, married!”
“Uh,” came Woodrow’s voice, uncertainly, “well, we was busy, an’...”
The obstetrician, the same doctor who had pushed her stretcher up to the hospital doors, bustled in, saying, “It’s time to take the little one back to the nursery. The nurse’ll bring her again in a little while, and you can try to feed her.” She began pushing the little basket. “Oh,” she said, “you got this filled out for me. I’ll just take it along.” Collecting the identification card from Honeybun’s night stand, she moved toward the door, but hesitated on the threshold. Peering over the rim of her glasses, the doctor cocked her head and asked, “What’s this, the baby’s name...is that Joyce?”
“Yeah, it just came to me,” Honeybun answered sleepily, “Choyce.
“Honeybun, this ain’t you,” Woodrow had said, as he climbed over her pregnant form at the last rest stop on the turnpike.
By the time they did arrive at the new bus terminal beside the middle school, Honeybun’s ankles had swollen to the point that Woodrow had to help her to back, immense and barefoot, down the steps of the bus. Her belly seemed to have slid down somehow with the long, vibrating ride, so neither of them had eyes for the shouting mob which had closed the channel behind the arrival of their bus. Honeybun turned when her feet touched the warm asphalt and clutched behind at the metal handrail on the folding door of the bus. With a small cry, she swayed.
“Woodrow, it’s started,” she shouted into the din.
“What’ll I do?” asked Woodrow, his bristly jowls shaking.
“Get me to that bench,” Honeybun said, her voice reduced to a grunt this time. She staggered as she reached for his arm.
There were people everywhere, but none who looked available to help with their problem. Woodrow used his height to scan over the parking lot, which, he suddenly understood, was the staging ground of what a banner described as
**Dublin ~ Dublin ~ LABOR DAY ~Dublin ~ Dublin ~ **
**PARADE**
The parade was a paper flower folded to fit in the nutshell of the new bus terminal lot instead of the old middle school, and the bumbling bus they had arrived on was the only intruder.
“Honeybun,” Woodrow said, “I’m going to see if the bag-guy can help.” Honeybun had her eyes closed and, slumped there on the planks of the bench, Woodrow could not be sure she heard him. Rather than disturb her, he pushed between a group of cub Scouts and several sequined high-school girls, toward where a man was half swallowed by the luggage bay in the side of the bus.
Honeybun gasped as another convulsion stole her breath. When she opened her eyes, she found her vision swimming, but one welcome sight emerged from the confused scene. Someone had sent an ambulance. But it looked like the stretcher people were being delayed by another group of people, who were trying to argue with them and she was in no mood to wait.
“What you like and what you don’t like, don’t make no never-mind a-tall, doctor,” said a skinny old man in the yellow plastic over-vest of a parade marshall, separating each word for emphasis. He showed discolored teeth in an imitation smile, directly in the face of a middle-aged woman who wore a real frown and a white, medical lab coat. “They got a permit to march just like you got a parade permit. They march number eight. You march number nine.” Beneath a square of poster-board bearing the words, “DOC– Dublin Obstetric Clinic,” the doctor growled futilely. The sign was carried by a second woman in laboratory coat. Just ahead in the compacted parade assembly, a large group of seniors hoisted signs reading It’s a Life, Not a Choice! and Abortion is Murder! and Right to Life! and a long cloth banner that jumped restlessly between two staves, Aren’t You Glad Your Mother Didn’t Have An Abortion?
At the head of the assembly, base drums of the high-school marching band flourished, almost together, then the brass hit the first bar of Stars and Stripes as if it were the shores of Iwo Jima, convulsing the parade into movement. Like progress in a caterpillar, the parade’s motion lifted the stretcher and moved it ahead. The doctor gave a heave and began to follow the flapping banner out of the parking lot and into the street, when a hugely tubby woman suddenly appeared and flopped half across her wheeled table.
“What th’....” The doctor cut off her irritable question and exclaimed, “M’gosh, lady, you’re not faking this, are you?”
Honeybun looked up with desperate eyes at the doctor, who had placed her hands on her shoulders. “I think I’m havin’ a baby,” she said.
“Lorraine!” the doctor shouted. Behind their obstructing stretcher a Cub Scout Pack fell into chaos, but it was a state the scouts were cheerfully comfortable with. “Lorraine,” the doctor snapped to her receptionist, “put those brochures down and help me with this woman.” The astonished receptionist blindly thrust her stack of glossy print-outs into the nearest pair of arms. The surprised scout looked without comprehension at the boldface heading: “A Woman’s Right to Choice.”
Honeybun was grateful to feel herself heaved up from behind onto the waiting stretcher, where she settled onto her back, feeling like a beached whale. Her abdomen rippled with such pain that it entirely circled her, digging a claw into the small of her back. She could feel that her legs were wet. She lost awareness of the crowd which surged around her.
“We have to get this lady to the hospital,” the doctor said, sounding anxious but determined. The parade and the crowd of watchers served to channel them into a slow progress down Giles Avenue toward Main. “Help me push this thing,” she said to the receptionist. “She weighs a ton.”
Lorraine, the receptionist-dressed-as-nurse, being only certified as a medical assistant, was less prone to assume personal responsibility for problems. She glanced around and shouted, “Hey, you scouts, get up here and let me see how strong you are. Do your good deed and help this lady across the street.” Cub Scouts surged eagerly to the stretcher’s sides.
The same parade marshal appeared again at Honeybun’s feet. He turned white about the lips at what he saw there and stalked around the Cub Scouts to where the doctor was braced to steer the stretcher. “You ain’t going to commit no abortion right here in this parade?!” His voice slid back and forth between exclamation point and question mark.
“Unless we get this woman to the ER damn fast, I’m going to deliver a baby, Mr. Minniver. Don’t stand there, get us out of this crowd.”
The righteous flush of outrage drained again from the parade marshal’s face and down his wattled neck. In desperation he cast about for a course which would lead to safety, or at least lead out of this deepening moral swamp. With a final glance, suggesting that the doctor had arranged this on purpose to annoy him, he hurried forward to collar the leader of the right-to-life group just ahead.
“Jacobs, you ain’t going to believe this, but we got a female about to throw a litter on that confounded stretcher right behind us. We got to get her the heck out of this parade. See if can’t you get your folks to clear a way up to the corner. Jimmy-John Hedricks got a patrol car there and he can take her up to the hospital. It’ll give him an excuse to use that siren of his. He always likes that.”
The frowning man to whom all this was addressed, came out of his brief catalepsy with a burst of action. He pointed at one of his group with the hand holding an “It’s A Child’s Life” placard and bawled, “Lawson, Beamer, Treichler, form a wedge.”
The last few Cub Scouts, who had not been able to crowd in to lay a hand on the wheeled stretcher, found glossy brochures stuffed into their grasp. They were not interested in what might be written on them, but dutifully began to hand them out to parade watchers as they followed their Den Mother and the jouncing gurney along the curb. Ahead of them, in the van, the less grey-haired right-to-lifers battled the mob in the gutter with the quarter-staffs of their Murder Starts at Conception! signs. Their serpentine banner had slithered from across the street to length-ways, as the man holding one end hooked on to the front end of the stretcher. It looked as if, Aren’t You Glad Your Mother Didn’t Have An Abortion? were emphasizing its point by pulling Honeybun up the street, away from the abortionist clinging to the back of her stretcher. Behind them all, not really paying attention to the scouts handing out Right to Choice, pamphlets, the assistant Den Mother distractedly shouldered together placards which read, Free Choice– A Woman’s Right and Stop Abortion Now! while trying anxiously to keep count of the little blue uniforms surging ahead almost over the toes of parade watchers lining the sidewalk.
When they all reached the corner, their mini-parade slowed and made to stop, as all eyes scanned in vain for the patrol car which was to have been their salvation.
“Don’t stop, for crying out loud,” shouted the doctor. “Keep moving. This woman has to get to the hospital. Mush!” Turning into the sloping side street, the clot of helpers which had coagulated about Honeybun on her stretcher put their heads down to encounter the grade. Bat-voiced Cub Scouts got shouldered out by growling Right-to-Lifers, but they would not have abandoned the procession for double their allowances for a year.
When Woodrow finally got the man with his head inside the luggage compartment to listen to him, it turned out he wasn’t much help anyway. Then, when he went back to where he was pretty sure he left Honeybun, she wasn’t there. Everybody was busy, so he couldn’t think what else to do but follow the crowd down the street to the heavy beat of the VFW drum and bugle (one drum, one bugle) corps. After several blocks, he found a policeman sitting in his patrol car on a little side street, nosed right up to the edge of the parade.
When he explained his situation to the police officer, he was told, “Hop right in. There’s only just the one place they could’ve took her. I’ll get you to the ER in no time flat.” The first thing the policeman did was turn the patrol car’s siren on, which added a lot to the business of making a six-point turn in a small street filled with pedestrians. Once clear of the crowd, the officer cut his vehicle loose, and they streaked down empty streets at high speed.
“Gosh, we got here fast,” Woodrow said, giving up on the tricky seat-belt buckle as they slowed into the semi-circular hospital drive and stopped just short of the ER entrance.
The policeman flipped on his radio and spoke some codes to the radio room. “I’m up at the ER, doing a transport. Looks like there’s another one of those demonstrations by the anti-abortion crowd going on. They supposed to be here today?”
Woodrow let himself out of the patrol car and wandered toward the jittering throng as they hesitated before the variety of automatic doors with their injunctions about Ambulances Only, and All Others. Then he heard a scream that sent his blood somewhere he didn’t know about.
“Honeybun,” he called in a voice no one could hear, “that you?”
“Great...,” Mr. Minniver choked on the only word that came to him, “she’s doin’ it right out in the open!” He pounded on the shoulder of the physician, who had moved to the foot of the stretcher in order to assess Honeybun’s situation. “Don’t you touch her, for gosh sake!” He pushed his way between the stretcher and the doctor. “I’m here to tell you that this baby is not going to fall prey to any abortionist, not if I have to raise it myself.”
The doctor straightened and slowly considered him. “Why don’t you,” she savored some thought, “go boil some water, would you?” Turning to the weary faces of the stretcher-pushers, she spoke philosophically, “Women have been having babies out in the open for a long time.” And then, more decisively, “Get her through that door and let the ER people deal with her.”
But just at that moment a bulky young man blocked the stretcher’s way. His plump and rumpled face was a study in worry. “Honeybun?” he muttered uncertainly. “Honeybun?”
The parade marshal stepped forward to assert authority. “Who’re you? What d’y’ think you’re blocking the door for?” He took a handful of Woodrow’s damp shirt-front and walked him to the side.
As Honeybun’s stretcher slid past, Woodrow turned with relief to this man with authority in his voice. “That’s my Honeybun.”
“That so?” the parade marshal responded sharply. “And who’re you, anyway?” He allowed the handles of a collection of placards and some pieces of paper to be thrust into his hands by some Cub Scouts without looking at them.
“Pack 162, assemble over here,” a voice was crying. “Pack 162, over here.”
“Me? I’m Woodrow Cheevy. Me and Honeybun come down here lookin’ for my Aunt Millie, cause Honeybun’s havin’ a baby, you know.”
The parade marshal opened his mouth, but once more internal pressure caused his vocal cords to lock. He raised his hand to gesture in Woodrow’s face and in blind disgust slapped the brochures in his grasp against Woodrow’s chest, where they half-stuck through the effects of perspiration and the slope of Woodrow’s front. In reflex, Woodrow placed one hand over the papers.
“Millicent!” the marshal shouted, turning all about in search for someone. “Where the.... C’mere,” he snapped, throwing the placards over a shrub. He hurried Woodrow through the automatic ER doors by his elbow. “Millicent,” he called out, just slightly lower in tone. “Millicent!” he demanded, raising one hand as he caught the attention of a rail-thin woman in a decent perm and polyester knits. She made her way quickly through the crowded waiting room. “What do you know about this?” he demanded of her, as soon as she could hear him without his shouting.
“That you, Aunt Millie?” Woodrow cried out in hope. The woman stared at him with an expression which would have been totally blank, if all sign of distaste were removed. He extended his right hand with the intention of offering a handshake. But, seeing the forgotten brochures he had in that hand, the woman took one under the impression that he intended to give it to her. Glancing at the words, “A Woman’s Right to Choice,” she thrust it back into Woodrow’s fingers, saying, “I suppose you think it’s smart to come down here from wherever to hand out trash like that.”
Woodrow didn’t quite know what to say. “He give it to me,” was the best he could come up with, poking the wad back tentatively at the parade martial.
“Who is this young man?” she demanded.
“Last week I sent you a letter Honeybun wro...” Woodrow’s voice faded off mid-word and he reached into his back pocket, from where he brought forth a very sat-upon folded envelope. “Here.”
Her sweated hair in dark snakes against the white hospital pillow-case, circles of fatigue under her half-closed eyes, Honeybun received Woodrow’s aunt and uncle with less interest than she would usually have shown. Anyway, they were over with Woodrow, looking into the small basket on trolley wheels that held her daughter.
“Married, young man, I said, married!”
“Uh,” came Woodrow’s voice, uncertainly, “well, we was busy, an’...”
The obstetrician, the same doctor who had pushed her stretcher up to the hospital doors, bustled in, saying, “It’s time to take the little one back to the nursery. The nurse’ll bring her again in a little while, and you can try to feed her.” She began pushing the little basket. “Oh,” she said, “you got this filled out for me. I’ll just take it along.” Collecting the identification card from Honeybun’s night stand, she moved toward the door, but hesitated on the threshold. Peering over the rim of her glasses, the doctor cocked her head and asked, “What’s this, the baby’s name...is that Joyce?”
“Yeah, it just came to me,” Honeybun answered sleepily, “Choyce.