This is a fictional story. All names, places, and viruses are used fictitiously. Resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, past or present, are intentional.
If you haven’t read from the beginning, please start at Chapter 1 here.
***
Due Date: 120 days away
We didn’t forget that Wednesday.
I sat on one side. Liz on the other. We alternated sides each week, if we could remember what we’d done the week before. We weren’t sure this time, but I ended up on Kenneth’s right.
Kenneth took off his pants and iced his thigh. We used a cold pack with those blue gel pebbles in them.
He held my hand, like he always did. When he was younger, he’d cry. I learned to take off my ring if he was on that side, like this week. That way, my finger wouldn’t get pinched. As he got older, he was gripping my hand with both of his.
Liz had all but perfected her process. Squeeze out a few drops of medicine before the injection to prevent any air bubbles. Grip the fatty portion of Kenneth’s thigh, a difficult feat on his little chicken legs. Insert the needle at the perfect angle, apply pressure to the syringe at the perfect rate, and then remove the needle at the same perfect angle that it went in.
Still, good weeks and bad weeks were hit or miss. We found the pain was typically less severe if the puncture bled afterward, an interesting observation, but not much help for getting it right in the process of the shot.
This was one of the bleeding weeks.
“Not bad,” Kenneth said, wiping the liquid off his leg. I could always tell before the blood, just based on how he gripped my hand.
He pulled his pants back on and trotted off to his room.
Liz and I paused together for a moment.
The decision settled in.
I replaced the ring on my finger as Liz got up to dispose of the needle in our Sharps container.
“You know, I was thinking,” she said. “We’re probably going to need to come up with a plan for these doctor’s appointments of mine.”
I hadn’t mentioned anything about it at work yet.
“I think Chris can work with me on some of them,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ll be able to work from home for all of them. That’ll be too much every week, definitely if it’s twice a week.”
Liz laid down on the couch and propped her feet on my lap. “Can you massage them?”
I shook my head no, but of course I did.
“I probably wouldn’t normally do this,” she said, “but I was thinking Kenneth could just watch him? Hopefully, I’d be in and out in an hour, tops.”
“I thought of that too. Let’s talk with him about it. See what he thinks.”
We called Kenneth back out and asked him.
“Okay,” he said.
“And you can always call Ben.”
“Yeah, as long as I know when mama’s out,” I said, “I can be on standby with my phone in case you need to call me.”
“Make sure yours is charged too,” Liz added.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ll watch YouTube.”
“Thanks, Kenneth. That’s all we wanted to ask you.”
He went back to gaming.
“He actually seemed pretty excited about it,” Liz said.
“He’s growing up.”
I ran my thumbs along the soles of her foot, kneading out all the tension I could. With school out, she had two kids at home, double her usual workload. Sure, Kenneth stayed pretty self-sufficient, but he was still another person in the house to feed, occupy, and worry about keeping healthy on a day-to-day basis.
“Before you mentioned the doctor’s appointments,” I said, “I thought you were going to talk about shopping. I think we should stock up.”
She didn’t respond immediately.
“Not like a hundred pounds of beef or whatever. But what do we have, like three days of groceries?”
I lifted her feet off my lap and got up to scan the fridge. Two jars of pickles but no fresh meat. Some onions and a wilted bag of salad in the crisper. I grabbed the second-to-last beer.
“Well, we have plenty of Taco Bell sauce,” I said.
I checked the freezer. A tube of ground beef, an opened box of taquitos, bunch of bags of peas and corn and broccoli, plenty of ice packs. What I expected.
“I don’t know if it helps now,” Liz said, “but someone posted that Kroger is getting a big shipment of meat. She said to get there early. I think she said 6:00. There will be a line.”
“I was thinking to start at Aldi’s. See what they have. Then go to Kroger for everything else.”
She rolled her eyes.
“What? I don’t want to spend a bunch if we don’t have to. It’s not like I could go before work anyway. I’ll swing over on my way home.”
I tossed the bottle opener back in the drawer.
“Do you want me to make you a list?” she asked.
“Can you text it to me? We don’t need to prepper stockpile, just further than we are now.”
“Like two weeks?” Liz asked.
“Yeah, at this point, it’s just stupid not to. Some stuff, black beans or whatever, we’d eat anyway. We might as well get a bunch. We can ration it out over a month, of more, if we have to.”
She started checking off items on her grocery list app.
I pulled her feet back onto my lap.
“Ooh, your hands are cold.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “But yeah, the less we go shopping, the better. I was thinking about buying the paint and everything for Kenneth’s room. We’ll have the time. But I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t buy anything extra like that until we know what’s going to happen.”
“Yeah, I agree. Save what we can. Stock up on food. Self-isolate, hard. Stay healthy.”
I glanced at the beverage on the table beside me.
“Probably ought to cut these out too,” I said. “Like I told my mom, make the easy decisions now, so we don’t have to make difficult decisions later. We’re all going to stay healthy. Kenneth is going to be okay.”
“So that’s our goal then?”
“That, and let’s hurry up and have this baby.”
