“I’m in the outside lot,” I say.
My trainer had me park there so I could run sprints in the lot earlier.
“Can I borrow your car?”Leo asks me.
“The gearshift is weird.I’ll drive you.”
We run to the locker room, where I grab my keys.Carter finds us there, and the three of us race toward the exit.
My Trailblazer is the only car in the outside lot.The three of us get in and Leo tells me which hospital to go to.I start the car and shake the steering wheel while pressing the brake to shift into drive, which is the weirdness I was talking about.
“Jesus, man,” Carter says from the back seat as I drive toward the lot exit.“You probably leave this bitch unlocked in hopes someone will steal it.”
I laugh because I know this car doesn’t compare to the ones he and his wife drive.There was a huge knife cut running from the top of one of the back seats all the way down and across the seat part when I bought it, but I hardly ever have passengers, so I didn’t care.
“It’s reliable,” I say.“That’s all I care about.”
I roll my window down when we reach the security guard’s booth.Leo leans over from the passenger side and yells, “Mara’s in labor!Get that gate up, Billy!”
Billy lunges at the button, grinning.“Congrats, man!I can’t wait to see pictures!”
The gate goes up and I fly through it, feeling my phone buzzing in my pocket.When I take it out and look at the screen, I see that it’s my agent, Art.This call could be about a contract offer.
“You need to answer that?”Leo asks.
“No, I’ll call back.”
He exhales long and slow.“Okay, breathe.Ice chips, skin to skin, support the neck.Don’t look down there.”
“She’s the one doing the hard work,” Carter barks from the back seat.“You just need to stay calm and cool.”
“I will, but there’s a lot of shit to remember,” Leo says.
“Let the professionals handle it.”
Leo reads an incoming text on his phone.“She’s going to a room!Hurry up!”
“Women having their first kid don’t pop them out in ten minutes,” Carter says.
“My mom was in labor for twenty-eight hours with me,” I say.
“I don’t think I’m going to miss it, I just want to be there with my wife.She shouldn’t be alone when she’s in labor.”
“There are nurses,” Carter says.
Leo ignores him.“We want a seven to ten APGAR score.Seven to ten.Manifest that, boys.”
“Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”I ask.
“We don’t know.It’ll be a surprise.”
I can feel his excitement over becoming a dad.I was close with some teammates in Sweden who were fathers, but I hadn’t met anyone I’d consider having kids with.
It’s different with Blair.We haven’t been seeing each other long, but I’m imagining myself on the way to the birth of a child we’re having, and it feels amazing.
Her sons don’t have their dad around, and that’s his loss.I can see myself quickly thinking of them as my own, and if Blair and I never had more kids, that would be okay.
“Oh shit, there it is!”Leo cries when the hospital sign comes into view.“I’ve got smelling salts in the hospital bag.Let’s do this.”
