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“What happened to those three girls who used to hold hands while they peed in a field, drunk?” Katrina asked.
Annie barked out a laugh. “Don’t remind me of that. It’s a miracle we weren’t murdered when we were teenagers.”
While they joked and laughed, Maggie wept in Katrina’s palatial marble bathroom. She knew the drill, having taken at least five tests in the past three months. Finally pulling herself together, she undid her pants and slipped them down to her ankles, sat on the toilet, and stuck the stick in between her legs.
“Are you doing it?” a disembodied voice whispered from the other side of the door.
“Make water running noises,” she shouted back. “I can’t reach the faucet and I can’t pee.”
They made swishing noises on command. “You sound like a rattlesnake,” Katrina said, elbowing Annie. “Do this. Shhhh. Shhhh.”
So both of them hissed on the other side of the door, making Maggie laugh out loud. “You guys are a riot. It worked. Tell me when two minutes are up.”
She folded a piece of toilet paper and placed it on the back of the toilet, ready to receive her test. After washing her hands, she went back to the toilet.
“Time’s up!” Katrina called out.
Holding her breath, Maggie looked at the stick.
Pregnant!
Epilogue
Halloween was just around the corner. Annie sat in the sunroom of the house she shared with Chris, nursing baby Emily Marie while watching the half dozen horses Chris had adopted from the Wild Horse Initiative after the baby was born. Justin was in the corral with Chris, teaching him how to train the horses.
“Here’s a cup of tea,” Katrina said, placing it close by. She was due any moment and still didn’t look pregnant from the back.
“How do you do it?” Maggie asked, coming in with a tray of sandwiches that she placed on the coffee table. “I’m only four months and my ass is already huge. My body might not recover this time.”
“You’re beautiful and you’ll be fine when this one is a month old, just like you were with Tina.”
The sound of laughter echoed throughout the house as the toddlers played in the den. “I’d better go make sure no one is crawling in the fireplace,” Maggie said, leaving the room.
“I didn’t want to say anything before, but I’m sure I’m in labor,” Katrina admitted. “I had a backache, but I just had a contraction.”
Annie sat forward, watching her friend. “You’ve dropped, too. I can see it now. We need to keep track of this. Hand me that pen on the counter, please.”
She jotted down Katrina’s Labor at the top of the paper. “About what time was the contraction?”
“I was in the kitchen, getting the tray ready, so about noon. That was ten minutes ago. It lasted for about a minute, but I wasn’t watching the clock and you know how impossible it is to guess time.”
“This is so exciting! Our little girls will be one month apart. I might cry.”
“Why are you crying again?” Maggie asked, back to her unsympathetic self.
“Kat’s in labor.”
“Well, maybe,” Katrina said. “I had a backache all night, and I just had a contraction.”
Pointing to the sandwich tray, Maggie said, “Eat up, skinny! You’ll need the energy for labor! I’m going to tell Dave. Where is he, anyway?”
“He’s with the farrier in the barn,” Annie said, pointing to their new barn.
“You finally got your barn,” Maggie said, grinning. “I tell ya, this girl gets what she wants.”
“Chris keeps telling me he’ll do whatever I want or get me whatever I ask for because he wants me here. It’s really difficult not to take advantage of that. Having the boys around turned out not to be that bad after all.”
“Justin said Ben is doing wonderfully at the clinic, that he’s so much help,” Maggie said. “And apparently he loves vet tech school.”
