“No, ma’am, I surely do not.”
“Please don’t call me ma’am. I’m only twenty-one and it makes me feel like somebody’s mother.”
“Well, then, what’s your name?”
“Melody.”
“Melody. No wonder you know so much about music. Your name is like a song.”
She’d felt a shiver in the heat. “While my mother was waiting for my father to come back from the war so that they could get married, she was studying to be a singer. She has a wonderful voice.”
“How about you?”
“My voice? It’s all right, but . . .”
“No, I mean what did you want to be before you got married?”
She’d followed his gaze to her ring and hid it in a fist.
She’d been a music major at the University of Florida, pursuing the career that had eluded her mother. But she met Travis during Christmas break sophomore year. When she returned to Gainesville, he visited her every weekend, and when she came home that summer, he’d proposed.
She was hoping to finish her education. No reason to rush, as President Johnson had already rescinded the draft exemption for married men. But Travis wanted her to drop out, and Travis wanted a Valentine’s Day wedding, and whatever Travis wants . . .
Otis’s ears perk up again, and Melody hears a car’s approach with a distinctly clattering engine.
She takes a deep breath, preparing herself to face Cyril LeBlanc with the news that she’s expecting his child.
Margaret Costello has a pronounced widow’s peak above fine features and intense blue eyes. Her dark hair is teased and sprayed into a fashionable flip, protected by a lime-green scarf knotted under her chin. It matches her gloves and vinyl go-go boots. Even wrapped in that bulky brown plaid wool coat, Oran can see that her figure is slender, though not too slender for his purposes.
She’s nervous, spilling too many words into too little space.
“Sorry I’m late, but it’s getting nasty out and I had to come all the way from Bensonhurst, and this place was hard to find, and then when I did I walked by a few times because I wasn’t sure . . .” She tilts her head at the sign taped to the window. “Aren’t you closed? It says that the hours are—”
“I keep telling the receptionist to update that. We take late appointments on Fridays now.”
“You have a receptionist?”
“She sits right over there.” He points at Carla’s desk.
“But you’re the one who answered the phone when I called.”
Hmm. None of the others had noted that, nor questioned the hours. Smart, feisty little thing. Reminds him of his Gypsy.
“Around here, when it’s busy, we all pitch in wherever we’re needed. Now, let’s get you into an exam room.”
“But . . . don’t you have a nurse or something?”
“I sent them all home for the evening. You’re late, and the weather is nasty, and you’re the last appointment tonight.”
Still she hesitates, just inside the door, as though she wants to jerk it open behind her and flee into the night. His own fingers itch to reach behind her and lock it, but he doesn’t dare scare her. Not when they’re so close, and she’s so perfect, so very much like his own little girl.
A vision flashes in his mind—a prophecy. Margaret will have a daughter who looks like her, a sweet sister for his Gypsy.
“I, uh . . .”
He blinks and sees that she’s watching him just as Gypsy does, as though she can see right through him.
“I have to go. I, um, changed my mind about—”
“There’s a twenty-five-dollar fee for last-minute cancellations.”
“Twenty-five dollars? But . . . it’s a free clinic.”
“Free for our patients. Do you know how many girls make appointments, show up, and then are too scared to go through with it?”
Something flashes in her blue eyes. I’m no coward, she’s thinking.
Oran unspools words like a rescuer dropping a lifeline to a child who’s toddled to the edge of a precipice.
“Most of these young women are very much like yourself—they’ve taken a big risk just by calling us, let alone coming here. They’re defying society, their parents, the Catholic Church . . . even the law, as of two years ago!”
A well-placed reminder that family planning services and birth control distribution had been illegal until the 1965 Supreme Court ruling. It’s all so new, and she’s so young—how would Margaret have any idea how any of it works? Few people do.
“Just think about all those people who claim to have a young woman’s best interests in mind—” He breaks off, raises his voice to an annoying intonation, “‘It’s for your own good, we’re only trying to protect you,’ they say, don’t they? And you are so obedient, such a good, perfect girl. Until you fall in love. They don’t like that, do they? They don’t trust him to protect you the way they do, but they don’t know him, do they? They don’t know how it is with you two. And when you decide to protect yourself against unwanted pregnancy . . .”
She’s looking down now, at the lime-green plastic boots that reveal so much more than mere fashion sense. Only a spirited, carefree soul would wear boots like that on a night like this.
“So yes, we understand how it is with these young women who make appointments. But we have to protect ourselves, too, and our patients. We can’t afford to waste our time and resources on girls who aren’t mature enough, strong enough, to go through with it. That’s why we have the cancellation fee.” Mythical, but she wouldn’t suspect that.
Her chin trembles. She lifts it.
“I know it’s not easy, but the hardest part of this is over,” he says. “You’re here. Now all you need is a quick exam, I’ll give you your birth control prescription, and you’ll be on your way.”
Ah, yes. She wants the magic Pill. But does she want it badly enough to ignore her gut instincts and follow him into the exam room?
Yes, she does.
He ushers her inside, tells her to get undressed, put on a gown, lie on the table with feet in the stirrups. He turns his back while she does so, pulling on sterile gloves and laying out instruments on the countertop the way he’s seen Dr. Brooks do, watching the proceedings through a crack in the door.
When he turns back, there she is, dutifully lying on the table, shivering in the chilly room, eyes squeezed closed. She’s at his mercy, and they both know it.
“All right, now, Margaret. Just try to relax. This won’t hurt a bit.”
He walks toward her.
Five minutes later, she emerges from the examination room, fully clothed and looking relieved. Oran is waiting for her.
“There now, see? I told you it wouldn’t be so bad, didn’t I?”
“It wasn’t. Not at all.”
He hands her a little brown bag. “Here you go.”
She peers inside. “That’s it? That’s the Pill? I thought it came in a packet, not a bottle.”
“Some do, some don’t. Be sure you take it every time you menstruate, on days three through seven.”
She narrows her eyes. “I thought you take it every day.”