At Franklin Memorial Medical Center, bright lights hovered above me while doctors spoke in calm voices that did not match the storm inside my head. A female orthopedic surgeon leaned over and said, “Melissa, you have a fractured pelvis and a torn ligament in your shoulder, and you will need several days in the hospital and strict instructions not to lift your baby for a while.”
My husband, Jacob Parker, was stuck in Denver after a blizzard grounded flights across the Midwest, and he sounded helpless and furious over the phone while promising he would get home as soon as the airport reopened. In the hallway outside my room, a nurse tried to soothe Owen in a borrowed car seat that belonged to my older sister, and his thin newborn cries pierced every fragile place inside me.
I reached for my phone and called my mother, Susan Whitman, who lived only twenty minutes away in a tidy brick house that I had helped pay for nearly a decade. For nine years, ever since my father died suddenly of a heart attack and my mother claimed she was drowning in bills, I had transferred four thousand five hundred dollars to her account every month without missing a single payment.