Overcast

by John Proctor

															IDA
You did hit her.

                             FRANK
      Just once. Only once. Ever. Miss Ida, please understand, I get up at 5:00 in the morning and go to work at a bakery. I get off of work at 2:00 in the afternoon and head straight to another job. Heck, I am holding down three jobs with the one I have on the weckend, then night school. 

                              IDA
      Boy, you are taking on too much. 

                              FRANK
      I know that, but there is nothing I can do, somebody has got to pay the rent. All we wanted was that child. All we wanted was to be together and be a family. All 9 months I pampered her. I gave her everything. Sometimes, she would wake me up because she wanted a submarine sandwich at 3:00 in the morning and I would trudge down to the all night Greek grocery store and get her one and when I'd come back, there she'd be asleep, so peaceful. It went on like this for 9 months. The morning she went into labor I was at the bakery, I had just gotten there, just walked in the door and my boss said, "Franky, your wife is on the way to the hospital." I went a litlee nuts. I was jumping around all panicked about how I'm going to get from way down here on 12th street all the way up to the hospital on 70th. Those days I was leaving the car with Mikey in case she needed to go anywhere. Tooley, my boss, knows that, so he grabs me by the front of my shirt and shakes me a little to get my attention, then he gave me the keys to his car and said, "Go. Just go." God, I must have broken twenty speed laws that morning. When I got to the hospital, I'm grinning this grin from ear to ear and I walk right up to the nurses desk and I say, "I'm Frank Miller and my baby is coming." Quick as nothing they take me to some delivery room and there's Mikey, laying there, all quiet. She wasn't sleeping. She was just laying there peaceful but she had that same look, like she has when she's asleep. I took her hands in my hands and we just sat like that for a while. We laughed and joked about naming our kid Egbert or something awful like that. Then she got this real quiet voice and said, "Its going to be a boy, and I want to name it after you and my brother. You first Francis, then my brother, Paul. Francis Paul." Heck I had never given any thought to having a child named after me. I mean, who am I, just Francis Anthony Miller from the bad part of Fairly, the smallest town in Arkansas. I mean, I'm nobody. A nobody with nothing. But Mrs. Michelle Francis Anthony Miller said she wanted to name her first born child after me. I was so damn happy. And we just stayed there like that. Mikey didn't scream or yell or throw things or anything. It got sort of rough on her for a while. The doctor would tell her to push and she would do like he said. They had all of these monitors hooked up to her and everything. The doctor called in a whole team of people that he wanted there as soon as that baby got born. Boy, those people jumped when he said jump. And there were me and Mikey with all these important people in this big old important hospital and they were all there working for us and we didn't understand none of what they were saying. As far as we knew it was just us and the world was swirling around us. Things got sort of rough on Mikey. She was sweating like she was running a marathon or something. After about twelve hours the baby came out. You know how, because of movies and things, you expect to hear a baby crying when it gets born. We didn't. Nobody rushed to put the baby on Mikey's chest. Nobody even said something like, "look you've got this beautiful baby boy." Nothing. Then the doctors and nurses said a lot of technical sounding stuff, that I'm sure I didn't understand. They started putting all of these chords and tubes all over our baby. Up his nose and down his throat, everywhere. They put an oxygen tank on him. And after a couple minutes everything quieted down. People started walking out of that room, taking those stupid masks off their faces, like they were disappointed because they'd just lost a game or something. They they took the baby out of the room. I felt Mikey's hand get tighter on mine. She started talking fast, then screaming for them to bring the baby to her. And nobody did. They just took him away. They called me to the next room to confirm the death. He was a boy. Francis Paul. The doctors said it would be better if Mikey never saw him but the way she was screaming . . . I don't know. I just kind of stood there. I guess she got to a nurse or someone because somebody took the baby back in to her to prove that he was dead. Do you know what that sound is like? The sound of a woman screaming for her dead child. No. I guess you don't. I stayed with Mike in the hospital for two days. She screamed until she couldn't talk anymore Then she was quiet. They said I could bring her home, so I did. She laid in the bed, curled up, and she still wouldn't tall. I couldn't stay home any longer than four days. I had work. The first night I came home, there was Mike sitting in the front room with all the baby blankets we had bought. The blankets were all bundled like they were a baby and she was cooing to the blankets and making baby talk I tried, as gently and as softly as I could to tell here that there was no child in there. That all she had was some rolled up blankets, but she wouldn't listen. I don't know anything about how a mother lets go when a baby dies so I let her alone. She kept on like that for a week. Then one day I came home and Mikey had gone shopping. There were bottles and pampers and baby food all on the kitchen table. Mike came running to me to show me what had brought home from the store. I couldn't take it. I work so hard to pay the rent and the doctor's bills and school and everything, I just couldn't take it. Shc was holding those blankets up in front of my face, showing me her baby. I wanted to go away, you know leave the room or something, but she kept after me with those blankets saying, "Look at what Francis Paul did today." She kept after me . . . and I hit her. I didn't even think about it. My right hand just shot out. We both just stood there for a minute.  Neither one of us moving. I don't know, maybe I was hoping to make her come back to life. Like when the doctor smacked the baby, hoping he would cry, maybe I was hoping my Mikey would come back to me, you know cry or something. She didn't she picked all the blankets up off of the ground and went into the bedroom and locked the door. When I woke up in the morning she was gone. She took the car and left.  I figured she had to come here. Where else was there to go? . . . for either of us? There was a bus leaving for Fairly fifteen minutes from the time I called the station. I ran 11 blocks to the station and I was on that bus until I got here today. I only hit her once and I would take it back if I could. I just wanted my wife.