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Back The Surrogate
Chapters (65)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. Part One
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Twenty-Four
  29. Twenty-Five
  30. Twenty-Six
  31. Twenty-Seven
  32. Twenty-Eight
  33. Twenty-Nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-One
  36. Thirty-Two
  37. Thirty-Three
  38. Part Two
  39. Thirty-Four
  40. Thirty-Five
  41. Thirty-Six
  42. Thirty-Seven
  43. Thirty-Eight
  44. Thirty-Nine
  45. Forty
  46. Forty-One
  47. Forty-Two
  48. Forty-Three
  49. Forty-Four
  50. Forty-Five
  51. Forty-Six
  52. Forty-Seven
  53. Forty-Eight
  54. Forty-Nine
  55. Fifty
  56. Fifty-One
  57. Part Three
  58. Fifty-Two
  59. Fifty-Three
  60. Fifty-Four
  61. Fifty-Five
  62. Fifty-Six
  63. Acknowledgments
  64. About the Author
  65. About the Publisher

A knock at the door and a nurse entered, bumping into the doctor as he left. “There are a few questions here you didn’t answer,” she said to me.

I hadn’t seen this nurse before. She had a nasal tone in her voice, and she acted like paperwork was her favorite thing in the world. “Sorry,” I said.

She handed the questionnaire to me on yet another clipboard. “The most important one is here.” She pointed to the middle of the page. “Next of kin.”

“Oh,” I said, bummed that she’d caught it.

“We need full names of two relatives, along with their phone numbers, plus one emergency contact who is not a relative, also with a phone number.”

“Okay,” I said, but it wasn’t okay. I didn’t have any relatives that I wanted to be involved in this or much of anything else, not since my father died. That was why I’d left it blank. I wanted to ask this nurse: so what do you want me to say? That my mom left me and my dad when I was six? And that for a while my aunt tried to help us, but she gave up on me when I was ten, because she got busy with her own kids and she figured I was old enough to take care of myself? And should I explain that it was just me and my dad until I was eighteen, when, in the summer after my first semester of college, my dad had a heart attack and I found him at home in the hallway? Or that I had to drop out to take care of everything that needed to be done, and that there was no more money for school? Is that what this nurse wanted me to write?

Or should I have lied? Lied and given her a nice name or two? With a happy story. I could have said, Oh, yes, my parents are Ron and Donna Nobody and they live in Wonderful, Massachusetts. My dad is a genius dentist and my mother stays at home. They raise horses and donate to the Red Cross. But right now they’re on vacation in Hawaii, so no, there’s no need to worry.

In the end, I wrote down Hal and Ruth’s information. This was their child, anyway. They should be the ones to deal with any problems. Then I added Digger, because there was one more blank to fill in, and I’d always used him as my emergency contact on job applications. I didn’t mention that two weeks earlier, we’d finally broken up once and for all. And just like with every other breakup between us, we’d had amazing goodbye sex. It was a bittersweet end, but I believed he’d always be there for me. So I wrote down his name and number, and I wanted this nurse to get off my back.