Page 44 of Knocked Up

The clinic supply sink was between the sterilizer and the shelf where the fluid bags lived. It was stainless steel with a wide lip, and a mirror somebody screwed to the wall in about 2004. I'd cried in that room twice, both times in 2017.

I lined them up on the lip of the sink. Violet started a timer. We stood under a fluorescent tube with the sterilizer ticking as it cooled.

"Three minutes," Violet said.

"It says two."

"The other one says three. We're going with the longest number in the room."

"That's not how any of this works."

"Tessa Anne, I've waited my entire adult life for exactly these three minutes and you are not going to shorten it. Do you want me to talk or not talk?"

"Talk."

So she talked. A foster named Kimberly, a rash, forty-one volunteers, a dog in Arvada with a name she disapproved of. I stood with both hands on the edge of a supply sink and heard about six percent of it. At some point she stopped. Neither of us said anything and the sterilizer ticked.

"Forty seconds," Violet said. "I'm going to hold your arm."

She held my arm.

Three of three. They were not shy about it either. There is a version of this where it's faint and has to be taken to a window. This was three tests on the lip of a sink announcing themselves like a fire alarm.

Violet put both hands over her face and made a sound like a kettle.

I did not make any sound at all. I looked at three pieces of plastic and did the only thing my brain had available, which was inventory.

Five bottle babies. A lease on the land that renews in August and a man named Grant Fessler with nice shoes. $1,100 of parvo on a credit card and an equipment payment sixty days out. A twenty-one-year-old brother who thought I had it handled, because I'd made a career out of him thinking that.

And a man on a one-year contract with an out at the deadline who had already left once.

"Say something," Violet said.

"I'm running the numbers."

"Say a human sentence."

"I can't," I said. "There isn't one."

At the time every single one of these felt like a plan.

"It could be phantom," I said.

Violet took her hands off her face.

"Pseudocyesis. False pregnancy. It's a hormonal event. The animal shows every clinical sign, mammary development and nesting. They'll mother a shoe and there is nothing there."

"Tessa."

"I've treated it four times this year."

"Tessa Anne Reeves."

"It's a documented condition."

"In dogs," Violet said. "It's a documented condition in dogs. You are not a dog. You are a thirty-one-year-old woman standing in a supply closet. There are three tests on that sink and none of them are for dogs."

"You don't know that. That one might be."