Girlie slid out like a hot buttered noodle on that Indian-summer night in October — her father’s birthday, in fact. Chas was in the birthing room, standing next to my hospital bed. A few minutes before, he’d been complaining that his legs hurt and he needed to sit down. The midwife cleaned Girlie off before presenting her, blue-ribbon style, to us, and I thought about how one chapter in my life was ending and a new one was beginning, whether I liked it or not.
The birth was my second. My first child, Paddy, had taken seven hours to come out, but his sister arrived in exactly four hours — damn good time, I thought, for a girl. The labor came on like a whipping and culminated in that incongruous mix of cheering and screaming, a sensation indelibly recorded in my memory. When the ordeal was over and I was breathing normally again, I asked Chas to get me a roast-beef sandwich and coffee from a tiny luncheonette across the street from the hospital. It was after ten o’clock, but I didn’t care. The food tasted remarkable, as if it were the first thing I’d eaten in days.
