Cat’s In The Cradle…

Monday night, I am sitting on the couch with the Nearly when he says:
“I found the stroller we should get.”
Excuse me?
“You’ll never get the cats to ride in a stroller,” I say.

An hour later, the Nearly calls me over to where he is sitting at his computer:
“Let me show you,” he says, pulling up a picture of a stroller. A picture he has bookmarked.
“Huh,” I say.
He tells me he liked this one, but it was too expensive. This one doesn’t have wheels that pivot.
“Is that important?” I ask. I do not know, having never before in my lifetime shopped for strollers.*
The Nearly looks at me pityingly. He continues:
“I almost picked this one, that you can run with.”
“But we don’t run,” I remind him.
“I might,” he says.
“Ah.”
“But I finally decided on ‘The Flyer.’ Isn’t it great?”
“Lennie will love it,” I say.
“It’s not for Lennie. It’s for The Baby.”
I look at the Nearly in alarm:
“Are you pregnant?”

Later still, as the Nearly tells me about his day, he reveals that he has started keeping a list of his favorites among the children’s books at work** so that we can buy them for “our kid.”
“There’s a great one about a cat, where the moon is a saucer of cream,” he says.

Yesterday, Tuesday, I woke up unable to lift my neck from the pillow. I thought I had emerged from the accident unscathed—but no. As it happens, my neck hurts. Also my shoulders. Also, I have a headache. I find that if I keep my neck and shoulders stationary as I move—easily accomplished by pretending to be a robot—I am able to perform simple tasks.
I am at work, performing simple tasks, when the phone rings. It is the Nearly.
I know what you are thinking—he wanted me to stop on my way home from work and pick up some unvarnished pine for the bassinet he is whittling. But no. He is incoherent with pain. He keeps saying my name, and that he doesn’t know what to do, and that it hurts, his lower back on the right side, GOD GOD IT HURTS.
Then he hangs up. I am out of my chair so fast and hard that if I had been in my new, tiny cubicle I would have hit the opposite wall and knocked myself cold. So much for simple tasks—I scramble down several flights of stairs and sprint outside to my car, which was easy to find in the parking lot, as it is the only one bearing the Mark of the Beast.***
I race home, bound up the stairs sobbing from pain (neck) and fear (possibly dead Nearly Fiance) and slam through the door to our apartment to find the Nearly…

…reading comic books on his computer.

I stood there, panting, while he explained that the pain—the worst pain of his life—had diminished. I made him describe the pain. I made him show me the location of the pain. I told him it sounded like a kidney stone, but could be something else. We called the NurseLine and were told to go to Urgent Care when it opened at 5:00. I went back to work. The Nearly took a nap. I returned at 5:00 and drove the Nearly to Obviously-Not-So-Urgent Care, where the doctor asked him to describe the pain, asked him to demonstrate the location of the pain, and told him it sounded like a kidney stone, but could be something else. Thus in agreement, we paid the doctor and went home.

While we were in the waiting room, the Nearly turned to me and said:
“So, you might have noticed that I have been thinking about the kid thing. It’s probably been pretty obvious.”
“Oh?” I said.

I am a model of restraint.

*Even when pregnant, I couldn’t so much as glance at a onesie without genuflecting superstitiously.
**He works at an elementary school.
***Monday—the day of my accident—I got Dinah’s license plates. The number on them? 666.