"What's wrong?" Doug asked Jo after they'd put the yearbooks away. "You got real quiet all of a sudden there."
"Nothing, really." Jo sighed. "Doug, do you ever think it's weird that we're so far apart in age?"
"It's never mattered to me." His brown eyes were serious. "Does it matter to you?"
"Well...no, not really. At least I thought it didn't. I guess it's just that after looking at these old yearbook pictures, I feel like I'm in some kind of time warp or something."
Doug laughed. "It's funny you said that, 'cause when I was in my twenties, this movie called 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' came out, and there was this dance called the 'Time Warp' in it."
"You used to watch 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show'?" Excited, Jo had forgotten about the yearbooks.
"Oh, yes! We'd dress up like the characters, throw stuff at the screen...it was a real blast!"
"We used to do that too!" Jo grinned. "You know, maybe we don't have such a big generation gap, after all!"
"Well, here goes," Jo said, lying back on the table as she'd been instructed. Because of her age, Dr. Hanson had wanted her to undergo an amniocentesis to rule out genetic abnormality in the baby. Doug held her hand as the technician smeared cold gel on her belly, and a moment later, they were looking at their baby's tiny form on the screen, marveling at the movements of its arms and legs.
"Here goes," said the technician. Jo gasped as the needle plunged into her abdomen, and she and Doug both held their breath as they watched it appear on the screen. They both heaved sighs of relief when it was removed a couple of seconds later.
"Go home and rest for the remainder of the day," the technician told Jo as she placed a bandage on her abdomen. "Don't go to work tomorrow. We'll call you as soon as we have the results."
When they got home, Jo went right to bed. Doug made her soup and brought it into the bedroom and sat beside the bed while she ate it.
"Do you feel all right, hon?" he asked.
"I'm fine," Jo told him. "Just glad that's over with."
"Tell me about it." He chuckled. "We've got ourselves a real live wire, haven't we? It squirmed around so much I was afraid the needle was gonna hit it."
"I was too," said Jo.
"I remember the first time I felt Clay move." Doug's eyes became slightly glazed over. "Mary Frances and I were sitting on the sofa watching TV together and she took my hand and put it on her belly. 'Wait just a minute', she told me, and sure enough, I felt him move after a few seconds. That was awesome!"
"Did you watch him being born?" asked Jo.
"I sure did! It happened in the wee hours of the morning. Mary Frances had been in labor for hours. She was exhausted, poor thing. They gave her an epidural, and that let her sleep for a few hours. They came and woke her up when it was time for him to be born. He was all limp and blue when he first came out, and it scared me a little bit, but after I cut the cord, he started moving around and crying. That was the happiest moment in the world for us." His voice shook a little, and he had to wipe tears from his eyes. Jo knew that, even after all the years, he still wasn't completely over his first wife's tragic death.
"Jamie was almost born in the back seat of the car," Jo told her husband. "I waited until it was nearly too late to tell Rick that it was time to go to the hospital, and it was pouring down rain and there was an accident ahead, and by the time we got to the hospital, she was already crowning. She was born in the emergency room. We never made it to the maternity floor."
"There ain't no messing around with her, is there?" Doug laughed. Over the months, he'd developed a fond affection for his stepdaughter, coming to see her as the daughter he'd never had. He admired her spunk and enthusiasm and felt protective of her.
After lunch, Jo took a nap. Sometime later, she heard Clay come home from school and disappear into his bedroom. An hour or so after that, Jamie also arrived home and came into Jo and Doug's bedroom.
"Are you all right, Mom?" she asked.
"I went for my amniocentesis today," Jo told her. "They told me to go to bed for the rest of the day."
"Isn't that where they stick a needle in your belly?"
"Yep."
"Wow! Didn't that hurt?"
"It wasn't that bad."
Jamie grimaced. "I sure hope I never have to have that done."
"Don't have any kids after you're thirty-five," Jo said wryly.
Jo was at work when they called her with the results of her amniocentesis. "Everything came back completely normal," the nurse told her.
"Thank God!" Jo exclaimed.
"I can also tell you the baby's sex, if you want to know," the nurse continued.
"Yeah, that would be cool," Jo said after only a moment's hesitation.