PREGNANT TERESA
It was the third time that morning.
Jane just makes it to the mens room before tossing up what was left of his meager breakfast.
He drags himself out of the FBI bathroom and flops on his couch.
"You know, my morning sickness has been over for months now," Teresa remarks.
"This is our morning sickness, Teresa. We're pregnant; not you."
"We're pregnant. Really, Jane?" she says. When he made remarks like this it made her queasy.
She adds, "And are you going to get stretch marks too?"
He leaps to his feet. "Ooh, I love stretch marks. Let me see, let me see."
She shoos him away with her hand.
"I don't have them…yet."
He looks disappointed. There was nothing, it seemed, that Patrick found sexier than stretch marks except maybe that dark line down the center of a pregnant woman's belly.
Angela had had these changes early and Patrick couldn't wait for Teresa to catch up.
She'd be relieved to emerge from this with as close to her original body as possible.
But Patrick was eager for varicose veins, hemorrhoids and the mask of pregnancy. Also lower boobs were high on his list.
When her bellybutton went from an innie to an outtie, she hadn't been able to get him off her all night.
She preferred to regard her pregnancy as a means to an end. Go through nine months of gestation and you get a prize.
Instead she had a husband who talked like a mixture of a daytime talk show, a zen birthing class and an entire aisle of Hallmark cards.
"It's a joy to see my wife ripening," Patrick says from the couch.
"Did we just get beamed back to the Old Testament or something, Jane?"
Gag me with a sippy cup, she thinks.
When she'd gotten pregnant, she had no idea how obsessed he'd be.
He was so sentimental and drippy about the subject, even Van Pelt was skeeved out.
It turns out he'd been a carny OB/GYN since his mid-teens. A very respected position passed down from the mother's side of the family to the firstborn son.
He had his own speculums and everything.
Sometimes, she'd wake up and he'd be examining her.
She'd say good morning. And he'd say he didn't like the look of her cervix at all.
She looks over at Cho. If Van Pelt was skeeved, Cho was suicidal about Jane's pregnancy personality. He'd taken to listening to his iPod all day.
She watches as Jane pulls out a stack of baby catalogs. Most days he sits for hours looking at bumpers and cribs and wallpaper.
"I don't really want to be that person, Patrick," she says. "With the middle brow nursery. I don't want the country look or the romantic look or the animals in the forest look or the circus look. I want the "cheap crib with a table until we can throw the shit out" look.
He cocks his head as he evaluates how a swatch of crushed rose velvet looks next to a piece of ivory rickrack.
"That's all about competing with other parents, Jane."
He takes out his carpet samples and deals them out on the couch.
She thinks about how terrified she is about the birth. No matter how much she begs him, she knows he'll have lighting, make-up and a camera crew.
She has a deal with Cho.
If Jane starts filming, Cho will come in and arrest his ass.
"Teresa, I think you're starting to waddle." Jane sits up and lets out a long wolf whistle.