About twenty minutes later, Jack's eyes fluttered open, and he looked at Abigail and grinned. "Thank goodness you're awake!" she exclaimed.
"Yeah...sort of," he mumbled.
"How do you feel? Does your leg still hurt?"
"Um...not now..."
"Can I get you anything?"
"Maybe some ice water..."
Abigail poured a cup of water from the jug on the tray above his bed and pressed it to his lips. He drank greedily. "Anything else?"
"Oh, no...I'm fine..." He closed his eyes, and Abigail brushed the hair back from his forehead. "Did they tell you...what happened?"
"The doctor said you were bitten by a brown recluse spider."
"Yeah..." He chuckled. "Laid low by a creepy crawler."
"You're gonna be fine, Jack. Just get some rest." The exhaustion suddenly hit her. "I'll be back in a couple of hours," she promised her husband.
She arrived home to find Joanie just cleaning up after breakfast while Sharon and the kids watched television. "How is he?" asked Joanie.
"He was bitten by a brown recluse spider," Abigail told her.
Joanie gasped. "Oh, no!"
"He'll be fine," Abigail continued. "He just has to stay in the hospital for observation for a few days."
Abigail went into the living room to tell the children what had happened, and Sharon began to cry. "It's all my fault!" she sobbed.
"Why, of course it isn't, hon!" Abigail assured her. "Why do you think that?"
"Jack was looking for my papers when he got bit."
"That doesn't make it your fault!" Abigail embraced her sister-in-law. "It's nobody's fault. It just happened. That's all."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive!"
After a meal and a two-hour nap, Abigail returned to the hospital to find her husband sitting up in bed, watching television. "Hey, hon," he greeted his wife.
"I'm so glad you're feeling better," she said.
"So am I. How are the kids?"
"They're fine." She sighed. "Poor Sharon. She thinks this whole thing is her fault because you were looking for her papers when it happened."
"You've always been so good with her, Abby." Jack looked thoughtful. "You know what? I'll bet you'd be great working with mentally disabled adults."
"Well, you know how I was planning on going into education, but then Jackson was born and all of a sudden, all I wanted to do was stay home and take care of him." She chuckled. "Maybe when Julie starts kindergarten next year, I could go back and finish getting my degree, specializing in special education instead of regular."
"Go for it!"
A couple of days later, Jack was released from the hospital. Everyone was very glad to see him, especially Sharon, and to prove to her that he really wasn't angry at her, he took her to the pizza restaurant with the video games and let her play skee-ball for a couple of hours. He returned to work the following Monday, and within a couple of weeks, Sharon had also started working at the plant nursery and was enjoying her new job very much.
It was a cold, rainy winter, but at last spring arrived. In April Julie was registered for kindergarten for the following year, and in June, Jackson was promoted to the second grade. Abigail found it a challenge to keep both kids and Sharon occupied during the long, hot summer days. She took them for swimming lessons and to the library for their summer reading program. One afternoon in July, she received a telephone call from Joanie.
"Monica's gonna be induced tomorrow morning," she said. "Fonzie and Brenda are flying in from Milwaukee tonight. They're gonna stay with me and Chachi."
"That's nice," Abigail replied. "I'll try to swing by the hospital to visit tomorrow."
After lunch the following afternoon, she left Sharon and the kids with Beryl and drove to the hospital, where she met up with Fonzie, Brenda, Chachi, and Joanie. "She's still in labor," Joanie told her. "The doctor checked her about half an hour ago and said it'll probably be later on this afternoon."
Abigail saw that Fonzie and Brenda's other daughter, Andrea, was also there. She walked over to where Andrea sat flipping through a magazine and sat beside her. Andrea looked up and smiled.
"Hi," said Abigail. "I haven't talked to you in a long time. How have you been?"
"Fine," Andrea replied. "I've been busy redecorating the house lately. Dakota belongs to a play group that meets every Thursday morning at the park, so that's been keeping me busy, too."
"I almost ended up having a C-section with Julie," Abigail told her. "I labored all morning and didn't make much progress. The doctor checked me in the early afternoon and said that if I didn't deliver within the hour, he'd do a C-section, but then Julie suddenly came so fast he didn't even make it back in time to catch her, so Jack caught her."
Andrea frowned. "I sure hope my sister doesn't end up having a C-section."
Abigail sat with the others for several hours and was just about ready to return home to make dinner when the beaming physician emerged from Monica's room.