“You won’t go that long.” Elizabeth sat up on the edge of the bed and eyed her. “You’ll deliver early. You’re too big already. Are you keeping it?”
Janie shook her head. “I didn’t know that was an option.”
“Not if we’re under eighteen,” Elizabeth said. “But at least we get three squares and a bed until the kid is born. My stepdad threw me out when he found out he had gotten me pregnant.”
“What did your mama say?” A few months ago, the idea that a man would do that to his stepchild would have shocked Janie, but not since hearing a few of the girls’ stories in this place.
“Mama is an alcoholic and does whatever he says, and she never believes me, but she did call the folks here and got me into the home, again, so I guess she ain’t all bad,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll be eighteen the week after this one is born, so I’m not going back home ever. How old are you?”
“Sixteen in another month,” Janie answered.
“I was your age when the first one was born. He belonged to my boyfriend.” Elizabeth pushed a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “I wish this one did, or that I could tell the nice people who will get the baby that the father is a bastard who takes advantage of his stepdaughter.”
“What happened to your boyfriend?” Janie asked.
“He died in a car wreck two weeks before I found out I was pregnant,” Elizabeth told her. “If the baby boy that couple took home looks and acts like him, they’ve got a good child. Danny was a good man—maybe I should say boy, since he was only sixteen at the time.”
Elizabeth was right in her prediction about Janie not carrying the baby full term. On the afternoon of April 15, Janie was doing her algebra homework when her water broke. Elizabeth hurried out of the room to the only phone on the third floor—a wall-hung black one that could only call the nurse’s station. In ten minutes, a lady in white appeared with a wheelchair and motioned for Janie to sit down.
Elizabeth waved and yelled, “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Janie managed to say before the lady took her out of the room.
Janie delivered a five-pound baby girl at one minute until midnight. At three minutes after midnight, she delivered another baby girl only three ounces bigger. She got to hold her twin daughters, with their jet-black hair and tiny little fingers and toes, for one hour before the nurse took them away. Watching that woman walk out of the room with her beautiful babies was the hardest thing Janie had ever had to endure, and she swore she’d never go through it again.
Four days later Aunt Ruthie showed up at the hospital to take her to Birthright, Texas. Janie’s milk had come in that morning, and her breasts felt as if they were made of concrete. They throbbed, and the front of her blouse sagged with the moisture. For the first time since she had been taken away from her home, Janie wished that she could talk to her mother. She’d know what to do about the pain and the embarrassment of having big, sticky circles on her shirt. But her mother and father had been called to run a mission in Mexico and were packing to leave.
As Janie took one last look at the room and waved at Elizabeth, she made a vow that she would march with Greta for women’s rights when she got old enough. She shouldn’t have to leave her babies behind, and she should be able to buy birth control pills if she wanted to have them.
60 years later
Chapter One
Birthright, Texas, population forty, was the only place Noah Jackson had ever truly felt at home, so why was he dreading going back there? He kept time to the country music on his truck’s radio as he fought the Houston traffic. Once he was through town, the drive north would be a piece of cake. In five hours he’d be sitting in his great-aunt’s driveway. By suppertime he should be unpacked and moved into the big two-story house on the east end of the town.
“Town,” he chuckled. “Birthright can barely be called a community these days.”
The bumper-to-bumper vehicles finally broke up, and he could drive the speed limit. He’d promised Miss Janie, his great-aunt, two years ago that when she needed him to come stay with her and manage her affairs, he would be there.