Free Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult Page B

each other cake. Leaning toward Zoe, I whispered, “I give this marriage ten years, tops.”
    Zoe laughed. “Watch it, buster. That could be us one day.” Then her watch beeped, and she looked at the time. “Oh,” she said. “It’s seven.” I followed her down the hall to the bathrooms.
    There were two, one for men and one for women, each big enough to accommodate a wheelchair—or a husband who had to give his wife a progesterone shot. The women’s room was locked, so we ducked into the men’s instead. Zoe hiked up her skirt.
    There was a bull’s-eye on the upper part of her butt, drawn in Sharpie marker. Every day for the past week, since we began these shots, I’d redrawn the circle after her shower. I didn’t want to hurt her by sticking the needle somewhere more painful than it had to be.
    I had believed there was nothing worse than giving Zoe shots in her belly—mixing up the powder and the water and pinching the skin to inject the Repronex; dialing the dose on the handy-dandy syringe-pen that contained the Follistim. The needles were tiny and she swore they didn’t hurt, even though they left bruises on her abdomen—so many that sometimes it was hard to find a fresh spot for the next shot.
    But the progesterone was different.
    First, the needle was bigger. Second, the medicine was in oil, and just looked thicker and creepier. Third, we’d have to do it every night for thirteen weeks.
    Zoe took out the alcohol swabs and a vial. I swiped the top of the vial clean, and then rubbed the center of the bull’s-eye on her bottom. “Are you going to be okay standing up?” I asked. Usually, she was lying on our bed.
    “Just get it over with,” Zoe said.
    Quickly I screwed the big needle onto the syringe and withdrew the dosage from the vial. It was tricky, because of the oil—sort of like sucking molasses through a straw. I waited till the fluid was a bit past the number on the syringe and then pushed on the plunger, to get it just right.
    Then I twisted off the needle and attached a new one we’d use for the injection. It wasn’t as wide a bore, but it was equally nasty—a good two inches had to get jabbed into Zoe intramuscularly. “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath, even though it was Zoe having the shot.
    “Wait!” she cried out. She twisted toward me. “You didn’t say it.”
    We had a routine. “I wish I could do this for you,” I told her, every night.
    She nodded, and braced her hands against the wall.
    No one ever tells you how resilient skin is. It’s meant to be tough, which is why it takes a little leap of courage to jam a syringe through it. But it was worse for Zoe than for me, so I kept my hands from shaking (a real problem at first) and plunged the needle into the center of the bull’s-eye. I made sure there was no blood mixing into the medication, and then came the hard part. Can you imagine the force it takes to push oil into the human body? I swear, no matter how many times I did this to my wife (and I did look at it that way—as something I did to her), I could feel every bit of resistance that her flesh and blood put up against the progesterone.
    When, finally, it was done, I pulled out the needle and stuck it into the Sharps container that was next to the sink. Then I rubbed the injection site, trying to keep Zoe from getting a hard knot there. Usually, now, I’d get her a heating pad, too, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen tonight.
    Zoe put everything back into her purse and pulled down her dress. “Hope we didn’t miss the bouquet toss,” she said, and she opened the bathroom door.
    An elderly man in a walker was patiently waiting. He watched Zoe emerge from the men’s room, followed by me, and he winked. “I remember those days,” he mused.
    Zoe and I burst out laughing. “Not unless he was a diabetic,” I said, and we walked back into the reception holding hands.
    The Kent County Family Court isn’t that far from Wilmington, where Zoe and I have