The Man with a “Preggie” Pager – January 1981 – SPECIAL EXPANDED EDITION WITH MORE ILLUSTRATIONS AND PHOTOGRAPHY – BETWEEN THE TRACKS – $19.99

In the quiet dawn of a Saturday morning in January 1981, the first light of the morning gently touched the frost-kissed windows of Maplehurst Court in Knoxville, a place Conner Matthews had called home for the past six months—the once-majestic 1929 apartment building that housed the divorced, the retired, and several poor graduate students.

The air was thick with anticipation, a symphony of mundane and extraordinary playing in harmony.

It was a Saturday like any other – the smell of the dumpster and trashed beer cans wafting through the open window, the reassuring hum of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ stirring the silence, and Conner was caught in an intricate dance between domesticity and duty.

His hands were busy sifting through and sorting the laundry destined for Mrs. Liu when an insistent vibration broke the rhythm – it was the “preggie” pager.

He wore two pagers then – one that linked him to the ruthless demands of his job, reaching out to him from beyond the clouds; and another, reluctantly worn but equally important, that bound him to an unfolding chapter of one of his new friends’ lives.

At 31, freshly divorced and allergic to commitment, Connor wore the pagers on his well-worn service belt with the giant American flag belt buckle: one a SAT pager for work business emergencies on the right side, and on the left side, mysteriously, a “preggie” pager.

No one expected the company’s newest executive to monitor contractions like an anxious father-to-be.

Four months earlier, he’d arrived at corporate headquarters and silently declared war on convention. While others chose sleek modern furniture from GSA catalogues, he rescued a retired chairman’s weathered desk from surplus, along with the desk chair and two side chairs. The whispers began immediately: “Watch this one carefully. He’s not like the others.”

And watch they did—especially Brenda, the unusually young female Chief of Staff.

Connor methodically charmed the secretarial fortress guarding the executive floor, remembering children’s names and bringing anniversary flowers to a 40-year veteran. He asked questions instead of making proclamations. He listened when others spoke.

“He understands who really runs this place,” Brenda confided to her assistant, while discreetly observing him daily.

Then came the evening when Brenda approached him as he prepared to walk home.

“Got a minute?” she asked. “I have an office situation that requires your… unique perspective.” Her eyes lingered on his belt where, hours later, the “preggie” pager would find its permanent home—a silent testament to complications no corporate manual could possibly address.

“It’s Audrey,” Brenda said, as if that explained everything.

In the microcosm of our office, it did. Audrey from her team, who wore gray cardigans year-round and brought in cupcakes on birthdays but never ate any herself, who’d recently started coming in late and leaving early, her hands fluttering around her stomach as if checking for a pulse.

I’d noticed the change, but in those days I made a point of seeing nothing that might require intervention.

Brenda explained that Audrey’s “situation” was complicated, a term our office reserved for family deaths and embezzlement, and sometimes both.

Her pregnancy was high-risk, and she was alone in the city—no mother, sisters, or childhood friends to take her calls at midnight. She did have a six-year-old daughter, Emma, who alternated weeks between Audrey’s walk-up and her ex-husband’s place in Oak Ridge.

“Her ex is not an option,” Brenda said, and her tone made me hope she meant he’d absconded to Portugal or at least the adjacent postal district. “He’s a nightmare,” she added, and then she told me: the pregnancy was the result of a rape, weeks after their divorce was finalized, under circumstances no one wanted spelled out but everyone could imagine.

“Why me?” He asked, and hated how small his voice sounded.

Brenda sighed. “Audrey trusts you. And, well—” she shrugged at my tie, which was coordinated with my shirt for once, “so do the women on this floor. You don’t leer, or interrupt, or—” She let the sentence collapse. “She needs someone in case… something happens. You are trusted.”

Conner thought of his reputation: a man with two pagers and no discernible personal life, the one who walked home alone and ate dinner at the Thai place three nights a week because it was close, who rode the bull at Desperado’s on weekends for free drinks, that is, if he wasn’t thrown off in two minutes.

Once, this had seemed like evidence of freedom, or at least clever risk management. Now he was being recruited for a job that required actual presence.

“That’s all. Think about it, please,” Brenda said, handing him the pager. “Thank you, Conner. You are appreciated.”

He nodded. “Of course,” he said, and he thought they both knew it was less an answer than an automatic reflex, the way you say “bless you” to a stranger’s sneeze.

Conner’s first official “preggie” duty arrived that Saturday morning, when Audrey called and asked if he could watch Emma for a few hours. She sounded embarrassed, like a telemarketer forced to read a script. “It’s the nausea,” she said. “I just need to lie down, and I don’t want her to see me—like this.”

Emma was waiting in the lobby with Audrey, clutching a plush unicorn and swinging her legs so hard her sneakers left black scuffs on the tile. She looked up at him with the frank, almost bored gaze of a child who has met too many adults to bother with awe.

“Hi,” she said, and then, “Do you have a dog?”

Conner told her no, but there was a dog park nearby, and that they could watch other people’s dogs, if she wanted. She nodded, the way her mother did, as though she’d already anticipated every possible outcome and accepted this was the least bad of them.

They spent an hour at the playground/dog park, then fed sparrows at the bakery next to Mrs. Liu’s, the one place he frequented weekly. Emma asked him why he lived alone, and he told her he was waiting for the right roommate.

She said her mom hated being alone, too, but sometimes it was better than crying in front of people. She said this as if she were giving him the weather report, and he realized no one had coached her to be anything but honest.

When Conner brought her home, Audrey was in a white, tattered bathrobe, her brunette hair slicked back and her face bare but calmer than he’d ever seen it.

“Thank you,” she said, and he shrugged like he got requests like this all the time. She pressed a Tupperware of banana bread into my hands, as if to formalize the transaction.

After that, the pager went off every couple of weeks. Sometimes Audrey just needed a ride home from the doctor; sometimes it was a plea to go for groceries when she couldn’t bear the stares and was exhausted from it all.

The pager buzzed at 11:17 PM one night.

“Emma’s with her dad. The apartment echoes. Could you just… be here until I fall asleep?”

He arrived twenty minutes later with a rental movie. While the popcorn popped, he mixed powdered lemonade in her kitchen. They watched half the film before her breathing deepened, her head heavy against his thigh. He waited until she was fully asleep, then carefully shifted her onto a pillow, tucked her grandmother’s Cherokee Rose quilt around her shoulders, and locked the door behind him with the spare key she’d given him “just in case.”

Those late errands revealed a Knoxville he’d never known existed—flower shops with back doors that opened for the right knock, streetwalkers who nodded at him with growing familiarity, college kids stumbling home from bars who parted around his purposeful stride, and the kitchen wisdom that chamomile steeped exactly four minutes, no more.

He memorized which blocks required vigilance after sunset, which corners harbored shadows deep enough to swallow a man whole. And he discovered, through trial and error, how to navigate conversations with a six-year-old who already knew that not all stories ended with everyone safe at home.

At work, nothing changed, and everything did.

The floor’s ecosystem shifted around Conner. Brenda’s nod would bring him into the conference room for discussions previously above his pay grade. Tupperware containers of still-warm brownies arrived on his desk, along with handwritten notes from the administrative team. One Tuesday morning, he found an envelope containing a gift certificate to the Regas Restaurant—the General Manager’s wife had heard about “that lovely young man who helps poor Audrey.”

Conner was still the man with the preggie pager, but now it felt less like an anomaly and more like a credential.

Some mornings, Conner would sit at his desk in the coveted corner office and watch the sun creep over from the Great Smoky Mountains and across the frosted windows, and he’d imagine Emma and Audrey somewhere out there, working through their own routines.

Conner would wonder if this was all anyone hoped for: to be the person someone else could call, even if only for a while, even until things stopped being quite so complicated.

It was a small story, in the end, but it changed Conner. It made him notice things—who was struggling, who needed a hand, who was always last to leave the office because they didn’t want to go home.

Conner found himself lingering in the break room, asking questions, listening. He found himself wanting, for the first time in a long time, to be worthy of the trust someone else put in him.

And when the time finally came—Audrey doubled over on her kitchen floor, labor hitting earlier than ever expected—there was no time for hospitals. He rushed to the scene. Running all the way. He got Emma across the hall to Mrs. Patel, then called 911 while Audrey’s water broke across the linoleum.

Officer Royce arrived before the ambulance, looking as terrified as Conner felt. “I see the head,” Royce whispered, his voice cracking as they knelt in the mess of fluid.

Audrey clutched Officer Royce’s arm, her knuckles white as she unleashed a torrent of curses that would make a sailor blush. The baby emerged into Conner’s waiting hands just as the EMTs burst through the door, their urgency colliding with the sudden stillness of new life.

Conner stared down at the blood-slick infant, his stomach lurching even as something warm bloomed in his chest. He and Royce exchanged a shaky high-five over Audrey’s exhausted form before both men bolted for the kitchen sink.

“First delivery?” Royce asked between heaves.

“Yep, just training videos,” Conner managed.

Months passed. Audrey traded being a secretary for the District Attorney’s office. A few months later, her bar exam results arrived the same week as the baby’s first tooth.

Several years slipped by.

Then one Tuesday morning, Conner glanced up from his phone to find Audrey standing twenty feet away in the Knoxville Federal Courthouse lobby, her hair now streaked with silver at the temples.

When they hugged, something settled inside him—a story finding its rightful conclusion. She beamed as she told him Conner Royce was at the top of his class, and how Emma had just hung curtains in her first-year apartment at Maplehurst, already talking about the LSAT.

Read inspiring stories of faith, resilience, and love in Darryl Armstrong’s newest collection of short stories – BETWEEN THE TRACKS.

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