There’s total silence on the other end, so I back the car all the way out of the garage, thinking that maybe I’ve been disconnected or I’m just not getting a good signal, but then I hear a man’s voice say, “I’m sorry, but your mother didn’t survive.”

“What? Wait a minute. Let me back up a little more.” And I do. I back this car all the way out into the fucking street. “Now, could you repeat that, and please speak a little louder?”

“I said your mother didn’t survive. She’s passed on.”

I heard him the first time. But. I was hoping that in between that sentence and the next, maybe she might’ve been strong enough to fool them by taking one more breath. Mama’s good at that. Not giving up. I wonder if they checked her carefully, because she could be napping. These asthma attacks wear her out. She’s told me that a million times. She could just be asleep. Somebody should check. I open my mouth to tell the doctor this, but no sound comes out. Absolutely nothing. And then I pound the steering wheel with my fists until I have no energy left. The phone falls to the floor of the passenger’s side and my head drops against the steering wheel. But I have to wait. Right here. In this driveway. In this car. Until I can move. Until I can figure out how to get through this thick loud silence.

One Entrance to Another

“It’s moving right now, Cecil, put your hands here and feel,” Brenda say.

She’s next to me, laying on her back. At first, I’m scared—I ain’t felt no baby move inside nobody’s stomach in thirty-five years—but the next thang I know she taking my hand and putting it against her warm smooth skin and my fingers is spread out wide as they can go and she slides it around and then I feel a little hump and it gets higher and then moves right under my hand and I jump. “Hey!”

Brenda laughs. “Wait, I think he’s over here now.”

“He?”

“He or she. It can’t be but one or the other, Cecil.”

And, sure enough, here he come again! This feels weird. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for Brenda, being that it’s swimming around inside her and all. “Seem like it would kinda hurt,” I say.

“It feels good, to be honest with you. But it sure don’t hurt. Sometimes it tickles. Praise God.”

I slide my hand around her big belly some more and wait and wait and don’t nothing happen for the next five or ten minutes.

“She sleep. Show’s over,” Brenda say, but don’t move my hand. “I’m sleep, too,” she says, and I just lay right here listening to her breathe till it sound like a light whistle, and then I roll over and do the same until that alarm clock whistle a little louder and I know it’s 3:30 A.M., time to get up and go to work.