Neither of them had health insurance, so they did their research and set aside five grand for the delivery. Then they hit a casino to scrub the remaining stacks down to two halves. The first was a bundle of cash in less-conspicuous denominations. The second was a cashier’s check, which, within forty-eight hours, had vanished as a five-figure scoop into his filial responsibility–statute dues. With the last of the cash in smaller bills and so larger bands, Henry’d been scheming a visit to the park manager, Sandi. But just as he’d finished counting out enough to both catch up on back payments and pay off next year’s rent in a fat, fuck-you wad to plop onto her desk, Michelle’s water broke.

The it’s-a-girl cigar hadn’t been the only surprise.

Nothing could have prepared Henry for such horror and gore. Right before his eyes, Michelle was being split from the inside out. It was torture. As she panted, pushed, bellowed, shrieked, and cursed his very existence, he was utterly helpless to assuage her pain, or steal it away to endure in her place. And worse, in the delivery room he was only an obstruction, always in somebody’s way. Like a buffoon, his contributions consisted solely of echoing the nurses’ orders and squeezing Michelle’s hand when it wasn’t clawing him away. Not only was he useless and impotent, but all of her suffering—Look what you did to me, you rat bastard!—had been entirely his fault.

If guilt and futility hadn’t sufficiently crushed him, then a new word made quick work of sending him to the floor, down where he belonged. At hour twenty-two, a nurse said something about an episiotomy. Briefly, he wondered how any theory of knowledge could reconcile such prolonged physical torment, until a pair of shears was handed to the nurse. She gave them a test clip in the air, ignoring Henry’s pleas for just a minute, a second, a definition, and then—snip—he fainted.

The fall resulted in four stitches, a CT scan, and a moderate concussion. The following day, after coming to in a hospital bed next to Michelle’s, he had to determine the runner-up for most flagrant shock of this ordeal. A toss-up between the internal wildfire emblazoning a new and horrifying capacity that’d been sparked by the first time he held his baby (“A boy?—a boy!”), or the hospital bill.

The miracle of life was as gruesome as it was pricey. After Michelle’d braved twenty-six hours of labor, an emergency caesarian, and an extra night for recovery, they were well beyond their researched budget. Exhaustion did nothing to blunt her anger for Henry in the next bed, whose pansy ass had not only missed the birth of their son, but also blew up their hospital bill with his little tumble, like.