He might mean it… until she swells so much from both water and baby that she couldn’t pull her grouchy lips in if she tried. Or until she has it and her wrinkled, dark, sagging stomach won’t snap back to that smoothness he used to love to bump up against. I’ve seen them stay until the baby’s first blown-out-of-proportion birthday party or maybe even later, but something about being called “Daddy”—never mind husband—seems to choke men these days. They shove off their women and kids like suffocating pillows smashed against their faces, cutting off not only their air and vision but the rest of their lives.

At least when somebody’s suffocating, you can tell: you see their faces turn blue, their lips quiver, their eyes buck, and their throats jerk. But when a man is mentally packing his bags, the suitcase is never out until he’s already standing on the other side of the door. He suddenly gets shy whenever they have a little time alone, silently fusses with the food on his plate much more, if he’s even still eating her cooking at all. Then his nights at the corner bar start dragging on longer than they used to, well into the hours they used to be shattering headboards and calling each other’s names. Suddenly the mama he complained about when they first got together becomes strangely needy, and she starts hearing the excuse a man gives a woman he wants to have sex with without having to spend the night: “I gotta do something for my mama.” Exactly what is never explained, but she looks at him with puppy-dog eyes anyway and says, “Okay, baby, take your time.” It’s all over by the time she starts first dropping hints, then actually saying, “You need to start bringing some more money into this house.” If the kids are lucky (and I wasn’t), they’ll be too young to remember the arguments filled in by the swish sound of flying objects, the lightning-bolt crack of slammed doors, and of course the face slaps. Finally the story ends when a Greyhound bus or loaded-down car hits the highway, and the woman is left staring into a window rather than out of it.

I know the exact moment my baby came inside me: it was on October 11, 1992.

That was the night I met Rasul, and the night Renelle Washington came home early from work with a new surprise birthday cake for her husband Leroy. An Entenmann’s German chocolate cake, thirty-six candles standing up sharp and wicked like pitchforks. The whole sixth-floor apartment still held on to the burnt stink from Renelle’s earlier attempt at “homemade” cooking. Three months into another birth, she had tortured a Duncan Hines chocolate box mix into volcanic rock that morning; its nasty failure predicted the baby’s fate.