“Not exactly, but something like that,” Sue said. “We’re actually not supposed to dispense advice, but I just hate to see people do something they might regret so I felt the need to explain all your options. Maybe in between now and Tuesday, you’ll have thought about it a little more so you can be one hundred percent sure.”

She didn’t understand I didn’t have shit to think about. In my own family and others, I had seen too many kids running around hopelessly spotted linoleum kitchen floors with messy faces and soiled diapers, crashing into stained walls that landlords refused to paint. I had pictures of myself bathing cousins in a stained tub with tiles missing from the walls in the background. I knew my hair would be fuller and longer if only I could get my hair done every week like the popular girls. Ma made just enough that I didn’t have to suffer the shame of getting free lunch, only reduced, but that still wasn’t as good as being able to walk up to the front of the line and buy the more glamorous junk food. Once the men ran off, my aunts and cousins—and even my own ma—became old and cranky before their times. Kids weren’t the problem, but not having money was. So until I had money, I wasn’t having no kids. There was nothing to think about. My kids were going to grow up in a Cosby Show house.

Even though I knew I didn’t want the thing inside me, I put my hands under my coat to warm them once I came back outside. The commotion from the mutt’s accident had calmed down, and Big Mama had disappeared. I walked all the way to the El with my hands on top of my belly, which was still soft and loose, jiggly with my own stubborn baby fat, not yet hard and taut. I circled my fingers around my navel as I waited for my stop, well aware that something was attached to the other side. I had been so busy being mad about my situation that I hadn’t really thought about what was going on. I was just one person, one life, one soul, walking through this world by myself. Yet, something I hadn’t even realized was there at my side. Just like that silly “Footprints” story Grandma had kept on this plaque above her bed before she died and her room was mine, where Jesus was walking alongside a man all along and he didn’t even realize it. There were now two of me, one familiar and one foreign, but both strange as I finally realized what and who I had become. I still had that plaque on the wall in the middle of my Fresh magazine posters.