Beau had been born on a snowy night in January. It was a date that would become infamous in the city, and even the country; a winter storm paralyzed Atlanta, stranding people in their cars for upwards of eighteen hours. When the first late-morning flakes began to fall, panic swept the city as every business, school, and government office made the regrettable decision to let out at the same time. Within minutes, hundreds of ill-prepared commuters spun out and crashed. The interstates snarled to a dead stop, clogged with wrecked cars and trapped eighteen-wheelers. Some people staggered out of their cars, abandoning them in the middle of the roadways in search of refuge in grocery stores and gas stations; others hunkered down in their shrouded vehicles, peeing into soft-drink cans and calling in frantic updates to loved ones as their cell phone batteries dwindled. Children spent the night in their school gymnasiums, their little bodies pressed together, their inadequate lightweight coats rolled into pillows. The landscape across the city resembled something from the front lawn of the White Witch, studded with terrible, silent statues of flash-frozen southerners.

Okay, I’ll admit it: that last description might involve a little bit of hyperbole. As far as I know, people had not instantly turned to ice, at least not on a Narnian scale. But the rest had been true, and it had been bad. The national media, especially in the upper latitudes of the country, swept into a fever of righteous schadenfreude as metro Atlanta shuddered to its knees. Snowmageddeon. South Parked. The Ice Age Doomsday Zombie Snowpocalypse. The citizens of Boston and Minneapolis and Buffalo watched the nightly news broadcasts with no small degree of glee as every announcer in the northern half of America reported that the snow-removal apparatus of the city of Atlanta apparently consisted of one intoxicated redneck with a plow duct-taped to his Ford F-150. You might, said the smirking announcers, reasonably wonder what calamitous amount of snowfall it took to create such an epic mess. One foot? Two? Could it be . . . three? The Yankee ridicule soared to the stratosphere as a CNN reporter—stranded at headquarters off Marietta Street—shamefacedly admitted the final snow accumulation: two inches.

Two inches. That was all it took to transform I-85 into a vast parking lot. And that was all it took to prevent me from reaching the hospital when the labor pains began.

The initial plan had been for me to call Vani, who was temporarily living with her parents, when my time was nigh. Vani would collect Rorie and deposit her with a colleague before driving me to Emory, where she’d stay with me and wipe my brow and whisper encouragement as my fatherless baby boy made his entrance into the world. But when I reached her, she sounded alarmed.

“Now?” she yelped. “Now? Kiki, have you looked outside?”