Aunt Vera lay in the center of the room on a raised bed, with blankets bundled so close around her I wondered if she could even move her arms. Aunt Vera did not look like Ruth at all. Aunt Vera, before she was pregnant, was a collection of bones held together by her skin. Her face was narrow, with pale blue eyes and long blond hair she treated with mayonnaise and cracked eggs. She looked like a lady in a fairy story, and might as well have been laid on an altar or a bed of roses. Her stomach rose out of her body like a tumor.

My father went to her and they hugged, he shifting her awkwardly so he could hold her, and he kissed her on the forehead.

“Ruth,” Aunt Vera said, and she opened her arms.

Ruth stayed back by the door. Her body strained as if someone were holding her there.

“Come here, Ruth.”

In Aunt Vera’s arms, Ruth looked too big. The roundness of her body, her bones bulging ungainly beneath her skin.

“How’s the baby?” my father asked.

Aunt Vera pressed Ruth down into a chair by the bed, and rested her hand in Ruth’s curls. “He’s going to be okay.” Her face was resplendent. “They told me,” she said, resting her pinked-up cheek on the pillow—even chalky-sick she was beautiful; I was always comparing Aunt Vera to my own mother, how young and not like a mother Aunt Vera looked—“that it’s a boy. They didn’t know I was waiting. They said, ‘Your son is just fine, Vera.’ I would have had them not tell me, but I’m so glad they did. I’m having a boy.”

“You’re having a boy.” My father was holding Aunt Vera’s free hand, his fingers closed around hers like curling bark. It had never struck me before how alike my father and my aunt looked. Their same goose-down hair, and the same laughingness about their eyes. “What are you going to name him?”

“After Dad, I think. Nick.”

I was named after my grandmother, my mother’s mother, Judith. There were tears welling in my father’s eyes, and I looked over at Ruth, my face hot. Aunt Vera had wound one of Ruth’s curls all the way around her finger, so that I could see the raised peaks of her scalp being pulled with it.

“Oh, Vera,” my father said. “I’m so glad he’s okay. I’m glad you are.”

Aunt Vera laughed, and stretched her head back on the pillow, her neck a sleek arch, pulled taut with tendons. “It was something. It didn’t hurt at all, actually. I woke up because of the wet spot. I honestly thought I pissed myself, and I was like: Okay, this is a new level of pregnancy. I’ve lost bladder control. It’s fine.” She held up her hand, as if in the moment, comforting her shaken self, “It’s fine. It’s my miracle, it’s fine. And then I go to take my panties off and there is blood—not just on the bed but like gushing out over my fingers. I thought I miscarried. I called 911, they thought I lost the baby, the girl on the phone I mean. I was crying.”