“Hello?” I called out into the darkness. The sounds of crickets and of cars whooshing by on the main road were all that answered. Behind me, the dog whined plaintively, but the baby had thankfully fallen silent. “Is anyone there?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Dee! Stop calling out like that. No one’s going to answer you.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s not like he was left here accidentally.”

“He?” I eyed the pink woolen blanket that the baby was swaddled in. “Looks like a girl to me.”

“It’s a boy,” she said firmly.

“But it has a pink blanket.”

“Trust me. It’s a boy,” Ruth repeated.

She walked inside to the couch and gently laid the baby down. I trailed behind her with the plastic bags. As Ruth unwrapped the blanket, the dog trotted to her side, where it sat next to the child, who’d begun to mewl. The dog licked the baby’s cheek and it stopped fussing.

“Don’t let it do that,” I said.

“What?”

“Cover it in dog slobber.”

“The dog’s soothing him,” she said. “See? He’s stopped crying.”

The baby was wearing a mint-green Babygro that had fasteners all down the front. Ruth rubbed her hands together to warm them before reaching down and undoing each snap. She pulled the baby’s legs free of the cotton leggings and then undid the safety pin of the cloth nappy.

“Aha!” she cried. “A penis! I told you so!”

I walked over and looked down at the baby, who was, indeed, a boy. “How did you know that?” I asked incredulously. “Do you have some kind of penis sensor?” I was only half joking.

Ruth shrugged. “I saw a sign the other day.”

“A sign?”

“Yes, a blue bootie attached to one of Ma’s knitting needles.”

“So what? What did that have to do with this baby?”

“I told you. It was a sign pointing to the arrival of a boy. I just didn’t understand it at the time. Now I do.”

There she went spouting that psychic nonsense again. “Well, the odds were in your favor,” I said. “It could only be a boy or a girl. You had a fifty percent chance of being right.”

“As did you, but you were wrong.” And then she laughed. “Will you look at that? He has a birthmark on his butt that looks just like Africa.”

I peered over and had a look. “Looks more like a cauliflower to me.” I noticed that the baby was still covered with a thin layer of vernix—the white substance babies are born with—and that the piece of thread that had been used to tie off the umbilical cord looked a bit grubby. It was unlikely that the baby had been born in a hospital.