“Minx is going there this morning to have it cleaned up and make sure the lights and water are turned on.” He reached across the seat and found my hand and held it. “Come over here. Bring him too. Get over close to me.” I moved to his side. The highway opened up before us, two lanes of beautiful new asphalt highway that led all the way to Guntersville Lake and on to Atlanta. All the way to our new home. I looked down at the sleeping baby. The most beautiful baby in the world. I stood up on the seat on my knees and very very carefully laid him down in the basket in the backseat and turned back to my husband and cuddled up beside him. “Yes, it’s me and I’m in love again,” he started singing. “Ain’t had no loving since I don’t know when.” He was laughing and singing and driving our blue Chevrolet down the highway as fast as it would go.

We got to Atlanta in five hours and went straight to the new apartment. Minx and Henry were waiting for us with two bottles of champagne and the floors waxed and flowers on a table Malcolm’s mother had sent up for the hall. There was a small living room and a dining room and a modern kitchen with lots of shelves. There was a staircase that led to an upstairs hall and two bedrooms and a bathroom. It was a palace compared to the garage apartment where we had lived the first year of our marriage. The master bedroom was already furnished with a new bed and a beautiful hooked rug that Minx had made for us. We plugged in the record player and drank the champagne and Minx carried the baby everywhere and would not put him down. She and Henry had never been able to have a child although they had been married for twelve years. “I will be his fairy godmother,” she kept saying and Henry went out for more champagne and we drank that too.

Later, when Minx and Henry left, I fed the baby breast milk now abundantly laced with alcohol and he went to sleep and Malcolm and I went into the bedroom and lay down upon the bed and made him a baby brother. “I love you,” I kept saying. “I love you to death. I love you so much I can’t stand it.”

“Do it like that,” Malcolm said. “Do it harder. Like that. That’s the way. That’s what I want.”

“Do you love me? Say you love me. Swear you love me. You have to love me.”

“Of course I love you. Don’t move. Make it last, Rhoda. I want to make it last.”