We’d been seeing each other about six months when the pregnancy happened. It was my decision to keep the baby, but we needed Paul’s family’s help, which came with the proviso that we get married. Paul was poor but secretly harboured dreams of being rich, whereas I was poor and secretly harboured dreams of being glamorously poor. Poor with taste. Jean Genet poor. Paul ended up starting his own contracting business when Ashley was twelve, and it took off, and ever since then we’ve found ourselves in a totally different stratum of life. But when you grow up with nothing, it becomes a pathology. Paul teases me that I wear out my underwear so much I need a belt for them. I’m perfectly content to repair a snapped-off rear-view mirror with duct tape, or use a hair dryer that sparks. I’m clumsy and break things all the time, which I sometimes think is because I’m still not used to having many things, things not made of plastic, things like delicate vases perched on bookshelves and lamps on end tables.

I grew up urban poor, but Paul was a proper redneck, sharing a bedroom in a plywood-floored bungalow with three brothers a half-hour outside of Amarillo, where you could write your name in dust on the windshield of a car if you left it un-driven for more than three days; a gentle and earnest redneck who’s happy to fall asleep to a woman reading poetry to him. Everything about Paul is oversized. Hands, ears, face, heart. If I had to describe him in a word, it would be ‘concerned.’ Concerned about me, my happiness, if I’m too cold, too hot, too quiet, concerned about Ashley, about her grades, her friends, her haircuts, concerned about the future, our finances, global warming, concerned about what his neighbours think of him, about his mother getting older, sick, dying, his alcoholic brother, concerned about being good, being right, being on time. I am decidedly unconcerned.

As Paul climbed out of bed and padded over to the ensuite to pee, I picked the turgid essay back up, but before I could find my place in it, I stopped. It was still there. I could still hear the sound. It wasn’t my imagination. There was a very low, reverberating tone, only just perceptible below the echoing of Paul’s urine in the toilet bowl, the soft din of the air conditioning, and the muffled FaceTime conversation coming from Ashley’s room down the hall. It was quite possible that the sound had been there all along and I had just never noticed. But now that I had, it struck me as peculiar.

Paul flushed and walked back into the room. What’s wrong? he asked.