I hadn’t thought the rash showed much in my freckles.

“Did you see our new car?” Sam asked.

“That bus?”

“It’s more like a jeep. Four-wheel drive and everything. It’s made by a tractor company and it’s supposed to be very tough. That’s what we’re going to use to escape into the wilderness.”

“Are you going to buy a place?”

“There’s no money left. But Lichtenstein’s uncle has a cabin in the mountains in Montana. He’s going to loan it to us for the winter. He only uses it in the summer for fishing.”

“What are you going to live on?”

“My mother’s sending us fifty dollars a week.”

Carlotta sat up and smoothed the red dress over her bulk. “She also sends vitamins and iron pills.”

“For you, Ram-Tam Buddha Belly!” chuckled Sam.

We went for a slow walk. Carlotta ambled with her hands on her belly, feeling it shift, I suppose, and listening to what was going on inside of her.

We passed the goat house in the clearing. The back wall was up, supported on the sides by poles that ran into the ground. The chips and sawdust and the logs themselves had gone gray in the humid heat.

“He’s just waiting to finish it until Spike comes again,” Carlotta explained. I noticed the dark circles under her eyes, almost like bruises.

“I wish you’d go to a hospital.”

She stopped short. “I don’t want to hear any more about that.”

She pulled up a switch from an aging bush. It whistled through the air as she swiped at the trunks of the trees.

“They all have such fine reasons—doctors, you, and even Spike’s wife. My mother, too. But what it comes down to is that I’m alive and the baby is alive and you want to put us through a machine. You want a tidy cellophane package with a brand name and an address to complain to. They’d knock me out as soon as I got there and I’d wake up with a bloody bed and some nurse in an ironed brassiere peddling me a kid whose face I didn’t see when it was born. That’s the worst kind of robbery. Stealing hunks of people’s lives.”

She wouldn’t look at me. She stood still and beat at the trees with her switch. Sliced through ferns, caught her own leg. When she spoke again her voice was soft and steady.

“I want my son to live touching things that are alive or have been alive. Leather and wood and dishes that grew up between somebody’s fingers. Plastic shrivels your soul, and people who don’t care kill what they touch.