Our family was polenta poor but our dentist, Dr. Fusco, had a father-in-law who was big with White Owl Cigars, one of the Yankees’ sponsors.
The watcher at the OR window signals to our team. We start the Apgar timer and wait.
A howl near my head. I resist waking, my mind reaching for wisps of dreams.
I saw his face when I least expected it, smiling at me from a corner-mounted television in a crowded café in Prague.
At first I thought it must be a trick of the light, some particular wavelength that shimmered and flicked with an orangish sheen across his skin, like tea gone cold in a porcelain cup.
I consider his marshmallow roasting technique: expectant, leaning forward, cautious not to catch his treat aflame as he rolls the stick between his hands like he’s molding spaghetti out of Play-Doh.
I pulled on jeans and a soft sweatshirt and stepped out of the camper into the cool morning. Mist kissed my cheeks, chilled my hands.
Boom. The sound is decidedly not normal on a day with perfect blue skies and the shoes of thousands of marathon runners smacking the pavement.
It was a mistake to ask him how he had been. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so damn polite.
I used to look in the mirror and see my father. Now it's my mother who stares back.
Whoosh! The iridescent flame ascended the sleeve of my navy Nautica sweater quickly, and I realized too late that I had brushed the hot Bunsen burner.
They weren’t Lees with the wave of stitching on the back pocket that the coolest girls wore. But as I checked out my backside in the mirror on my closet door, I didn’t care.
We missed our appointment after lingering at a fixer-upper full of possibilities, some magnificent, others terrifying. The agent made us wait outside.
I found her at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad.
Big mistake, I think, treading rough surf on an unguarded beach in Maui. The water’s too deep for a little boy, too wild for a grown woman who still doggy paddles.
The driver was trained for this, and I was high in the back, protected. But then, there it was.
“I was a drummer,” he insisted, drawing my attention from his bulging belly, skin taut like a snare but less tympanic. My first solo paracentesis had history, jangling my nerves.
I ran barefoot across the street and yelled, “I’m a pediatrician! It’s going to be okay.” It wasn’t okay.
The phone’s ring pierced my mental fog as I lay in the hospital room.
“Alexa,” I call out. “Set the timer for five minutes!”