The movement was in me, but it wasn’t me. It was another little something, a someone, willfully choosing to flex his flippery future arms, or whatever it was he had by then. It was a choice, but I hadn’t made it. It was inside me, and mine, but I did not control it.
Right exactly then, my son started. He became real in ways he hadn’t been five seconds before. Much realer than he had been almost four months back, when I was cleaning up my hotel room in Atlanta, finding only one used condom but remembering two sexes. A second condom had been on the bedside table, speaking to good intentions but still mint-in-package. Now I could feel him making small decisions inside me, and I already knew his name. It was a nerd reference so obscure that nobody but me would ever get it.
“Hello, Digby? Is that you?” I asked him, listening in that same odd, inward way for a sound that was not a sound.
It came again, as if in response. Alien and tiny, unfeelable under any other circumstances.
“Oh, my stars and garters, you’re really there,” I told him, though Late Bloomers said he was a few weeks away from hearing yet.
Quickening, my book had called it, and it was the perfect word, because when he quickened, my whole life sped up, too. I was pregnant, and this baby didn’t even have a crib. Right now he had only me. I had to tell people. My Tuesday gamers ran a meal train every time someone had a baby or got sick. I’d made umpty casseroles and quarts of soup over the years; now I would need a turn.
Most important, I had to tell my family. Fast. My parents needed time to get over their initial shock before the baby came, so Mom could teach me to breast-feed and Keith could show me how to properly install the car seat that I didn’t own yet.
Every Sunday afternoon Rachel hosted a family luncheon after church. I’d sat through more than a dozen since I’d gotten pregnant, eating shrimp scampi or beef medallions for two and keeping my mouth shut. This Sunday, I resolved, I would simply say it.
Something sure smells good, and hey, I’m spawning. Boom and done.
I’d pre-forgive Mom and Keith for any less-than-ideal initial reactions. They were going to be so embarrassed. I’d bright-side it for them, reassure them that I was healthy and happy and remind them that they were finally getting a second grandkid. In the end they weren’t going to love Digby any less for being fatherless or browner than they were. But the end seemed a long way off.
Rachel would back me up, but the minute we were alone, I’d get an earful from her, too. She’d be pissed at me for setting a bad example for her thirteen-year-old daughter. So would her husband, probably, but screw him. Of every jackass currently stomping around on this blue planet, Jake Jacoby was the last one who was allowed to have an opinion about me.
I’d eat whatever crap they needed to shovel at me, and then they’d rally around me. Around us. They had to, especially with Rachel there to make them. Rachel could rally so fast and so hard, and I had to be ready for that, too. Before Sunday I needed to go online and order everything I wanted for a bright blue Superman-themed nursery, before Rachel could swoop in with trendy neutrals and distressed wood and those horrifying Swedish animals from GOOP.
Sunday night I’d call my grandmother down in Alabama. If Birchie had been any other small-town ninety-year-old southern lady, the thought of telling her might make me cringe, but she was her singular self. Sure, Birchie lived stiffly, and by rules, but they were rules of her own making. That call seemed more like a reward I’d earn by weathering the storm of telling Rachel and my parents.
When I told Birchie about Digby, I knew that my prim grandmother would be . . . joyful. Joyful that she and I would not be the last of the Birch line after all. Joyful in the same soaring, secret way that I was—and right now? Feeling him move? I was practically giddy with it. I lay in the darkness, reveling in the flutter of this tiny, late, imperfectly got piece of what I’d always wanted.
Now I could hardly wait to call her. She had lived a version of this story: a single son, born when she was past thirty, that she had raised alone. Granted, she’d been a young widow. She’d had a proper husband there for the conception part. Even so, Birchie would understand better than anyone else how, in the wake of my son’s beginning, I felt like my life was beginning, too.
I had no way to know that seven hundred miles south of me, the grandmother I longed to tell was coming to her end.
2
Birchville, Alabama, had its own origin story, so entwined with my grandmother’s that there was no way to tell one without the other. The town itself was founded by Birchie’s grandfather, Ethan, the eldest son of an old Charleston shipping family who had acted as blockade runners in the Civil War. They kept their money safely overseas, surviving the Late Unpleasantness with their fortune intact, if not their reputation. Their newly destitute social circle had small appreciation for southerners who had chosen prudence over patriotism.
By 1874 Ethan, who had been a child during the war, was chafing under the uncomfortable combination of wealth and the Old Guard’s condemnation. He wanted a fresh start, and he was not the only young man in Charleston who felt that way. He left, taking several sons from the old families with him: a Darian, an Alston, and two of the impoverished Mack boys. The Macks had sunk all their money into Confederate government bonds; that family especially was so bitter that it penetrated the bloodline, genes-deep.
Ethan founded Birchville on the bones of a burned-out ’Bama town that had lost its charter in the war. He rebuilt the church first, then perched a big white Victorian house on the hill across the road. When both buildings were finished, he sent back to Charleston for his girl, to marry her in one and move her into the other. My great-grandfather, Ellis Birch, was born in that house, and my grandmother was born inside it, too.
At 9:00 a.m. on any given Sunday, Birchie would be sitting at her formal dining-room table in that very house, watching her town wake up through the big bay window. Behind her, on either side of the doorway to the kitchen, portraits of her grandfather and father flanked her, watching their town as well, stern and benevolent. Ethan looked proud, after the fashion of portraits in his day. Ellis looked even prouder, plus he had those creepy Uncle Sam eyes that seemed to rove around the room. I had never liked eating in the dining room under his painted gaze, but it was the Lord’s day. Birchie would no more eat a Sunday meal in the cozy breakfast nook than she would take up Prancercise. I could imagine her there perfectly, spine ramrod straight, ankles crossed, eating her egg and sipping coffee with Wattie Price, her bosom friend.