Nothing happened for a year, which is not unusual, and then nothing happened for another eight months, which is.

In the January of 2013 Carmen went to a clinic on the north side of San Antonio and saw a doctor named Alma Villareal, and over about four months she had every test there is.

I am going to list them, because I did not know what they were at the time and did not ask, and because I think a lot of men do not.

She had bloodwork four separate times, at specific days of her cycle, which meant taking mornings off work.

She had an ultrasound.

She had a hysterosalpingogram, which is a procedure where they put dye through your fallopian tubes and take an X-ray, and which she described to me afterward as the worst forty minutes of her life to that point, and which she drove herself home from because I had a load going to Laredo.

Every single result came back normal.

And in the May of 2013, Dr.

Villareal said the thing that I have replayed, at this point, several hundred times.

Carmen came home and told me, at the card table, in a completely level voice, because she had been rehearsing it.