And then she laid it out, and she was completely right, and it took her about ninety seconds.

“There’s a woman at your mother’s church who has been told for eight years that I couldn’t have children.

There’s your cousin Dara.

There’s your aunt.

There’s the woman who cuts your mother’s hair, who said something to me in an H-E-B in 2019 that I’m not going to repeat to you.

“In about a month, all of those people are going to find out that I turned up with a seven-year-old.

“And I know exactly what the sentence is going to be, because I have been the subject of that family’s sentences before.

It’s going to be: well, we only have her word for it. Said kindly.

Said by people who’ll never say it in front of me.

“And in about nine years, my son is going to be sixteen and he’s going to hear it from somebody at a funeral.