Good Luck, Fatty

from the dregs of some hobo’s peach schnapps instead of ushering new life into the world.
     “What do you want me to do about it?” Denise snaps. She hustles for the door, leaving Orv and me frozen and confused. Without looking back, she adds, “I’ll be in the car.”
     

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    When we get to the hospital, Denise wields the Royale into a fifteen-minute parking spot at the cusp of the emergency room and orders me and Orv out.
    “Where are we going?” Orv asks with a disinterested yawn, the passenger door expectantly agape.
    I slip out of the car and wait on the sidewalk for my guardians to settle whatever nagging issue is ping-ponging between them. “Just head for the maternity ward,” Denise instructs with a flustered eye roll. “I’ll meet you there.”
    Orv quits while he’s ahead, joins me on the sidewalk and hesitantly leads the way. At a second-floor nursing station, he stops and says, “Have you got a Marie…” He stares a second at my ear. “…Cotton here?”
    The young lady behind the desk, a raven-haired beauty with a dash too much black eyeliner, consults an erasable whiteboard and tells us, “She just went into surgery. Y’all can wait in the visitors’ room, around the corner.” She waves a dagger-nailed hand to direct us.
    I tug Orv by the shirtsleeve and say, “Thanks.”
    Duncan is perched on the edge of a boxy chair by the visitors’ room entrance, his elbows on his knees, his hands steepled in prayer. He fails to notice me and Orv as we approach.
    Orv waltzes right past my father and plops down on an angular loveseat, but I figure it would be just plain rude of me to do the same. “Duncan?” I say, stopping by an empty chair beside him. His eyes are closed, and they don’t look like they plan on opening any time soon. “Dad?”
    He mouths the end of a prayer I should know by rote, the words escaping his lips as a solemn whistle. Finally his eyelids part. “Roberta!” he exclaims, then catches himself. “I mean, Bobbi, of course.” He rises and drapes his arm around me, gives my shoulder a squeeze.
    Why does this feel so awkward? I think. Shouldn’t my father’s touch be more like home?
    It isn’t.
    I wriggle away and take a seat, ask him, “How’s everything going?”
    “Fine, fine,” he replies, pursing his lips and clasping his hands behind his back, as if he’s gearing up for a round of pacing.
    I glance ahead into the room and notice a gouge-my-eyes-out-adorable set of toddler twins with white-blond hair, checkered overalls (matching, obviously), and railroad conductors’ caps. I wonder what my brother, Roy, will look like. Or my baby.
    “Mr. Cotton?” a shrill voice asks behind me.
    In the doorway is a chubby lady (maybe twenty pounds lighter than me), in seafoam-green scrubs and a surgical mask pulled down around her neck.
    “Yes?” my father says.
    The lady (a doctor, I assume) tells Duncan that my brother weighs in at nine pounds, two ounces, possesses the expected ten fingers and ten toes, and, after a bit of scrubbing by the nurses, will be happy to receive visitors. Marie, she informs him, should rest—at least for an hour or two—before the swarm of company descends.
    Duncan trails the doctor to the nursery, and Orv and I stay behind to catch Denise. Three or four minutes later, she bombs in, her eyes bloodshot and puffy. “What’s the matter?” I say.
    She whacks what looks like a clump of snow off the shoulder of her denim jacket. “Nothing.”
    “It’s snowing?” I say, unable to hide my awe.
    “Yeah, I guess.”
    Orv stands up, takes a sideways step toward the doorway. “Let’s get this show on the road, so we can get home before the bars let out.”
    Bars? Plural? This is rural North Carolina, not downtown L.A. (though I suppose Orv’s still right, since there isn’t much else to do around here but drink).
    Orv, Denise, and I form an orderly line and march to the nursery, where we peer through the glass at Duncan in his goofy gown-and-mask getup, rocking my swaddled baby brother to sleep.
    My eyes begin to pulse with tears, but I can’t tell if they’re the kind of tears that make Yiddish grandmas clutch their chests with joy or the kind that spring from a life of neglect and disillusionment.
    Orv taps the glass like patrons are warned against doing at the zoo. Then he lets out a high-pitched psst! sound, and Duncan looks up.
    I wave my father and the baby over. “Oh my God,” I murmur as Duncan tips Roy’s