The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,14

one leg crossing over the other, a foal learning to walk, as he looked up at the sky, his forehead smeared with blood.

The onlookers tried to still the man as we continued to drive on the shoulder.

“Do you think we should call anyone?” I asked.

Ramon shook his head. “Everyone is calling,” he said, and, as if to prove his point, as we passed, I saw someone snap her phone closed and reach out for the man, touching his chest, an offering of comfort.

I turned around in my seat to watch the scene recede. The man just swayed and sat down in the road, and I watched several others start to leave the bus, one by one, startled and disoriented, and then soon they were merely toy soldiers, inky silhouettes against the darkening sky and black road, and then they were small dots on the horizon and then they were gone and again we were on our way.

4

__

We were headed into a new world. Also, we were rattled from the accident. And because Raleigh is a city of hotels, especially the little enclave of them on Arrow Drive where we drove in circles until we finally found ours, when we got back in the car to go to the adoption agency, to this mixer, we were already behind schedule.

“We’re going to be late!” I turned frantically to Ramon. “Why are we the only people on earth without a GPS system?”

Ramon resisted, along with medical treatment, most of life’s newest conveniences, which also included microwaves and light dimmers.

“It’s no big deal,” Ramon said. “Please, just check the directions again. What street is this?”

“I am checking, Ramon, I am. Oh wait.” I rolled down the window. “Excuse me! Excuse me?” I screamed out into the evening air, vaguely toward the median strip, where two men in baggy jeans walked, hands shoved into pockets, their heads pitched down.

Ramon did not slow down. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“What?”

“You’re going to ask two homeless people how to get to the mixer?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am. Because two homeless people—who are not homeless by the way, they’re fine—know more about how to get to the mixer than we do.” I started to cry.

“Please tell me you’re not crying.” Ramon looked straight ahead. “Honestly, Jesse, you have to pull yourself together.”

“Thanks for the help.” I crossed my arms.

“We are going to this thing and we need to be pulled together.”

“Actually,” I said, “what we need to be is on time.”

Or we’re not going to get a baby, I thought. I did not say it aloud, as I did not count aloud, or add up the years passing us by aloud, as if saying it out loud would make it so, but I did what I could not help, which was infuse absolutely everything with magical thinking. If we arrive on time for each event this weekend, we are that much closer to being parents. If we are late? Well, who knows what that means for our file. Perhaps lateness—along with being a bad baker, say, or cursing—would make becoming parents impossible.

“Perhaps you could look at the directions instead of crying and maybe we would get there sooner,” Ramon said. Very loudly.

“I can’t believe you’re yelling at me,” I sniffled. “We’re going to a goddamn adoption party and you can’t even be nice.”

“Adoption party. Now that sounds like a whole lot of fun.”

“I know,” I laughed. I tried again. “So, what if an adoption party was like a Tupperware party, where people brought babies and women showed up and bought them, in sets of ten say, with color-coded snap tops.” I pulled down the sun visor and checked for tear-smudged mascara. I wiped the corners of each eye with the tips of two fingers. “Color-coded,” I said again.

Ramon sighed, turning the car around.

I looked at the directions and then at the road. I had no idea where we were.

Ramon stopped and tore the directions out of my hand. He shook his head. “It’s right over there,” he said. “It’s been right there, the whole time.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“That it was over there the whole time?” Ramon pulled into the lot. “Here?”

“Yes.”

“Just what I said,” Ramon said.

“Mmm-hmm,” I said. But I knew it was some kind of metaphor. For what, and why it even mattered, who is to say?

_______

The mixer. It was in a little mall-like stretch of buildings around the corner from a gas station and a Subway, about ten minutes from Arrow Drive, a