Margaret Sexton - A Kind of Freedom

He was bagging up his first batch when he got the call from Licia’s mama.

“You betta get over here to Ochsner, T.C. Labor’s starting, and it’s going quick.”

He hung up the phone, then scrambled around the house looking for a suitcase among his mama’s piles of shit. Once he found one as old as he was, he stuffed some sweats and a T-shirt inside. Licia had told him he could expect to stay up to a week sometimes depending on how the baby was delivered, and he stopped in the bathroom on his way out for his toothbrush, left a note for his mama, and hightailed it to the bus stop for the 94.

By the time he got to the fifth floor, there was an IV in Alicia’s arm and something like a shower cap on her head. He was nervous to see her that way, but the nurse pulled him aside and reassured him: The baby was showing signs of distress, not moving as much as expected. Licia had done great carrying him, and he was big enough; it made sense to just pull him now.

T.C. nodded in silence, not sure how to formulate what he was really thinking. Finally he just said it. “Is she going to be all right?”

“She’s going to be fine, sir.” The nurse handed him some hospital scrubs and a cap, and he dressed, then sat outside waiting for anesthesiology to administer the spinal.

Then the same nurse came out and led him to the operating room. The doctors had already lined the curtain up at Licia’s stomach. He hustled over to her. He kept looking around for her mama or her sister, but it was just the two of them there. He took her hand, let her squeeze his as hard as she wanted.

“Are you in any pain?”

She shook her head, biting her lip. “Just scared,” she said.

“Can you feel this?” the doctor called out from the other side of the curtain. T.C. peeked back, watched as the doctor dug a scalpel into the bottom of Licia’s belly. “Because we started.”

Licia shook her head. She seemed to calm down after that, but T.C. tried to think of something to say, to take her mind off of the fact that she was getting sliced into.

“I know you wanted to do it the other way,” he whispered.

“It’s cool, however they can get him out healthy.”

He was about to tell her not to worry, that the baby was going to be fine, that everything would be now, but a minute later, the doctor called out to them again.

“Baby here in a second, Daddy, if you want to see.” He looked at Alicia to see if he could leave her. She nodded for him to go, her eyes wide and bright. He peeked behind the curtain again, and there he was, not anything like what T.C. was expecting amid the blood and goo, but he was his, long as a Lewis and red as one too, screaming like a banshee.

“You want to cut the cord, sir?”

“Sure.” T.C. asked them if he was aiming the scissors in the right place three times before he snapped them shut. Then the nurses weighed the baby, wiped him down, wrapped him in a blanket, and handed him over. He was tinier than T.C. could have imagined. T.C. guessed he was expecting something the size of one of those newborns on TV, but Malik could fit in the palm of just one of his hands. He carried him to Alicia and she burst into tears before she even saw his face. She couldn’t hold him because of the drugs, but T.C. held him out to her.

“Look at what we did,” she said. “Let me see him. He’s perfect, isn’t he? Did they say he was perfect?”

“They said he was perfect.”

“Can you believe it?”

T.C. shook his head. The baby’s eyes were closed, and T.C. kissed his closed lids.

“This is your mama,” he said. “And I’m your daddy, and we love you. We gon’ always be here for you, you hear? No matter what.”

T.C. walked out to the waiting room feeling even taller than normal. MawMaw, Mama, and Aunt Ruby had joined Licia’s people in there. They seemed to be trying to distract themselves from waiting with an episode of Judge Judy but they jumped up when they saw him.

“Twenty-two inches.” He pointed at himself, and they laughed. “Seven pounds, fifteen ounces.”

Everybody shrieked.

“He gon’ play ball like you, T.C.,” Licia’s mama said.

“That would be real cool,” T.C. said. “Real cool.”

He walked with his own family to the cafeteria, his mama talking nonstop while they waited on the elevator.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about, boy, that baby is as fine as you were. Real fine, you hear me? Look just like you. When I get home I’m going to pull out your newborn picture, put them side by side, and you’ll see. He got that same head shape, you got to mold it though so it flattens out, and that same nose, you got to squeeze it with your fingers, not so hard that it hurts him, you hear, but just to straighten it out. My baby, a daddy.”

She paused; he could tell that whatever she was thinking was as amped-up as her speech. This was the woman who had started him on basketball, the one his friends wanted to holla at, the one he’d been so proud of those years she was around. She had come back.

“We got to exercise his legs ’cause big thighs run in our family, don’t they, Mother?” T.C.’s mama went on, turning to MawMaw, who was holding her up as if she were the one who needed a cane. When MawMaw didn’t respond, his mama kept on.

“I’m just so happy,” she repeated. T.C. stood on the other side of her, and she squeezed his hand. “You’re going to be a good daddy, none of that here today, gone tomorrow mess. You know how I know? Remember when Miss Patricia took her grandbaby in? T.C. used to go over there every day and just hold him. What kind of eleven-year-old boy got any interest in a baby? My son did. And this one’s named after Daryl too. He’s gon’ be the light of your life.”

When they reached the cafeteria, his mama went off for a doughnut, and he and MawMaw and Aunt Ruby picked a table and waited.

It was rare to be sitting in silence with Aunt Ruby there — she usually talked enough for the whole family — but it seemed as if they were all still in awe. He fumbled with the sugar packets on the table. After a while he asked them what they were thinking.

“Oh, nothing, just ruminating. Not every day you become a great-grandmother, is it?” MawMaw asked.

Aunt Ruby smiled. “No, it’s not,” she repeated. Then she paused, wringing her hands. “Times like these, I really miss our parents.”

T.C. was surprised to hear her bring them up. They had died before he was born, and neither MawMaw nor his aunt mentioned them much. All he knew was that their father had been a doctor, the first black doctor in all of Louisiana or something like that, and that MawMaw and her mama hadn’t been close when she was a girl, but something had happened along the way to change all that.

“You miss them too, MawMaw?” he asked.

“You never stop missing your parents, no matter how old you get.” She paused. “No, I expect I’ll take this grief to my grave. But I just know they would be so proud. Things have changed so much in this world. People don’t do things in the same order they used to,” she chuckled.

“Maybe they never did them in that order,” Aunt Ruby cut in, laughing too.

“I guess not,” MawMaw said, “but our parents, even though they were sticklers for the rules, I have to think they would be proud, despite themselves.”

“They would,” Aunt Ruby said, but it came out more like a question.

“I hope so,” T.C. said, setting the sugar down.

He looked up. His mama had glided more than walked back with a bib for the baby she’d picked up in the gift shop grandmama’s baby, it read in blue cursive letters. She sang the words aloud. Then she looked at T.C. with more tenderness than he remembered seeing even ten years ago when he’d been named high school player of the year. Nobody drafted kids straight out of high school then, so he chose LSU. Six months later he was home for spring break, playing pickup ball with Daryl, and he twisted his right knee, tore the ligament. His doctor told him to wait out the season, but Coach Domingue played him anyway. Back then, he listened to everything Coach said, he was so happy to be wearing the same uniform Shaquille O’Neal had worn, but the second game of the season he fell again, fractured a bone in the same knee this time. LSU paid for the operation, but he was never the same after it, and when the school realized he changed, they did too. A few months later, Katrina hit and Daryl died, and T.C. was bottomed out.