Mitchell Jackson - The Residue Years

But wait, the retrograde choices, they just might be in my genes. Case in point, my biological pops. Dude had three babies in less than a year by women who lived on the same block. One year, same block! Who could or would concoct such a tale? My mom was the last of the threesome, claims she didn’t know about the others until right after her grand old valedictorian speech (besides birth, the proudest moment of her life), the one she made the night after she found out about tiny fetus me. And talk about timing, this was a few years after the first Supreme Court abortion ruling, a couple years after Roe v. Wade , and, and, and, if you add to that my pop’s apparent predilection for barebacking, to the assured detriment of Mom’s nursing school dream, you can see how I could have easily ended up a coat hanger victim or the refuse of some clinic. To her credit, though, Moms wasn’t having it. She traded in plan A for plan B and set about becoming the best single mother she could.

At moments, the best single mother there is.

If we all could be so selfless.

It’s cold as an Eskimo’s nuts outside, colder, but the weather hasn’t thinned the crowd. We (the we being me and Kim) check in and luck out on seats beside an über-pregnant woman that’s putting a whole lot of pressure on the seams of her long dress. The lady has two tykes with her, neither of them old enough to tie their shoes. Old enough to tear up some shit, though, and they’re working at it with toddler flair: tugging things off the tables, pushing the cold button on the water cooler, ripping jagged pages out of pamphlets. On a break from a reign of infant terror, one of them wobbles over by me and yanks at my pants. Are you okay? he says, craning up and flashing a jagged-spaced grin. Yes, I’m okay, I say. Mommy say we get grocery, he says. You take us get grocery? Before I can answer, his mother approaches shouting his name (something multisyllabic a linguist would have a tough time pronouncing) and draws the little man backwards. These boys, she says, and shakes her head. Oh my gosh, my boys.

The infant attraction ain’t new. That’s always been me, the one who turns colicky babies into cooing machines, who attracts the little ones like the North Pole magnetic pull. My mom said it’s cause I got a good soul, that babies can see though your blunders and masks right into the maw of you, but little multisyllable, he must not sense my intentions, the visions I’ve had of discarding one last life.

A duo manages the front desk, a twosome I’d bet not more than a few years removed from bittersweet sixteen, one of them wearing earrings big as bracelets, the other with a set of flushed cheeks. Kim says she’s thirsty and sends me to the cooler. She swigs what I fetch as if dying of thirst. Meantime, my nerves are straight anarchy! How, I say to myself, how, self, did we ever end up here? I ask this knowing full well the answer: Last week she asked what I had planned on this day at this time, knowing good and motherfuckin well I don’t plan much of nothing outside of school, then said, Well, since you’re not busy, why don’t you come to the appointment? She granted me all of a nanosecond to grab a wispy excuse (I didn’t) before ambushing me with one of those two-part gold medal questions only a half-wit botches: Don’t you care about me? Are you concerned with our baby?

And let it be known for the lifetime ledgers, I may be a whole bunch of things, but believemewhenItellyou, a superfool ain’t one of them!

Well, not always. Well, not then, at least.

Still, a baby don’t calibrate with me, not now, and maybe not ever, which is why these last few weeks I’ve been wrecked, one of those freeway accidents it makes you shiver just to see, which is why I’ve spent whole days consumed with finding just the right thing to say, just the right time to say it.

Let’s talk

Speak.

Are you sure?

No, I’m not.

Then we should wait, babe.

You think so?

No, I know so. Timing.

As I said, Mom’s a Mother Teresa type, magnanimous as they come, but me benevolent? In a world remade to my selfish specs, just that easy, Kim would concede, lay her aquiline cheek against my chest, and have a different kind of appointment by day’s end. But who am I supposed to be fooling? This is the first time ever she asked me to attend a visit, the first time ever that appointment wasn’t at a clinic besieged by around-the-clock picketing, the first time ever we’ve treaded anywhere near a second trimester.

Translation: These are desperate days.

Urgent days indeed.

I don’t know how it is where you’re from, but around here, the words planned pregnancy might as well be some kind of next millennium Martian language. Around these parts, it ain’t but three types of men:

Dudes who didn’t want to be fathers and made convincing cases otherwise.

Dudes who didn’t want to be fathers and got bulldogged into becoming them anyhow.

Dudes who didn’t want to be fathers and pulled Copperfieldish escapes before or right after their baby’s birth.

A nurse steps half in, half out of the lobby and calls a name. The pregnant woman labors out of her seat and totters with her charges trailing her. I watch the new foursome disappear.

Look at that. That can’t be me, Kim says. I would never do this alone.

How do you know she’s alone? I say. Could be the dad couldn’t make it. Stayed in the car. This place ain’t exactly male-friendly.

You see a ring? she says. Where was the ring?

One has to know when is when and when is now, so not another word from me. Instead, I grab a magazine. The cover girl is a pregnant girl wearing a bikini. She’s posed with an arm above her belly and another near her navel and her smile’s a normal smile on narcotics. This is the kind of picture that misleads, that makes pregnancy seem like one glorious journey for all parties involved. I peek up from the cover and see another couple enter, the man carrying a detached car seat, AKA a walking, toting sign.

As if I need one.

Every week she announces what’s new: He’s got a brain and spinal cord; by now he’s got hands and webbed feet; he’s not an embryo anymore, he’s a fetus. Updates I’m guessing are meant to beguile, but instead keep me awake late nights, staring at the swell of her belly, the broadening of her dark areolas, that, many-a-night, have shot me out of bed in sweats, my heart sailing like a souped-up metronome.

Right, my silly ass should’ve seen this coming.

Right, my silly ass didn’t see this coming. After she’d broke it off with her ex, after she and I began claiming one another (I shouldn’t have to tell you what a big step that was!), she duped me with that line of questioning that has sent many a believes-he’s-keen young skirt-chaser hightailing for an exit. We were at the open-air hot tub spot where I’d taken a few prime prospects, drinking white wine from smuggled plastic cups.

Are you the type of man to leave after the chase? Is this all about a challenge? she said.

No, not at all, I said. I really like you.

You do? she said. How long does that last?

Saecula saeculorum, I said.

What’s that? she said.

Forever and ever, I said. To the ages of ages.

And peoples, let’s admit that line sounded real slick, ultra-suave if I do say so myself, which I do. And where I’m from, the suavest shit you ever said to a chick is a superhero’s superpower.

Kim rummages in her purse and I scan the office playing the game where I imagine lives for absolute strangers. The guy in the mesh hat was a high school football star stiff-arming his way to the NFL till word leaked of test scores even a D-1 coach wouldn’t fix. Now homie hangs drywall to pay the rent and scrimps all year for fishing trips. The chick in the corner answers phones at a downtown dentist office, drives a minivan, cooks her husband two unappreciated meals a day, and sends him to work with a slapdash sack lunch and, every season or so, a shot of half-ass head! The female by the cooler is a former coed who volunteers at shelters and spends her weekends rock climbing, kayaking, hiking the Cascades.