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“Trevor,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
“Sorry, what?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What?!”
Good Lord, I was furious. I was so angry. She herself seemed resolute, as determined as
ever, but with an undertone of sadness I had never seen before, like the news had devastated
her at first but she’d since reconciled herself to the reality of it.
“How could you let this happen?”
“Abel and I, we made up. I moved back into the bedroom. It was just one night, and
then…I became pregnant. I don’t know how.”
She didn’t know. She was forty-four years old. She’d had her tubes tied after Andrew.
Even her doctor had said, “This shouldn’t be possible. We don’t know how this happened.”
I was boiling with rage. All we had to do was wait for Andrew to grow up, and it was going
to be over, and now it was like she’d re-upped on the contract.
“So you’re going to have this child with this man? You’re going to stay with this man
another eighteen years? Are you crazy?”
“God spoke to me, Trevor. He told me, ‘Patricia, I don’t do anything by mistake. There is
nothing I give you that you cannot handle.’ I’m pregnant for a reason. I know what kind of
kids I can make. I know what kind of sons I can raise. I can raise this child. I will raise this
child.”
Nine months later Isaac was born. She called him Isaac because in the Bible Sarah gets
pregnant when she’s like a hundred years old and she’s not supposed to be having children
and that’s what she names her son.
Isaac’s birth pushed me even further away. I visited less and less. Then I popped by one
afternoon and the house was in chaos, police cars out front, the aftermath of another fight.
He’d hit her with a bicycle. Abel had been berating one of his workers in the yard, and my
mom had tried to get between them. Abel was furious that she’d contradicted him in front of
an employee, so he picked up Andrew’s bike and he beat her with it. Again she called the
police, and the cops who showed up this time actually knew Abel. He’d fixed their cars. They
were pals. No charges were filed. Nothing happened.
That time I confronted him. I was big enough now.
“You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “This is not right.”
He was apologetic. He always was. He didn’t puff out his chest and get defensive or
anything like that.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like doing these things, but you know how your
mom is. She can talk a lot and she doesn’t listen. I feel like your mom doesn’t respect me
sometimes. She came and disrespected me in front of my workers. I can’t have these other
men looking at me like I don’t know how to control my wife.”
After the bicycle, my mom hired contractors she knew through the real-estate business
to build her a separate house in the backyard, like a little servants’ quarters, and she moved
in there with Isaac.
“This is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen,” I told her.