During a family dinner, I said, “I’m about to give birth.” My parents laughed: “That’s not our grandchild.” I drove myself to the hospital. A week later, my mother knocked on the door: “Sweetheart, let me see the baby.” I opened the door and asked, “Which baby? What grandchild?”

Zelma Haw, who has sat in the pew behind my mother for 20 years, caught me by the cooler.

“Imagin, look at you. When are you due, sweetheart?”

I opened my mouth.

My mother arrived from nowhere with a pitcher of tea.

“Oh, Imagin’s between things right now,” she said, warm as the weather, and poured Zelma a glass she hadn’t asked for.

Zelma looked at my stomach.

Then at my mother.

Then at the tea.

“Between things,” she repeated.

“Well, all right.”

And she walked away with a face that said she would be thinking about it for the rest of the party.

I wiped the lens with the hem of my shirt.

Raquel got me by the elbow and steered me into the kitchen where the extra ice was.

“Don’t make it a thing today,” she said.

“I didn’t say a word.”

“Your face did.”

“My face is 30 weeks pregnant, Raquel. It doesn’t have a lot of options.”

“Just get through the cake.”

She handed me a bag of ice like a peace offering.

“It’s his birthday.”

“I know whose birthday it is. I’m the one taking the pictures.”

Out in the yard, somebody started the song.

I went back out and shot Sawyer with frosting to his eyebrows and my dad holding him up like a trophy and my mother laughing with Zelma as if nothing had been said by the cooler at all.

I got every shot.

I always do.

And every one of them was a picture of a family that had just told a woman from church that I was between things.

When the guests thinned out, my mother took the new 8×10 of Sawyer, the one I’d printed that week, and carried it down the hallway to the wall.

I followed her because I always follow her to the wall.

It runs from the front door to the kitchen.

Every frame the same black.

Every photograph mine.

My parents’ 30th.

Raquel’s wedding.

Vaughn in his cap and gown.

Sawyer at one day old.

Sawyer at one year.

She hung the new one on a hook that had been waiting for it.

Then she stepped back to check the line.

And that’s when I saw the nail beside it.

A small brass nail alone, with a faint pale rectangle in the paint around it.

The ghost of a frame that had hung there long enough to keep the wall from yellowing.

I knew which picture that had been.

It was me at 20 in the college portrait my mother had asked for.

And I had not noticed when it came down.

“What’s that nail for?” I asked.

She straightened Sawyer a quarter inch.

“For when there’s a family to hang.”

“There’s one right here.”

I put my hand on my stomach where the baby was pushing a heel against me like she wanted a word in this.

My mother did not look at my hand.

“There’s no baby without a name, Imagin.”

She said it exactly the way she had said it at the table months earlier.

With the same flat palm, as if it were something she had read on a plaque.

I took out my phone and photographed the nail.

Just the nail and the pale rectangle and the edge of Sawyer’s frame.

“Why on earth would you photograph a nail?”

“So I remember where it was.”

She looked at me for a second like she almost understood.

Then the doorbell rang.

It was somebody’s grandmother leaving, and she went to be gracious.

I stood in the hallway with the nail in my phone.

And I want to be honest with you.

That was the first moment I stopped asking for a place on that wall and started keeping a record of it.

Vaughn showed up at my house in Church Hill with a rocking chair in the back of his work van.

A $30 estate-sale find that squeaked on every second rock like it was counting.

He carried it into my living room, set it by the window, and sat in it himself to test it, which made him look like a large child.

“It squeaks,” I said.

“I’ll fix it.”

He looked around for oil, found none, and went into my kitchen and came back with the vegetable oil, which is exactly the kind of solution Vaughn arrives at.

While he was on his knees drizzling canola into the joints, he said to the floor:

“Dad asked me to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“He said he’ll cover the hospital bill. All of it. Whatever insurance doesn’t. If the baby gets a different last name.”

“Mom’s maiden name?”

“Or anything. Just not ours.”

The chair squeaked when I pushed it.

“He’s buying a nail,” I said.