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?”

My mother came in with the platter and the chipped gravy boat and set them down.

Chip turned in.

“There,” she said. “We thought we’d just do a nice normal dinner.”

“Normal’s good,” I said.

My dad came in from the deck smelling like charcoal and sat at the head.

“Grace!”

He thanked God for family.

And I bowed my head with the rest of them.

Under the table, I put one hand on the metal seat of the chair and felt how cold it still was.

The third one came at 6:37.

And it was not the practice kind.

It started low and wrapped around to the front and held on long enough that I put my fork down and counted the seconds on the clock over the sideboard.

When it let go, I did the math.

The math was eight minutes.

I had a nurse’s voice in my head saying that first babies take their time.

I also had a 30-minute drive and a bag in the trunk.

So I said it plainly, the way I’d say it to a client.

“I think I’m about to give birth.”

My dad laughed.

Not a chuckle.

A real laugh.

The head-back kind.

The kind he does when Vaughn tells a story about a customer.

“At my table,” he said. “Sit down, Emmy. You’re not in labor at my table.”

My mother did not look up from cutting her meat.

“If it were ours, we’d know,” she said in the pleasant voice she uses for church visitors.

And then she laughed, too.

A small one.

Tidy.

Like a square towel.

“That’s not our grandchild,” my dad said, still grinning, reaching for the gravy.

And my mother, as if she wanted it on the record, said it back to him.

“That’s not our grandchild, Sydney. You’re right.”

Raquel snorted into her tea.

Sawyer, who did not know what anyone was laughing at, laughed anyway and banged his spoon.

Tobias put his napkin down and came half out of his chair.

“Imagin, do you need me to—”

Raquel caught his sleeve.

“Sit down. She’s being dramatic. She’s got a bag in the car. She’s been ready for a month.”

Tobias sat.

I want to tell you I said something.

I didn’t.

Another one was building, and I did not intend to have it in front of them.

I stood up.

The folding chair scraped.

I walked past my father, who said:

“Emmy, sit down and eat your dinner.”

And past my mother, who said nothing.

And into the hallway.

My keys were on the little bird hook by the door where my mother makes everyone hang them.

I took them down slowly because my hands wanted to shake, and I would not let them.

The hall light was on the wall.

On the frames.

On the brass nail with its pale rectangle.

From the dining room, my mother called in the same pleasant voice:

“Call us when it’s real.”

I opened the front door.

Nobody got up.

I heard my father ask Tobias to pass the rolls.

I walked down the front steps and across the driveway to my car.

I got in and put my hands on the wheel.

The next one hit before I had the key in the ignition.

I breathed through it in the driveway of the house I grew up in.

Alone.

With the porch light on and the curtains closed.

I called Yara from the on-ramp with the phone on the dash.

She picked up on the first ring.

Behind her, I could hear another woman breathing hard and a monitor beeping.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Eight minutes apart. Real ones. I’m on the Powheight.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“At the table.”

Yara said a word I won’t repeat.

“She’s at nine centimeters. Imagin, Mrs. Whitlow. I can’t walk out of this room.”

“I know. Go. I’ve got Sunny.”

“Text her right now. The word. Nothing else.”

“I’m doing it.”

I did it at the toll plaza.

One thumb.

The orange light sliding over the hood.

Now.

The reply came before I’d merged.

Deck B. I’m at the door with a chair. Nine minutes apart is fine. You’ve got time. Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Don’t talk to anybody who isn’t me.

Then the next one came.

I was on the bridge over the James River with the water black underneath and the city lit up ahead.

I held the wheel at ten and two, the way my father taught me in a church parking lot when I was 15.

And I breathed out longer than I breathed in.

When it passed, the dash lit up again.

My mother.

Don’t be dramatic. Call us when it’s real.