Riding In Cars With Boys by Beverly Donofrio Page A

drinking?”
    “A little.”
    “Did they book him?”
    “No.”
    “The car?”
    “Totaled.”
    “Jesus Christ. What’s the matter with you kids? I ought to have his license taken away. Now, what’re you gonna do for a car?”
    My mother came to pick me up, then it was her turn. “He’s gonna miss work,” she said. “What’re you going to do for money? I do what I can, but you know your father and me don’t have a pot to piss in. I don’t know, you kids think you can go around acting like teenagers.”
    “We are teenagers.”
    “You’re having a baby. You have responsibilities. What’s it going to be like when the baby’s born? How would you’ve felt if you lost it? You better smarten up.”
    I leaned my head back on the seat and watched the streetlights disappear into the car roof and hummed not a song but a drone, like a bumble bee.
    “What’s that?” my mother said.
    I kept humming, and she never knew it was me.
    Once I got home, I was afraid murderers and escapees from mental institutions were lurking by the windows, so I went directly to the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the floor next to the toilet. I felt so lonely, I even confessed to myself that I wished I could’ve gone home with my mother. I hugged the bowl and yowled great sobs like opera.
    Then the baby moved. It was the first time since the accident. My crying trembled to neutral.
    Maybe I’d been lonely for the baby. I realized I’d been talking to her for months without thinking. Maybe I would’ve been sad if she died.
    I went to a fortune-teller by the railroad tracks. Her trailer smelled of cat piss, and she was as wide as a Volkswagen. She sat me down and dealt some cards. She said I was having a girl, which I already knew, and that within five years I’d have two more children and move into a split-level house. My daughter’s name would begin with J.
    I began making plans. My daughter would look just like me, and when she was born she’d have a round little baseball head covered with black hair. Her eyes would be big and brown. She was going to be my best friend and there’d be nothing in the world we wouldn’t talk about. I’d tell her every last detail about my life up to her birth and after. She’d definitely go to college, and I’d call her Nicole, after a schizophrenic on my favorite soap opera. Ray said if it was a boy, he wanted it named after him. I said, no way. I wasn’t naming our girl after me. We settled on Jason, after Jason McCord in The Lawman, and his middle name would be Michael, after my father.

CHAPTER 5
    LABOR started on a Sunday night in the middle of September. It was so hot that week that the neighborhood dogs had taken to roaming in packs in a flurry of heat madness. Cats dived under cars and into open cellar windows to escape them. One day I saw the dogs toss a doll in the air and rip it limb from limb, a cloud of white foam clinging to their coats. I was almost two weeks late, and if I didn’t deliver soon, I was planning to throw myself in the middle of that pack of mangy dogs and be done for.
    We went for macaroni at my mother’s on Sunday, a ritual I’d missed maybe a half dozen times in my entire life, only this time I felt a pain after dinner while we were watching The FBI and eating lemon meringue pie, but I didn’t say anything. Raymond wanted to stay for the Sunday night movie, but I told him I didn’t feel too well and wanted to go home. As soon as we walked into our house, a slimy liquid drooled down the inside of my thigh. “Oooh, gross! Raymond!” I yelled. “I think I’m in labor.”
    “You’re kidding,” he said.
    We tossed my overnight bag into the backseat of our Chevelle (my father had found it for five hundred dollars and co-signed for the loan), and I suggested we take a ride once around the duck pond before we went to the hospital. The new Beatles song “Hey Jude” came on the radio.
    “That’s it!” I said. “That’s what we’ll name