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  • Our Lady of the Roses
  • Sonja Livingston (bio)

I don’t believe in God . . . but I do believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe.

—Diego Rivera

This is where I am:

Crouched in the space between kitchen and living room, my voice swelling with something like pride as I speak my words into the phone. My words. Just two. I’m pregnant. I turn my head from my husband as I speak. He’s on the sofa, a few feet away, and I don’t like him to hear my happiness, don’t want him to see the way it spills from my eyes. And really, there’s no time to worry over such things, because my mother has something to say, her own bit of news to share. Her whisper is giddy. My mother is in her late fifties, but her voice is more like a six-year-old who’s just stolen a sweet from the cupboard.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she says.

I steady my breath. There’s never any telling what will come out of her mouth, but I breathe deeply and try to convince myself that I’m years-of-therapy past the point of getting caught up in whatever comes.

“I’m pregnant too,” she says; her voice is high and full, and cut only by the sound of cheering. And though I can see with a bend of my head that the clapping is for the ballplayers on the television Tommy has flicked on, it sounds as if the cheering is for my mother and her big news.

“I’m pregnant too,” she repeats, and I push a few feet away, further from the television and the sound of clapping. [End Page 61]

“What?”

“I’m going to have a baby,” she says, and I guess she was right to warn me. I don’t believe it.

“But . . . your age.” My voice is hard, a pebble against the expanse of my mother’s sky. She turned 57 back in January, and apart from a preference for black-raspberry ice cream and the tendency to freckle in summer, January birthdays are one of the few things we have in common.

Until tonight. Now, it seems, we share something else; we are both mothers-to-be.

“I know”—she’s chuckling as if explaining a haphazard lottery win to a local reporter—“but I have always been so fertile. One look at a man and poof, I’m pregnant.”

I squelch the desire to remind her that she does far more than look, while wondering if she’s merely sloppy in her excitement, or whether her easy fertility has been pointed out on purpose. Either way, she does not seem to recall that I’ve spent the last six months undergoing exams that have reached into regions of my body I did not realize I had, and it doesn’t matter, because the fact is this: my mother is a ripened tree, an avocado clustered with glossy fruit holding court over a small Mexican square.

She’s laughing now, saying she’s told no one. Not even her husband. “But with you sharing your news,” she says, “how could I keep this to myself?”

I look into the other room. Tommy is tuned in to the game on TV. This may be because he heard me pick up the phone to dial my mother and knows such calls to be punctuated by fits of chocolate and crying, or because the Phillies are playing and the game is good.

Probably the latter. Tommy is not complex.

“You would not believe how thick my hair is right now, and one look at boiled chicken and I can’t keep a thing down.” Now my mother’s listing her symptoms. Now she’s my best girlfriend, grieving over sore breasts and a tight waistband. She doesn’t ask how it happened. My magic. And I don’t tell her that this time feels different. I don’t say that this time I allow myself to collect baby things, soft white pieces of cloth, which I store in the back of the guestroom closet and take out...

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