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  • Born in the Caul
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Ina Kaur. Certain Enigma. 2010. Color etching, relief, and blind embossment. 24 × 18 inches.

He was explaining how his wife, hours after giving birth, still full-moon bellied and woozy with accomplishment, had been swiped off the planet. “A wild blood clot walloped her brain.” His voice cracked—or was it our crappy phone connection?

“Awful,” I said. “Just awful.”

“Her name was Shira Marie.”

“An angel name,” I said.

“You have no idea. That woman made friends like some make empty promises.”

From out my kitchen window, the inky night sky suspended a crescent moon. I wondered if he could see it waxing, too.

“Thing is, she’s not gone to the co-op for squash, but gone, gone.” A real whimper snagged his deep tenor and sent my heart south. “And me and baby Gwen, we’re fumbling without her.” Two deep breaths: him first, then me. “You can come by tomorrow?”

Minutes before, while flipping through the Pennysaver looking for a clunker Winnebago, I‘d come across his want ad. There it was, his tidy plea sandwiched between Washing Machine and Wurlitzer:

WET NURSE: Wanted immediately in that capacity, a young, healthful person of good character, with a fresh breast of milk. If from nearby, the more desirable. Thanks, Dyson Ledge salexbxtk-2120643589@pennysaver.org

After I emailed him my phone number, Dyson had called back immediately. I honestly hadn’t expected to get a response. Thirty-one years old and I’d never answered a want ad in my life. I didn’t believe anyone actually existed on the want end; always figured it was more a conspiracy of wanters giving seekers a false sense of emotional commerce—and hope.

“I can tell just from our quick conversation here that Gwen’s gonna have no trouble taking to you.” He forced a hollow laugh. Then something else from his end of the line: wispy double-time huffing easily mistaken for a struggle if I hadn’t known, even then, that it was Gwen breathing for all of us.

The next morning, I stood on Dyson’s straw doormat. Any other day at 10 a.m., you’d find me manning the register at Cupettes—Yuma, Arizona’s, first cupcake boutique. My neighbor Lauren owned the place and last year convinced me to resign my Director of HR post at Motorola. Okay, fine. Since my hubby, Ian, made decent enough money, I reasoned, here’s my chance to taste entrepreneurship, put my rusty MBA through its paces, and eventually work up the nerve to commence my dream concept: a telescope-mobile. Like the Bookmobile, but instead of Dickens, my Winnebago cum stargazer would shuttle half a dozen Stellarvue 102mm White Refractor Telescopes into bad neighborhoods and give kids a view beyond their encroaching walls.

I knocked and shivered. The Arizona desert could be a cold, mean place in January. Where a doorbell once lived, desperate little wires reached out to reconnect and ping the air with sweet ding-dongs of visitors. Clutches of nappy fescue and ragweed littered his front yard and grew up and around a termite-riddled wagon wheel—a totem to indigenous defeat.

Finally, Dyson answered the door with Gwen casually cocked in one arm as if he’d been trained to hold helpless things. The honest morning light rendered this man, this tamer version of Mick Jagger, too old to be a new father and way too young to be a widower. His head almost touched the top of the weathered doorframe. His knees needed meat.

With his free hand reached out to mine, he started, “I’m Dyson. And you … shush, don’t tell me … I know it beings with an ‘A’. … dammit [End Page 81] … my memory is shot. Please forgive me … Ash—?”

“Ashlyn,” I said, wishing for something more substantial to appear in my mouth or hands: a blessing, hot soup, my address a hundred miles west of his mess.

The baby squirmed in his arms, perhaps smelling the breast milk leaching through my shirt. Dyson loosened the blanket cocoon. “This is Gwen. Two days new...

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