“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry I ever complained about my name.”
Verna squeezed his hand. “Well, it’s a terrible name for a little boy,” she said. “Your mama never did listen to me.”
The ambulance finally made it through around 12:40. Two paramedics came in stomping ice off their boots, and one of them looked around at the towels on the floor and the teenage boys standing in the doorway holding the door and Hector filming on his flip phone, and said, “Well, y’all already did the hard part.”
They checked the baby and me over, cut the cord the proper way, and loaded us up. Before they rolled me out, Verna leaned over the stretcher and fixed the towel around our son’s head like she’d been doing it all her life.
“You call your mama-in-law,” she said to Beau. “You tell her Verna said hey.”
