Trading Dreams at Midnight by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

Author:Diane McKinney-Whetstone
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 10

NAN KNEW ABOUT holding on to faith. Thought her faith had been tested and retested to the point where, if she’d been the type to question God, the why, Lord, why, would have been her nonstop utterance.

She turned up pregnant as a result of her climbing into bed with Alfred that first time. The pregnancy itself was not the calamity it might have been since by the time she knew for sure she and Alfred were already on the track to get married: Goldie had agreed to stand in witness; Sam had already offered cold cuts and Manischewitz for the reception; the people at her second job offered her a wedding-day dress. The stormcloud for Nan was not the pregnancy, it was that in her mind the child had been conceived too close in time to her sipping at the contents of that vanilla extract bottle and Alfred gobbling down what she had not. Worried from then on that the root may have lingered in their systems and damaged some workings of the baby coming to be in her womb. Though the baby by all accounts was perfect.

Alfred certainly thought the baby perfect as he looked at the infant through the receiving window. He never thought that such beauty could exist in human form the way that it did in that newborn. Nor did he know that such a feeling could happen to him on the inside that was so large that it reset everything about him, changed him. “A girl,” he said out loud to no one in particular. “Look at the mat of shiny black hair, look at the dark-as-midnight-eyes. I’m melting, I’m so very thankful.” He was also quite drunk as he staggered from the receiving room into the maternity ward where the new mothers occupied the beds that filled the length of the room. He was so overcome with gratitude for Nan giving him such a beautiful daughter that his eyes did him wrong and he cried in front of the bed that was not Nan’s and rubbed the foot of the woman who lay there. She woke and screamed. That started a commotion that rippled the length of beds until it got to Nan’s bed and the story was that a crazed drunk just tried to chop off someone’s foot.

Nan knew it had to be Alfred. The seven months of married life with Alfred had been filled to brimming with the embarrassing consequences of his love for drink. His putting his key in the wrong apartment door, and when the door didn’t open, just passing out there anyhow. His getting thrown out of bars and some Samaritan fetching Nan so that she could patch him up and cart him home. He’d insist that the mailman was late with the milk, he’d argue with the milkman because he’d not gotten his mail. He’d show up for work dressed for church, gone to church dressed as if he was preparing to unload cargo from a ship.

So

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