My husband left me alone in a parking lot while I was in active labor and drove away to go fishing. I want to be precise about the timeline, because the details matter and I have had a long time to think about them. It was 6:47 in the morning on a Saturday in March.
My contractions were six minutes apart. Brent grabbed his rod case and tackle box from the back seat of our car with the practiced efficiency of a man who had been doing this every Saturday since he was twelve years old, and he told me the hospital was only twelve minutes away, that I could handle it, that women had been doing this for thousands of years. Then he kissed my forehead and got into his father’s Chevy Silverado, and I sat in the passenger seat of our Ford Explorer and watched the red taillights disappear down Mulberry Street while another contraction moved through my body like something being wrung out.
That was the morning I understood, with a clarity that required no further evidence, exactly who I had married. My name is Destiny Dickerson. I was twenty-nine years old on that March morning, nine months pregnant with my first child, and I was about to drive myself to the hospital alone because the man I had married four years earlier had decided that a fishing trip with his father was something that could not be rescheduled for any reason, including the birth of his daughter.
Let me back up, because you need to understand how the morning on Mulberry Street was not a deviation from character but a confirmation of it. I met Brent Holloway four years before that morning at a backyard barbecue in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and he was exactly the kind of man who seems, from a sufficient distance and in a social context, like a very good prospect. He was attentive in the early months with the specific attentiveness of someone who understands that attention is a tool, who deploys it consciously and withdraws it strategically.
He had a good title at his father’s plumbing supply company, operations manager at Holloway Pipe and Fixture, which sounded impressive and which I later understood to mean that he did whatever his father told him to do with a slightly grander name attached to the doing. I kept my last name when we got married because my father had died two years before the wedding and I wanted to carry him with me. Brent said he understood.
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