Free Signs of Life by Natalie Taylor

cooking dinner for two and looking out the driveway waiting for his car to pull up, but I still don’t know if I get it.
    A few weeks after Josh died I ordered return address labels that only had my name on them. Instead of JOSH AND NATALIE TAYLOR they just said NATALIE TAYLOR . Around the same time, I took Josh’s name off of our checking accounts, and I immediately ordered new checks with only my name on them. Most notably, not even a month after losing Josh, I stopped wearing my wedding ring. I did this because I wanted everyone to know that I got it. I didn’t want
anyone
to think that I was in denial about his death (as if Consumers Energy or Comcast Cable care about whether or not I’m in denial). Months later, as I read
The Great Gatsby
again, I think about my return address labels, checks, and wedding ring. I don’t get it. I don’t understand what has happened. I just try to change things around me to help my brain along. But it doesn’t help.
    A week into school I talk to all three of my classes about how yes, obviously I am pregnant and will not be here the entire semester. I explain to them that I will be having a baby in the next few weeks, and once I leave, a long-term substitute will be with them until the end of the semester. This is really where you see the difference in age. The ninth-grade students sit frozen in their seats and the boys especially look scared to death that their female teacher, whom they really don’t know all that well, is talking about having a baby, you know like, delivering a baby. They seem to sit as still as possible and try to wait until the conversation is over. Once, Hales told me about when she was in the third grade and her teacher, Mrs. Sylvan, who was very pregnant, calmly announced to her room of eight-year-olds that her “water broke.” Haley said that immediately all the kids in class picked their feet up off of the floor, as if the water would soon seep under their desks. I have a strange feeling that the same thing could happen in my ninth-grade class if I were to be so horrifically unlucky.
    The eleventh-graders, of course, approach the subject with a brash, arrogant tone. “Mrs. Taylor!” Steven McCain yells from the front of the class. I had Steven in class as a ninth-gradestudent. I have learned to seat him in the front where he is less likely to verbally assault other students. He is the type of high-school student who claims to be really good at “debating,” but seems to think debating consists of interrupting people who disagree with him and constantly saying overdramatized lines from Hollywood portrayals of attorneys like “Overruled!” or “Erroneous on all counts!” So here he is, weighing in on my current state of gestation.
    “Mrs. Taylor! I just want you to know I can drive you to the hospital if you have the baby in class.” This is the other thing: Everyone in the world except women who have actually had a baby assumes that childbirth happens with this tremendous sense of immediacy. It must always happen with someone speeding through traffic lights as the woman holds her stomach with two hands and practices breathing exercises from a decade ago.
    I tell Steven that I would rather walk to Beaumont Hospital but thank him for the offer. Then an argument quickly erupts between Steven and Anthony Myers, who sits on the opposite side of the room (for a good reason), about who would be the better driver.
    “I’m in the parking lot on Sunnyknoll, Anthony, and you’re all the way over in the Trash Lot [student name for the parking lot on Catalpa]. It would be ridiculous for you to drive.”
    “Steven, you just got your license a month ago—you think you should drive a pregnant lady to a hospital after driving for a
month
?”
    I pick up the handouts for today and get things going. Like most conversations that Steven McCain initiates, this is a stall tactic.
    “I saw you roll right through that stop sign at Catalpa and Henley yesterday,