Page 130 of Ask Your Mom If I'm Real

Neesha’s eyes were on the game as she pushed.

Anleigh was passed out on the couch, having given up the ghost an hour ago after she watched the first fifteen minutes of the hockey game.

But this game was special, according to Chris.

This game was what decided whether or not they were going into the Stanley Cup finals.

And so, when it came to overtime, there was no way that Neesha was turning it off to push.

Chris, toward the end of Neesha pushing, hadn’t looked toward the television once.

Neesha shouted, Chris startled, and we all moved toward her at the same time.

“They scored! Oh, my god, they won!” She bore down, and that was the moment their baby was born.

I didn’t know where to look. The baby that was being cleaned by the nurse. Chris and Neesha who looked so deeply in love with the new life they’d just brought into the world. Or the television where I could see the team celebrating their win.

In the end, I chose the baby.

I took copious photos.

Of the baby. Of the parents. Of everything that I could think that they might want.

And when everything was settled down and over, only then did I watch the last ten minutes of the period on replay.

“I’m just terrified to let her be watched by someone else,” Neesha admitted a long time later. “I have to start prepping for next season in three weeks. How am I just going to let some rando watch my baby?”

That’s when a thought occurred to me.

One that I thought might help everyone involved.

Before I could voice it to her, the chirp of my phone ringing had me hurrying to answer it so it wouldn’t wake anyone up—Chris who was passed out on the couch next to Anleigh, and new baby Rosa.

Picking it up, I thought about how Jeremiah had first set it up for me before he’d left for his first away game.

“So you can talk to me, and I can see Annie.” He’d given it to me.

I’d taken it without complaint.

There’d been a lot of changes over the last four months.

And Jeremiah made sure that he’d given me every one of those changes.

I should be balking at all the things that he’d done for me—buying me new clothes, helping me sell a car, and co-signing for a new one, buying me a phone, and paying for everything—but each time that I got hung up on it, he’d talk me down.

“Hey,” I said into the phone.

“Hey,” he answered. “How are you?”

I laughed. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that? Congratulations. Have you been to see the trainer yet?”

In the four months that I’d been staying with him at his place, I’d gone to almost every single one of his games.

That’d been what Anleigh and I did over the months since I’d left my dad’s place.

I’d started to look for a job, something to keep me busy while he was away, but Jeremiah and I had both found something extremely interesting out on his first away game.

We were both miserable without each other.

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