Friday

In the sleeping house at midnight I finish folding a load of whites on top the dryer, which is already humming to a new heap of wet laundry. There is a stack of dishtowels one foot high and I pick up a prefold diaper, still warm and soft from the basin, and I hold it by the corners and let it hang lengthwise, bring it to my chest and take either corner inwards, folding the diaper into itself. My muscles on autopilot after years of memory, I turn the top three inches or so down and then fold the entire thing in half. Now it is ready for a bottom and a snappi fastener, and I set it down onto the stack of towels and frown at the anomaly. Because Chas hasn’t worn diapers in over six months now. And a small part of me frets that he never will again, a very small part of me called Insane. I pick the prefold off the top of the pile and sling it over my shoulder, walk into the kitchen and start to tidy the bar, a cuttingboard still wet with lime juice and cut spearmint, dribbles of rum on the white hexagonal tile counter, sticky now with mostly sugar remaining from the spills.

Outside the open windows on a windless fifty-degree midnight, a mockinbird hammers away atop some neighborhood perch, several doors down, hawking himself witlessly from every persuasion and to absolutely no end. After all these spring midnights since, filled with hours of mockingbird song in pitch black, and there are many in the expanse of fifteen springs, I always remember walking my bike from the architecture building on my way back home down the middle of an old college hill street in Providence, laughing and talking to a classmate about a project under the passing streetlights, to the swelling soliloquoy of a crazed mockingbird just days before finals. Tonight I am there again under pink falling blossoms, anticipating phantom critiques in the morning. My stomach is in giddy knots, I can’t sleep.