Talisman

I am out with the stroller again.

            “Angel,” I hear on Seventh Avenue. There’s a sanitation worker in a pack of four twenty feet down the block. Royal blue jumpsuit, sleeves rolled to his biceps, velvet yarmulke strung like a birthday cone to his head. He’s wheeling a gray plastic bin. This is New York. I keep pushing.

            “Hey, Angel,” he says. His co-workers jump the truck. We’re alone with the smell of garbage. “You missing something.” He says it matter-of-fact, trying to be helpful. As if my shoes were untied. I steady on his blues and wonder how he feels – if he feels anything – about sanitation. It probably offers a better severance package than mine.

            We meet halfway. His tattoos curl like vines from Wyckoff Gardens to Lansing, a father in Attica, a brother buried in Michigan, a longstanding Florida dream. I know these men. Every semester they slide into my classroom, extend long legs beneath tablet desks and sit through lectures on Night and Lord of the Flies, scratched recordings of Miles Davis’ “So What.” Their syllabi rolled like telescopes. Never Angel, they call me: Yo. Miss. Lady. Adjunk. Sometimes they earn their GEDs. Often they’re gone before I get to my unit on persuasion. Or else, The Things They Carried. Once they leave that’s it. I never see them again.

            This man is in no rush.

            “Angel,” he says, soft as a kiss, and I know what comes next. “Where your baby?”

            “Practicing,” I say. “Gearing up for the big day,” because I can tell he means well. Sometimes I say just going for a test drive, rescued from a stoop sale, mind your own fucking business, on my way to pick up the terrors, the little shits.

            He gives my flat stomach the once-over.

            “Don’t jinx yourself,” he says as I pick up down the sidewalk, rattling past...