Somewhere in Louisiana. The Best Western. It’s late. The temperatures are freezing. I cannot feel my extremities. I am pretty sure the rock rolling around inside my shoe is my toe.

I am parked beneath the entrance canopy, unloading our luggage onto a hotel cart. There is a man standing by the sliding doors. Carhartt and jeans. He’s on a video call.

“Can you believe it?” the woman on his phone says.

“I can’t believe it,” he says quietly.

“I wish you were here,” the woman on the phone adds. “I love you so much. I miss you so much.”

He is a large man. Maybe six eight. Broad shoulders. Heavyset. With hands the size of supermarket chickens. He could be a linebacker.

His phone call is over. He buries his face in his hands. I don’t think he’s crying. But he’s releasing some kind of emotion.

I ask the man how he’s doing this evening.

“Brother,” he says. “I’m SO good.”

I have two choices here. I can (a) be nosey, or I can (b) do the right thing and let this man live his life in peace without inserting myself. I should choose Option B.

“You sound pretty happy,” I say.

He nods. “I just got some good news.”

The man goes onto say his wife called to tell him she’s pregnant.

I congratulate him. He is overjoyed. He says thanks, and he says isn’t it amazing how the doctors said he’d never have children and here he is about to be a daddy, and can you believe it, and isn’t it funny how sometimes doctors tell you one thing and then God just goes and does another thing, and now, if I’ll please excuse him, he’s got to call some other people.

He makes another video phone call. This time, it sounds like he’s calling an older woman. The elderly woman on the phone says, “What’s up, baby?”

The man sort of turns his back to me. I am still loading my hotel cart with bags and suitcases. Lord knows, my wife and I have lots of suitcases. We travel with two fiddles, one guitar, a banjo, and—as if things couldn’t get any worse—an accordion.

The man says, “Mom, you’ll never believe this.”

“What is it?” The older woman’s voice has a note of concern in it.

The man tells her his wife is having a baby. I hear cheering on the other end of the phone.

The man’s hard shell breaks. I still can’t tell whether he’s crying, but I hear him blow his nose loudly.

Soon, his dad gets on the phone call. Then his sister—I think. Then, his nieces and nephews. Pretty soon, the whole fam-damily is on the call. Everyone is cheering and congratulating him.

His mother is crying. “Oh, thank you, God.”

“Thank you,” says the big man quietly, sniffing his nose. “Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you.”

Thank you.