A black cat crossed the road in front of my car as I was driving home from the gym this morning. I was turning off Miller Road and onto Hamby when it happened. The fire station, the one that looks like an old Victorian-style house, was still to the right of my station wagon and hadn’t yet slide across my rearview mirror, from one side to the other. For an instant I thought about speeding up or slowing down, but knew as quickly as the thought crossed my mind that there was no avoiding that cat. Our courses were set and our paths were going to cross.

The cat scampered up a little embankment covered in pine straw right off the road’s shoulder as I drove by. I watched it disappear into a side yard and thought, You’re being silly. It’s just a stupid superstition. But my thoughts kept coming in askew, all tangled up in old hurts, and I couldn’t separate my assurances from my memories.

The last time a black cat crossed in front of me I was climbing up the small, steep hill on Church Street from my office in McMillan Hall to the college president’s office in the Curtis Administration Building. It was the summer before Archie was born and I was working at Limestone College. The ultrasound appointment that would change my life hadn’t happened yet; it was still a week or two away. But I suspected something was amiss even then, and there had been that alpha-fetoprotein test I’d taken weeks before that summer afternoon whose results suggested as much as well.

When that cat crossed my path way back then I remember thinking, You’re being silly. It’s just a stupid superstition, but as I watched it’s sleek, dark body leap onto the exposed and undulating roots of the huge oak tree on my right without paying me any mind at all I knew I was wrong. Bad things were about to come my way.

But that afternoon happened another lifetime ago, and I haven’t thought of it again until this morning when a different black cat, one with fluffier fur, darted across the road in front of my station wagon. That moment, the one when the cat and I meet, felt ominous for a few beats. It did, and my mind cranked out a series of sorrowful scenarios as my station wagon’s wheels climbed the slopey, sharp left-hand turn in the road up ahead of me. In the time it took me to drive a few hundred yards I relived that other lifetime and imagined a half-dozen more until I remembered the face of the little boy who held my hand in the lobby of the gymnastics center Monday night.

His cheeks were chapped red and his hair fanned out around his head in a staticy halo. His dark blue coat was too big for him, but the fingers of his left hand poked out from his cuff has he waved to the adults and children walking through the door into the building. “Welcome!” Archie cried out enthusiastically every time the door swung open. “You’re at gymnastics!”

The other kids looked at him as if they didn’t know what to think, but the mothers and fathers and caretakers smiled widely and laughed aloud in a genuinely kind way. I smiled and shook my head from side to side, and then repeated after my oldest son, “Welcome to gymnastics!”

And then I thought about the little boy who yesterday afternoon broke away from me in the lower lobby of the ballet studio when his younger brother diverted my attention with some silly tantrum over some sort of toy. That little boy, Archie, stuck his shoulder inside the doorjamb of the small studio where his sister was sitting on the floor with her classmates before the ballet instructor was able to shut the door.

“Goodbye, Kit!” he hollered, his voice loud and sing-songy. “Have a good ballet class! Have fun!” he instructed before he backed out of the studio’s door and pulled it shut all by himself. All the little girls in their pink leotards giggled as the door swung closed between he and them, and all their mothers hovering around the observation window chirred aloud, nodding their approval. This memory and the one from the night before, they didn’t feel like bad things. No, not at all.

When I got home from the gym I took a shower, got dressed, ate something for lunch. I left the house to pick Kit and Jack up from school. When they were safely ensconced in the backseat of my station wagon, I drove across town to pick up their big brother. Jack suggested we stop at Starbucks on the way home; Archie picked which drive-thru we visited. I bought the twins chocolate chip cookies as big as their faces. I bought Archie an apple juice box. I ordered my usual.

At home my mother was parked in our driveway, waiting for us. She had clothing to give to me and she wanted to visit with the kids. She helped me get Archie, Kit and Jack out of the car and into the house. She helped me hang their coats in the closet and reminded them to take off their shoes by the door to the garage. She changed Archie’s diaper and got him new, dry pants from his room upstairs.

I folded laundry and put it away as my mom visited with my kids. When I was finished I joined them all downstairs, in the family room in front of the television, and we talked together, laughing, too. Archie was leaned over the ottoman when he turned to me, whining and whimpering. He was talking about his tooth, and said something about it being loose. I remembered that he’s visiting the dentist’s office with his class later this week on a field trip so I didn’t really listen to what he was saying, assuming he was blathering on about information he’d covered in class, until I noticed blood staining his bottom teeth. “Wait,” I said as I kneeled on the floor in front of Archie. “Something’s going on here.”

My mom suggested I give Archie a wet paper towel. I did. He chewed on it and as he did we five talked about wiggling his tooth back and forth, back and forth, with his fingers and his tongue. The twins were beside themselves with excitement for their brother. They yelled out and bounced around the room. I tried to call John. I couldn’t stop smiling.

Eventually I was able to talk Archie into letting me put my finger into his mouth and letting me touch his tooth. When I did, ever so softly, I felt the tooth brush against my fingertip and then watched it tumble down the front of Archie’s shirt, into his lap. “There it is!” my mother and I both said at the same time.

Archie cried a little. The rest of us cheered and clapped, hooted and hurrahed. My mom swept Archie onto her lap and dabbed at the blood in his mouth with a paper towel. The blood concerned Archie, but we assured him everything was o. k. He kept exclaiming, “It’s out! It’s out!” as Kit and Jack, my mom and I continued to cheer and congratulate Archie on being such a big boy.

When I showed Archie his baby tooth, a tiny little thing that’s no bigger, root and all, than a pill from a bottle, he told me, “That’s a bone.”

I guess he’s right.

Which makes me wrong. Or at least the me who was walking from one building at the bottom of Church Street to another at the top a lifetime ago. Bad things weren’t coming my way. Not at all. Black cats are harmless, and it’s just a superstition, that thing they say about them crossing your path. I know. It’s true.