At the end of my eighth summer, my mother was so pregnant that she barely had time between bathroom breaks to cook supper. Even hobbling to the front porch to watch us cross the street to the neighbors’ house was an event.

One particularly bad morning, she’d had enough. “Girls,” she said breathlessly to me and my then-four-year-old sister, “you’re going out with your cousins today.”

We stared at her. The Cousins were always organized, prepared, punctual … so unlike us.

“But where –” I started.

“To the beach.”

The beach? Well, that was a different story.

We spent a fair amount of time prancing around the house searching for big tees to wear over our bathing suits and packing plastic buckets with our favorite bath toys. All the while my mother sat at the kitchen table fanning herself with a swollen hand, gasping, “Okay, sweet pea,” when we asked her approval, and occasionally lumbering to the bathroom.

The Cousins picked us up exactly on time. They told us how excited they were that we would be coming with them, but mercifully said nothing about the fact that we’d packed no food or sunscreen.

Soon enough we arrived at the beach and put our bath toys to good use making sand castles and moats and treasure chests. We skipped through the sand, pinching at our soaked T-shirts although they suctioned right back onto our salt-sticky bodies. The Cousins were kind enough to give us a lunch that we gobbled up, sand grinding between our teeth with each bite.

Finally everyone piled back into the van. My sister and I carefully spread towels under us to protect the seats, since neither we nor the Cousins had thought to bring a change of clothes for us.

Snacks were passed around – something comforting like alphabet cookies or granola bars. The sun was setting outside the cocoon of the van, and shadows draped themselves slowly over each of us. The road stretched ahead. Eyelids drooped, sweaty fists loosened their grip on granola bar wrappers, and voices grew softer until they petered out altogether.

I felt my own exhaustion more and more with each passing moment, and as I drifted closer to sleep, my head inched down to rest against the window. When my aunt’s cell phone rang, I barely registered the sound.

“Hello?” she said softly. “Yes … yes ….”

Her voice was growing fainter as I returned to my dreamlike state. But when she met my eyes in the rearview mirror and mouthed “Mazel tov,” I knew something was up.

“What?” I yelled.

“Your mommy had a baby boy.”

“What?” I yelled again. Air filled my lungs in too-big bursts. I thought I would choke with excitement.

“Shhh,” said my aunt.

I shifted in my towel-seat anxiously, tapping my sister and pulling on her wet curls. “Esti,” I hissed. “We have a –” But I had to stop. I couldn’t say the word for fear it wasn’t true.

“Auntie!” I called to the front, feeling dangerously close to wetting myself. “Are you sure it’s a boy? Sure sure sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said dryly.

I lowered my chin and stared very hard at the back of my aunt’s head, squeezing my lips in concentration. “Are you positive?”

“Yes, honey,” she said. “It’s definitely a boy.”

I squealed, “I have a brother? I have a brother!”

I looked around the car eagerly, and one of my cousins offered me a sleepy smile. I beamed back at her. “A brother!”

Esti was still leaning on me and making weird sleeping noises. I shook my arm, trying to wake her up. “A brother, Esti!” My voice rose. “A brother!” But all she did was mumble in agreement.

“I have a brother?” I asked myself, looking at my reflection in the window. I’d always wanted a brother. “But – we only have girls in our family.”

The excitement of having a brother mingled with its impossibility. How can this be me? I asked my reflection, which somehow looked the same as it always had. I peered closer, searching every inch of my face. Squinting, I concluded that my chin did look decidedly pointier.

How would my new brother look? Would he be red and wrinkled like Rachel’s baby sister? Would he be a drooler? And he better have a lot of hair. I didn’t like bald babies.

As it turned out, he was pretty cute. And as he grows up – far too quickly – I remind myself from time to time of that day when, in a stuffy car with stiff towels as cushions and the faint sting of a sunburn stretched taut over my cheekbones, my life took a groundbreaking shift in the best direction.