Two and a half years later, I was carrying again, and this time my body didn’t cooperate the way it had with Owen. I went into labor early, on a Tuesday in March. Our daughter, Josephine, arrived small — too small — and quiet for eleven seconds that felt like eleven years. She spent six days needing extra care, under lights that turned her skin the color of an old photograph. Nathaniel slept in a chair beside her every one of those nights, because someone had to be there, breathing, while we weren’t sure she’d keep doing it on her own.
I thought about calling my father then too. I didn’t.
By the time Josie came home steady, I’d already started nursing school, studying at the kitchen table after the kids were down while Nathaniel worked nights so there’d be enough for tuition and formula in the same month. It took three years. I got my license the week Josie turned three, and I cried at that same table — because nobody was there to see me do it except the man who’d given up sleep for a decade so I could.
The only thing that ever really hurt was birthdays. Owen, and later Josie, would hold the one photo I had of my mother — a print Aunt Priscilla slipped into my coat the day I left — and ask why they only had one grandfather, and where the other one was.
I never had an answer that didn’t taste like a lie.
Last Sunday, a black car I recognized before I recognized the man stepping out of it pulled up outside our little blue house on Larkspur Lane.
PART 3
My father looked older than eight years should make a man. Thinner, his suit hanging off him the way clothes hang on men who’ve stopped noticing what they eat. The silver gift bag shook in his hand like it weighed more than anything he’d ever lifted at a job site.
Nathaniel went still beside me. I felt it before I understood it — the way you feel weather change in your bones before the sky does anything about it.
