Chapter 10
The sound he made is not a sound I can describe.
It wasn’t quite crying. It was more like something inside a person coming apart and being put back together at the same time.
When he could speak again, all he could say was, “He’s four. He’s… he’s four.”
We talked for three hours.
He told me his side, and every word of it fit the shoe box like a key fits a lock.
He told me he had called the house over and over that spring. My mother had told him I’d lost the baby. Then she’d told him I was grieving, never wanted to see him again, and that he had to stop calling.
He told me he’d written letters until the letters stopped feeling like they mattered, until the silence convinced him it was real.
He’d sent money the one time he had any to spare because it was the only fatherly thing left he could do for a child he’d been told was gone.
“I stayed away because I thought that was what you wanted,” he said. “I thought I was respecting you. Every single day, I wondered if I’d done the right thing. Every day, Lucy.”
He wasn’t the same reckless kid from five years ago.
He’d gotten steady work, an electrical job with a crew he’d been with for years. He’d made his life quiet, sober, and small.
He said he still had a photo of me from back then.
He laughed, wet and broken, and said he remembered how much I used to love the fries at that diner near the salon, the crinkle-cut ones, and how I’d steal his.
Near the end of the call, he went very quiet. Then he asked me so carefully, like he was afraid the answer would take a limb.
“Would you ever let me meet him?”
May you like
I told him yes.
But not yet.
