Chapter 9
When I could finally move, I looked at the top-left corner of the envelope in my hand.
A return address. Jesse’s. Out of state, a couple hundred miles south in Kentucky.
He might not even live there anymore. It had been five years.
But it was a thread, and I had spent five years believing there was nothing left to pull.
I could call.
I waited until that night, after the salon was closed and Dany was asleep at a friend’s house.
I sat alone in the empty salon with the chairs up on the tables and one light on over my station—the same station where Jesse had once fixed a flickering bulb and told me I could finally see who I really was.
I dialed the number from the corner of a five-year-old envelope and listened to it ring.
I did not know what I would say if a stranger answered. Or a wife. Or nobody at all.
A man’s voice picked up, careful.
“Hello?”
I said his name.
I said mine.
There was a silence so long I thought the call had dropped.
Then he said, in barely more than a whisper, “Lucy.”
Before I could answer, his voice cracked right down the middle.
“Is this—are you okay? Are you real?”
I told him I was real. I told him I was okay.
May you like
Then I told him the thing I’d figured out how to say, and in the end, I just said it plainly.
“Jesse, we have a son. His name is Dany. He’s four years old. He’s alive. And he’s mine. And he’s yours.”
