"Have you told your sisters? Caroline's going to lose her mind. Reese is going to want to know everything." He was already pacing. "We should do Sunday. Bring the baby, bring the mother. That's Audrey Callahan, right? The nurse?"
"Dad."
"You should call Caroline today. She'll want to get Henry's old stuff out of the attic—the bassinet, the high chair. That high chair is practically new; she barely used it." He stopped at the counter. He pointed at me. "The baby's got Rhodes bones. I can already tell."
"You haven't seen her."
"I don't need to see her. She's your daughter. She's got Rhodes bones."
He kept going. The Sunday dinner, the high chair, when the baby was old enough for the rink, whether Audrey needed anything, whether the house was big enough, whether I'd thought about the room situation. Each question was a brick in the thing he was building, and the thing he was building was a plan, because my father didn't receive news—he organized it. He turned it into a schedule. He gave it a play.
I sat at the table and watched my father fold my daughter into the family.
It was love. I knew it was love. My father loved his children with a force that could fill a stadium, and the force was genuine, and it never occurred to him that the force was also a weight. He was already building the version of this where the Rhodes family expanded by one and the highlight reel kept going, and somewhere in the planning, pacing, and the questions that kept coming, he walked past the thing I came in here carrying without ever seeing it.
I came in needing a father. Dad gave me a coach. He loved me in the only language he'd ever learned, which was forward motion and game plans, and he didn't know how to love me in the language I needed this morning—a man sitting at a kitchen table who didn't know what he was doing and needed someone to tell him that was okay.
My mother was still at the stove.
She’d been listening to Ray for the last ten minutes without interrupting him. She turned the eggs over and pulled two pieces of toast from the toaster. She put the eggs on a plate beside the toast, carried the plate to the table, and set it in front of me.
Her hand stayed on my shoulder.
"You don't have to figure it out today, honey." Her voice was quiet. "Today, the only thing you have to do is the next right thing."
It landed.
The next right thing. Not the whole answer. Not the plan. Not the Sunday dinner, the high chair, or the highlight reel. Just the next right thing, and the permission to not know what came after it.
She took her hand off my shoulder and went back to the stove.
I ate half the eggs. The toast went cold on my plate. My father circled back to the house—did I have room, did I need to think about the spare bedroom, because a baby needed a room, a baby needed space, a baby needed a plan.I let him talk. I drank the coffee. I watched him pace, and I loved him, and I was grateful for the love even when the love didn't know how to hold what I'd brought into the kitchen.
I stood up.
"I gotta go."
"Tell Audrey we want to meet the baby," my dad said.
"I will."
My mother walked me to the door. She didn't say anything. She stopped at the side door and looked at me.
She touched my cheek with the back of her hand. The gesture was hers. She'd done it when I was seven, when I was seventeen, when I came home from the hospital after the ACL and sat on the couch, trying to smile. The back of her hand against my cheek, and nothing else, and it said everything she didn't need to say.
She let me go.
I walked to the truck. The morning had come up the rest of the way while I was inside—full daylight now, the valley green and warm, the trees along Cedar Lane sharp against a sky that had finished deciding what it was going to be. I sat in the cab with the keys in my hand.
The next right thing.
I knew what it was. I didn't have an answer to the question Audrey asked me in the hospital room, becauseare you ready to be a fatherwas not a question you answered with words. It was a question you answered by showing up, and showing up was the thing I'd been trained to do since the first morning I walked into a firehouse and somebody handed me a pair of boots.
I turned the key, pulled out of my parents' driveway, and pointed the truck toward Hartsdale General.
CHAPTER 11
Audrey
