“My father would have had opinions about you,” I say.
“What kind of opinions?”
“The suspicious kind, initially. He was careful about people. Took a long time to trust anyone new.” I pause. “But he respected competence. Once he decided you were good at something, that was it. You had him.”
“And your mother?”
“My mother would have decided in the first five minutes and spent the rest of the time pretending she hadn’t.” I smile despite myself. “She had very strong instincts and absolutely no patience for acting like she didn’t.”
He looks at me across the desk with a quietness that isn’t his usual controlled quietness. This one is different.
We eat dinner together that evening, which has become its own quiet ritual over the last several weeks, neither of us formal about it, just two people ending up in the kitchen at the same hour and not leaving.
I’m halfway through my plate when I ask the question I’ve been turning over since the list appeared on the counter this morning.
“Are you scared?” I ask.
He looks up. “Of what?”
“Her. Becoming a father. Any of it.”
He sets his fork down. “Yes,” he says, plainly. “I don’t know how to do this. Everything I’ve built in my life, I built by being willing to make decisions other people weren’t willing to make. A child doesn’t respond to that.”
“No,” I agree. “She won’t.”
“I’m aware that my default approach to most problems is going to be exactly wrong for this one.”
“Also, yes.”
He picks his fork back up. “Are you scared?”
I think about it honestly. “Of the pain, yes. Of being responsible for an entire person, yes.” I pause. “Of loving her, no. That part doesn’t scare me at all.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“I think that’s the part that scares me most,” he says. “How fast it’s going to happen. How little I’ll be able to manage it once it does.”
I look at him across the table, and I think about my mother. She was twenty-four when she had me. Younger than I am now.
I know this not because she ever made a point of it but because I did the math once in middle school during a particularly boring history class and sat with the number for the rest of the afternoon, trying to imagine being twenty-four and suddenly responsible for an entire human being.
I couldn’t imagine it then. I’m still not sure I can imagine it now, even with the evidence of it pressing against my ribs every time the baby moves.
My mother never seemed scared. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. She moved through our childhood with a steadiness that I took for granted until she was gone and I understood that steadiness is not the absence of fear. It’s what you build on top of it when someone else needs you to.
I was seven the summer the house on Mercer got a leak in the roof.
My father was between jobs, the kind of between that stretched longer than anyone planned, and I remember lying in bed one night listening to them talk in the kitchen, their voices low, thenumbers they kept saying not meaning much to me except that the tone of them meant something was wrong.
My mother’s voice stayed even the entire time. Not falsely bright, not performing calmly. Just even, the way a road stays level even when the terrain underneath it is difficult.
The next morning, she made pancakes and let Lena put too many blueberries in hers and didn’t say a word about the roof or the money or any of it. She just made breakfast and asked us about our dreams.
I understood years later that she had spent the entire night awake.
“My mother used to say that having children was the only decision she’d ever made that she couldn’t prepare for,” I tell Zane. “She spent nine months reading everything she could find and still felt completely unprepared the first time she held me. Said it was like being handed something you’d been waiting for your whole life and suddenly understanding you had no idea what waiting actually meant until that moment.”
He looks at me across the table. “She sounds like she was someone worth knowing.”
