Page 19 of Worth of Waste

He should be allowed to at least try for his son.

“Flip it over,” Mike said. “She wrote on the back for you.”

Dino did, finding Karen’s familiar scrawl on the back of the photograph.

JD Martin, it read. But I call him Junior.

The baby’s birthdate, just a week and a half earlier, was written underneath.

And then, under that, was something Dino hadn’t expected.

I’ll see you soon, Karen had written.

Nothing else.

Dino didn’t need more.

It was enough.

This was perfect.

Karen

JUNIOR barely batted an eye as the plane hit the runway a bit harder than Karen was expecting it to. She held on tighter to her six-month-old son, glancing out the porthole window to see the ground and runway flying by at a speed than damn near made her dizzy.

She didn’t particularly like planes.

Flying wasn’t her thing.

Thankfully, her son had done just fine on the trip from Chicago to California. Once he’d been fed, Junior had slipped off into one of his afternoon naps and the bit of bustle from the plane hadn’t bothered him at all. She’d heard the horror stories about flying with babies, but her boy was proving those tales all wrong.

Kissing the side of her sleeping baby’s head, Karen smiled.

Junior—though his birth certificate only stated simply “JD”—had been that way from the very moment he’d been born. He’d made his way into the world on the early morning of November 2nd, and he didn’t make a fuss about it. He barely cried at all those first few days of his life, and Karen, being all by herself, had been damn near terrified.

She didn’t know how to be a mother.

She didn’t know how to suddenly care for this baby, who needed her twenty-four hours a day just to survive.

She didn’t know anything.

But Karen learned.

Little by little. Day by day. She took each and every new thing in slowly, taking every minute she had with her son to let him teach her what he needed. Junior made it easy, but she wasn’t quite sure how he had done it.

Karen still got to experience all the exhaustion of new motherhood and the craziness that came along with that. There were days that were harder than the rest, when she wished she didn’t have to do everything alone. She struggled badly when Junior was only a month old and she handed the baby off to a respected daycare so that she could start work at a studio that needed an extra photographer.

Still, she did it.

Karen managed.

She moved forward, including getting a new apartment in Wicker that had more space and a small balcony she could sit on and rock her son when the weather was nice.

It helped that Junior was waiting for her to come pick him up from daycare every day, with his big smiles and brown eyes that damn near matched his father’s. His tiny, chubby hands would fly up high as soon as he saw his mother come through the doors and his little fingers clenching over and over until she snatched him up and held him tight.

Oh, she adored her son.

Junior was everything that was right and good in her life.