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“Was it me?”
I take the pencil out of her hand and keep the hand.
“No.”
“You have to say that.”
“I do not have to say anything. I am going to tell you the true thing, and it is not a tidy one.”
She waits.
“We were very young. And I am not an easy person to live with. I want things done properly. I want them done properly by everybody, all the time, and most people cannot live inside that. He could not. I did not know how to be any other way, and he did not know how to tell me, and one day he stopped trying and left instead.”
Her thumb moves once across my knuckles.
“Leaving was wrong. I will always think so. I would not have left you for anything in the world. But he did not break us by himself. We chose each other, and we were both wrong.”
Her face goes before she does.
I come around the island. She is twelve and much too long for my lap, and she gets most of herself into it anyway.
She cries the way she did when she was small, all at once and furious about it. I put my hand on the back of her head and keep it there. I do not tell her it is all right. I hold on.
When she finally sits up she wipes her nose on her sleeve, and I do not say one word about the sleeve.
“I’m not mad at him,” she says. “I don’t think I miss him either. Is that bad?”
“No. You do not owe him missing.”
“He’s still my dad.”
“Yes.”
“And Colt isn’t.”
“No.”
“Sometimes he feels like one.”
“Like what?”
She looks at the page.
“Never mind. That part’s mine.”
“Fair.”
She climbs back onto her own stool, takes the pencil back, and returns to the problem.
I think the conversation is finished.
“Could Colt leave?”
“Yes.”
Her pencil stops.
I do not take it back.
