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I cut a line through the whipped cream atop my sundae. “Is that what you want?”
“More than anything, angel. But what I want is only half the equation. What doyouwant?”
I rest my chin on my fist, my gaze drifting to a neighboring table where a mom’s wiping chocolate off her son’s face.
“I’m not sure if it’s a good idea,” I say.
“Why would you think that?”
No longer hungry, I push my half-eaten sundae away.
“Did Mary tell you about me? About where I come from?”
“She didn’t tell me much. Technically, she’s not allowed to, and she wouldn’t want to betray your privacy.” Jonah scoots my chair closer so he can draw circles across my back.
“You want to talk about it?” he asks. I really don’t, but it’s the only way he’ll understand.
“I told you my mom started doing drugs after my dad took off. That wasn’t entirely true. She did drugs before he left. I think they both did. It just got a lot worse after he was gone. My mom would lay on the couch for days, not moving, not even to go to the bathroom. I remember our apartment smelling like alcohol and ammonia. She rarely made me take baths, so I smelled awful. My teachers noticed—on the days my mom bothered to wake me for school.”
My stomach curdles at the memory of the stench, and I’m suddenly grateful I decided not to finish my sundae. Jonah cradles the back of my neck, but doesn’t say anything, content to let me tell the story at my own pace.
“She only went grocery shopping every couple of weeks. Probably the same time she went out to buy drugs. I don’t know where she got the money because she could never keep a job. Sometimes she would come home really excited and want to braid my hair or play with me. Then she’d get bored and ignore me for three days.”
I can feel Jonah’s body tensing as I speak, even as his touch remains gentle. Breathing deeply, I steel myself for the worst of it, the memories I rarely let myself go back to.
“One day she left and never came back. I was all alone. At some point, the power got shut off, and everything in the fridge spoiled, so I ate whatever I could scavenge from the cupboard. The upstairs neighbors heard me crying and called the landlord, thinking I was someone’s abandoned dog.”
Jonah’s arms tighten around me. “Do you know how long she’d been gone?”
“A little over three weeks, I think. If I wasn’t sleeping, I was waiting, so I slept a lot.” I lean into his sturdiness, thankful for the support of his body, and his love. “I was put into the system after that. Most of my foster moms tried hard to connect with me, but I never bonded with them. Jonah, if that’s the only kind of parenting I know, then how could I ever be a good mom?”
I rest my head on his shoulder as he massages my back. I wait for him to push for more details or ask a million questions, like a psychologist would. But he doesn’t. He just holds me, comforting me through the awfulness. It comes so naturally to him. He’s going to make an amazing dad someday to a kid of his own. But what if his instincts aren’t enough to make up for my shortcomings?
“My sweet angel.” His beard tickles my face as he kisses me. “It breaks my fucking heart to think of you as that starving little girl. But against the odds, you’ve grown up into a bright, resilient, beautiful young woman. There’s no reason you couldn’t be a fantastic mother, too.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Nobody does until they have kids. But I saw you at the barbecue. You’re a natural, Teagan.”
I shake my head. “You’re the natural. You’re the perfect dad, and you don’t even have kids yet.”
His smile is tinged with sadness. “I have you, princess. You’re my little girl, but you’re also a grown up, and the great thing about being a grown up is that you get to make your own choices. You get to choose how you’re gonna live, and who you’re gonna love. You get to choose your family.”
He takes a breath, like he’s gearing up to reach inside himself and pull out something he doesn’t show people often.
“Mary and I lost our parents pretty young,” he says. “Our dad died of stomach cancer when I was nineteen and then our mom suffered a stroke the year I graduated college. We were on our own, technically speaking, but we had others around us. Extended family and friends. We opened ourselves up to support from all sides, and it came pouring in. We built a new family of our choosing. And I’d like, more than anything, to make you a part of that family, angel.”
I tuck my face into the angle of his neck and shoulder, wanting desperately to believe him. It’s not that I think he’s lying. Jonah’s a good man, and meeting him is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But I know from experience that I always fuck things up. My last foster mom called me a bad seed from a bad tree after I got so enraged that I chucked a rock through her kitchen window. That’s how it always goes. People give me a chance, and things go okay for a while, but then something happens and I get so mad that I explode.
But everything feels different now that I’ve met Jonah. I haven’t felt the urge to break things, or become so swollen with anger that I had to lash out. No matter what kind of seed I am, he makes me feel like I could grow into something beautiful. His love is purifying, like a long hot shower after you've been wearing the same clothes and sleeping on the ground for a week.
Maybe now that I know what it feels like to be loved, I could learn to love someone else. Not just our baby, but Jonah’s family, too. It’s not like the few disparate members of my own family would miss me. All my uncle ever seems to want from me is money. He says my dad is excited to meet me, so why hasn’t he called me himself?
This connection I have with Jonah is stronger than anything I feel for my own relatives. What if he and I could build a better family than the one I grew up in?
A real family, with parents who love their kids and stick by them no matter what.
“I’d love to be part of your family.” I loop my arms around his neck and climb onto his lap to kiss him. My tattoo stings a bit as he pulls me close but I don’t mind the ache.
