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“This place . . . it was so hard to move into.” He glanced back at the cabin. They’d lived in it for a little more than three years. Three years of not paying rent because the land and the cabin were owned. Kevin had no idea what a big deal that would become just a few short months after they’d moved in. For in that time, Jackson had been born. Another baby boy who looked mostly like Kevin, with thick dark hair and nut-brown eyes.
And a cleft palate.
The medical bills could have buried them. But they didn’t.
“I never said what a blessing it was.” Kevin turned to Helen, taking both her hands in his. “The truth is, my dad left me something amazing. For all of his faults, all the things I hated and resented, somehow he held on to this property, and he left it to me. More than once it changed how we could live. It provided in a way that I never could have otherwise. But up until this moment, I wasn’t thankful to my dad for it. Because I didn’t want to give him credit for anything good.”
Helen’s tender gaze never flickered into anything that resembled disappointment. She simply listened, holding his hands like the faithful companion she’d been for nearly forty years. Into Kevin’s pause, she nodded. “I have thought on the contradiction too. That in spite of the dark life he couldn’t find his way out of, your dad left behind a blessing. One that changed our lives.”
“I want to say it out loud. I need to—even though I don’t know where he is now and am frankly scared to imagine.” Kevin turned his attention back to the trees. “I’m grateful, Dad. Thank you for providing me and my family with a life that could have looked very different otherwise.”
Seemed like practicing gratitude shouldn’t take forty years to get around to. But it had. Seemed like it shouldn’t take such an emotional toll. But it did.
Even so, as exhaustion crept in and his intuitive wife looped her arm through his and guided him back home, Kevin was glad to finally lay that burden to rest. It certainly had been a long time coming.
Helen peeked into the master bedroom a half hour after they’d returned from their walk. Kevin had finished his cider and was now dozing peacefully. For several minutes she watched the rise and fall of his chest, each puff of air eliciting gratitude from her heart.
Life was a beautiful gift.
She bent to press a soft kiss to his temple, then picked up the empty mug and slipped away. Once in the kitchen, she made herself a fresh mug of steaming spiced orange tea and then settled at the table. In front of her waited the large picture book she’d dug free from a lower cabinet. With a cautious finger, she traced the edge of the front cover and then gingerly opened to the beginning.
The date on the front flap read 1989. Helen turned the page and was catapulted into decades past.
Jackson had turned two and had undergone his second surgery. The stitches beneath his nose and down his lip looked like tiny spiders trailing his sweet little face. Even so, most of the photographs that captured him revealed eyes that held mischief.
Though he looked like his father, Jackson would grow up to act like his mother.
Oh, how Helen loved a good belly laugh! And she was certainly the ornery sort. One only needed to ask her older neighbor from her growing-up years. Tilly Knolls used to call Helen Chase their very own little Dennis the Menace. From pouring milk on the floor in Ms. Knolls’s kitchen so that she could share a snack with the woman’s kitties, to sneaking out to fork the neighborhood lawns as a teenager, Helenlovedfun.
Kevin had said it was one of the things that attracted him to her the most. His dark life had desperately needed fun.
Jackson was Helen’s mini-me—and it was a good thing, because he needed humor in the unique struggles he’d encounter in life. Sometimes, though, Helen had forgotten that her son had come with an abundance of laughing fortitude. Sometimes that mama bear in her had been a little much—even to the detriment of her other sons on occasion.
But in those pictures, she saw only a two-year-old making faces at the camera, somehow managing to do so around those stitches.
In those pictures she also saw three older boys making messes, and grinning like little monkeys, and living the boy life like natural-born pros, oblivious to the tininess of their home or the oddity that all four shared one bedroom. And in those pictures she saw the backdrop of that cabin. The one Kevin had forced himself to adopt as home once again and then fix up the best he could on the very limited amount of money that they’d had.
Somewhere midway through the photo album, she came to two moments in time that were encased in her memory with perfect clarity. First was Kevin’s birthday—she couldn’t remember which birthday, but she remembered so many other details. Namely, the fact that on that day, as she had decorated the homemade cake she’d cooled on the counter, she experienced a sudden bout of nausea.
After barely making it to the toilet to empty her stomach, realization dawned. The recent tiredness. The strange dreams. And only the day before, a sudden tingle in her breasts.
She was pregnant for the fifth time.
Though she’d felt guilty over it even at the first tear, Helen had cried. Seven years, five babies, and, thanks to massive hospital bills, she and Kevin were as poor as they’d been when they’d gotten married.
As Helen studied the pictures glued to the album’s paper, she fixed on the one that her mother or Elizabeth must have taken—the one of just her and Kevin. He looked happy, her in his lap and his arms wrapped around her. At that point he’d been oblivious to their next stork visit. But Helen . . . Helen looked pensive.
It’d been a near breaking point for her. She’d loved her boys, but she couldn’t imagine motheringfivechildren. They were okay in that little cabin that Kevin had fixed up, but how could they fitfivechildren in one room.
What if this one was a girl?
What if this one, like Jackson, was born with special (expensive) medical needs?
What if she broke?
What if Kevin broke?
In that faded photo, Helen could read all of those fears as if they were printed in bold captions below.
