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I turned around and saw my mother standing there, making coffee. Neither Max nor I had heard her come in.
“All you boys do,” she went on. “I understand why. He was a good man.”
She sat down at the table with us and both Max and I raised an eyebrow. Our mother rarely spoke about our father. After he died, she shut down conversations about him.
“But we were younger than either of you when I found out I was having Luke,” she said. “It was kind of a shock.”
I nodded, encouraging her to continue. It was surreal hearing about my dad.
“He didn’t take it very well,” she admitted.
“What do you mean?” I wondered.
“I mean that when I told your father that I was pregnant, he was scared. We started fighting a lot. Neither of us were ready to be parents. We’d been married for less than a year. We had no money and neither of our families were particularly supportive,” she said. “There were times when I was convinced he was going to leave me.”
Her words hug heavily in the air.
“He almost left? Dad? Are you serious?” I asked.
“Yes. But that’s the thing about life,” she continued, “the big life changes anyway. They don’t wait for you to be ready for them. They just happen. So many things in this life are going to happen before you’re really ready for them. They force you into action and you decide whether you’re going to step up or not.”
“And dad stepped up?”
“He did. We’d fought the day I went into labor. I wasn’t sure he would even come to the hospital. But when my water broke, I called him and… there he was. When Luke was born, Hank was so proud. He held his son and swore he’d take care of us for the rest of our lives.”
“He was a good father? Just like that?” I wondered. “He figured it out?”
“He didn’t always know what to do right away. He made a lot of mistakes. We both did. But his heart was always in the right place. And that’s what really mattered.”
Neither Max nor I said anything.
“So, to answer your question, you never know whether or not you’re really ready to be a parent,” she told us. “You don’t have to be perfect, but if your heart is in the right place, things will be okay.”
Max looked up from his hands and glanced over at Holly, who was putting on her coat and getting ready to leave. He got up to help her.
I got up too, figuring it was time to head home, but my mother stopped me.
“You know, you each got something from your father.” She sighed, the photo albums still in her hands. “Luke got his loyalty. Elias got his brains. Henry got his sense of adventure. Max got his kindness. Laura got his resilience…”
“And what about me?”
“You got his heart, Carter,” she told me. She reached for my hand and I gave it to her, the gesture feeling uncomfortable, yet necessary. “And, for what it’s worth, I think you’re the most like him of any of you kids.”
Her words hit me square in the chest, tugging at my heart at not letting go.
I couldn’t make out athank you. I just squeezed her hand.
Twenty-Four
Zoe
“There’s some woman here asking about you,” Mark informed me. He had a stack of charts in his hand and his nose in the air. “Looks like she’s doing a background check or something. What did you do?”
“What are you talking about?” I wondered. I looked over at the nurses’ station where a petite woman with long, black hair and a budding little baby bump was interrogating Dr. Castigan. “What’s going on?”
I rushed over, figuring that whatever this was couldn’t possibly be good. I’d just gotten Dr. Castigan to like me, and I was sure that all that progress was about to go straight to hell.
“I have no reason to doubt that Zoe Laster is a wonderful mother,” Dr. Castigan told the mystery woman. “She’s been a dutiful employee here, respected by her colleagues and wonderful with her patients.”
