Toby moved closer to his mother.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, sweetheart,” Renee told him. “Go wash up and get ready for bed. Dad and I need to talk.”
“Okay.” He looked between us once more before disappearing down the hallway.
I only closed the door once his footsteps had faded upstairs.
Renee sat down at the kitchen table, turning her wedding ring around her finger. I stayed standing.
***
Twenty-six years ago, my father found the positive pregnancy test in the bathroom trash before I’d worked up the nerve to tell anyone.
“Renee. We need to talk. Now.”
“Dad, I was going to tell you tomorrow, I promise.”
“Give me your phone.”
At fifteen, I’d fallen hard for a boy who worked the register at the hardware store where I did homework after school most afternoons. He always gave me the bigger half of whatever snack he’d snuck from the
break room. I wanted him standing next to me when I told my father.
My dad called him instead, before I ever got the chance.
I found out years later that my father told him I never wanted to see him again. Then he pulled me out of school for the rest of the semester and sent me to stay with his sister three states away, telling everyone I was doing an exchange program.
To me, he said only, “I handled it.”
“What does that mean? What did you tell him?”
I wrote to that boy anyway, handing my letters to my aunt because she was the one who drove past the post office each week.
“Anything for me today?” I’d ask her every single afternoon.
Eventually she stopped even checking and just shook her head before I could ask.
When my clothes stopped fitting right, my aunt set adoption
