He stopped.
He looked at it.
And he didn’t move.
I’ll never forget that moment. Later, I would replay it over and over, trying to understand. Because his face didn’t light up. Not at first. He went completely still, the way an animal goes still when it hears something in the woods. All the blood drained out of his cheeks. His lips parted, and for a second he looked almost afraid.
“Ben?”
“That’s…” He swallowed. “Are you sure?”
“Two lines. Look. Two lines!”
He took the test from me. His hand was shaking so hard I thought he’d drop it.
“How,” he whispered.
I laughed. “What do you mean, how? The usual way, I’m guessing.”
And then something broke open in him. He made a sound, half sob and half laugh, and he grabbed me and lifted me right off my feet. He spun me around in the hallway, and I knocked a picture frame off the wall with my foot, and neither of us cared.
“It’s a miracle,” he said into my hair, over and over. “It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle.”
I thought the shock on his face was just disbelief. Six years. Of course he couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it either.
That night, I heard him in the backyard on the phone. It was late, almost midnight. I’d gotten up for a glass of water and saw him through the kitchen window, standing by the fence in his bare feet, pacing.
I opened the back door a crack.
“I know, Mom,” he was saying. “I know. But it happened. It actually happened… No. No, I’m not going to. I’m choosing to believe it… Because I have to. Because what’s the alternative?”
He saw me in the doorway and hung up fast.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Mom.” He smiled and walked over and kissed me. “She’s over the moon. She’s already planning to knit about forty blankets.”
