“You can always tell me something. That’s the deal now.”
“I know.” He smiled a little. “That’s actually what it’s about.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to me.
It was a letter from Dr. Hale’s office. Ben’s latest test results. He’d gone back every few months that whole year, he told me. Not because he was hoping for anything. Just because he’d promised himself he would never again be afraid to look.
The numbers didn’t mean much to me. But at the bottom, Dr. Hale had written a note by hand.
Still low, but holding steady. Your daughter remains, as I said before, a remarkable piece of luck. Give her my best.
“A remarkable piece of luck,” I read out loud.
“That’s what she is,” Ben said. “Odds of maybe one in a thousand, he said. Maybe worse. And she happened anyway. And the first thing I did when I saw her was call her a mistake.” He shook his head slowly. “I’ll be paying for that one my whole life.”
“Yes,” I said. “You will.”
“I know.”
I folded the letter back up and handed it to him.
“I’m not going to tell you it’s okay, Ben,” I said. “Because it’s not. It was never okay. It’s never going to be okay.”
“I know.”
“But I’ll tell you this.” I looked out at the yard. At the balloon. At the maple tree that was dropping its first red leaf onto the grass, right about where the trash bags had been a year ago. “I didn’t forgive you all at once. I don’t think I ever will. I think I’m forgiving you in pieces. A little bit every time you show up. A little bit every time you tell me the truth even when it’s ugly. A little bit every time you hold her.”
He didn’t say anything. He just nodded. His eyes were wet.
“Some days I give you a piece,” I said. “Some days I take one back. That’s how it’s going to be. Maybe for a long time.”
“That’s fair,” he said. “That’s more than fair.”
“Good.”
We sat there a while longer. Then, very slowly, I moved over on the step until my shoulder was touching his.
He didn’t move. I think he was afraid to breathe.
“Ben.”
“Yeah?”
“Next year, for her birthday, we’re doing the cake inside. I’m not scrubbing frosting out of that hair in the backyard hose again.”
He laughed. A real laugh. The first real laugh I’d heard from him in a year.
“Deal,” he said.
People ask me sometimes how I could go back to him.
My friend Rachel asked it straight out once, over lunch. “Claire, he threw you out. With a newborn. How do you even look at him?”
