My knees go weak. I brace both hands on the counter to keep from folding.
I hear the doctor’s voice like she’s still in the room. There we are. Yolk sac. Little fetal pole. About a hundred and fifteen beats per minute. Her tone calm, as if my whole life hadn’t just changed.
The way Paige’s fingers laced through mine, her gazed fixed on the screen in wonder. The way the room narrowed to a screen and a soft, stuttering flicker.
I own a pub in a small town. I run beer and burgers and pay for repairs on a kitchen hood that breaks more often than it should.
I can wrangle a Saturday night rush with an understaffed line and a keg blow in the middle of a four-top order, but this strip of paper knocks me flat.
I drag in air and hit the fridge for a glass of water. I choke down half of it, set the rest next to the paper—then move it away—andfinally sit at the table, the chair scraping across the wood floor with a noise that feels too loud.
What now, Hoffman?
Jason’s name pops into my head. He’s my family. Has been since we were in high school—hand-me-down skateboards and split sandwiches and sleeping on the Richards’ couch when my own house was unbearable.
He’s the person who held one end of a sheet of plywood while I swore at a bar top that wouldn’t level. He’s the voice in my head every time I’m about to do the dumb thing that will cost me money and pride.
And he’s Paige’s brother.
How will he look at me? Like I betrayed him? Like I snuck around? How will Gwen look at me? Gwen, who has hugged me like I belonged to her since I was sixteen and bloody-lipped on her kitchen stool.
Don, whose handshake has meant more to me than anything I ever got from my own father. Will he go soft around the mouth and say, “We need a minute, Ben?”
Will the two of them close ranks and stare me down like I’m a problem to solve?
They should defend and protect her. I’d be worried if they didn’t.
I rub the heel of my hand over my chest where it’s tight. It doesn’t matter what they think, I tell myself, and know that’s not true at all.
It matters because I love them. It matters because this is the one circle I’ve ever been let into, and I don’t want to be shoved back out on the lawn like a pariah.
But it doesn’t matter enough to change what I do next. I’m going to be there. For the baby. For appointments. For all the good parts, the dull parts, and the parts that make you weep in the car because you haven’t slept in four days. I’m not going anywhere.
I won’t be my father.
The thought knocks the air out of me so suddenly that I grip the table to keep from flinching.
He’s a ghost at best now, a shadow in a doorway in my head, but today he’s full-color: the back of his jacket as he closed the trailer door; the sour coffee smell that always lingered in the kitchen. Fighting off tears as I stood at the front door of a house that was no longer mine, to find him gone. No note. No call. Nothing. Just absence.
I want to be someone who doesn’t disappear. Someone my kid can count on.
But the ugly thoughts invade my mind. What if I can’t help it? What if something in me is wired wrong the same way he was?
What if the first time the baby screams for three hours, I find the handle of my keys in my palm and the door slamming behind me?
What if I’m my father, but it’s just taken me a while to realize it?
“Jesus,” I say out loud, because the thoughts and doubts are starting to eat right through me.
I push back from the table because I need to move or I’ll fall apart. The house is clean enough, but I clean it anyway because I don’t know what else to do with my hands.
The sink, the already-wiped counter. The coffee table ring that’s been there since 2019. The motion helps. So does the burn in my shoulders when I scrub too hard.
When I can’t find another thing to make shine, I pace.
From the front door to the back, through the living room where the leather couch is permanently dented from a thousand Sunday collapses. Up the stairs; down.
I stop at the spare room at the end of the hall, the one with the half-assembled rowing machine and two boxes of winter pub specials I never ran. It smells faintly of dust and cedar.
