“She’s hungry.”
He nodded.
“Do you need anything? Water? Food? Gregory showed me how to warm a bottle.”
He hesitated.
“I practiced.”
“You practiced warming bottles?”
“Six times.”
He showed me a faint pink mark on his wrist.
“I tested them incorrectly the first two times.”
I laughed.
I couldn’t help it.
He almost smiled.
“Can I come in?”
I looked at him.
“Yes.”
He sat on the nursery floor beside my rocking chair.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
He simply watched Wren.
“She has your mother’s nose.”
“Raymond said that too.”
“Raymond is usually right.”
Then his voice changed.
“He was right about something else too.”
“What?”
“That I should have been there.”
He meant my mother’s final day.
He told me Raymond had called him from Atlanta.
Once.
Twice.
Then a third time.
Telling him to leave Chicago immediately.
Dad believed there was still time.
There wasn’t.
“I’ve thought about that every day for sixteen years,” he said.
He admitted that afterward, he couldn’t look at me without remembering the hospice hallway.
So instead of showing up, he sent Raymond.
To graduations.
College.
My wedding.
“I thought I hadn’t earned the right to be there.”
