“The worst.”
“That’s why I like him.”
I laugh. Dad’s thumb catches a tear I didn’t realize was running down my cheek.
“Does your mother know?” he asks.
“Not yet. I wanted tonight to be about her.”
“She’s going to lose her mind.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to cry for a week.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to start knitting again. She hasn’t knit since 1998 and it’s going to be a disaster.”
I laugh again. “You’re supposed to pretend to be excited!”
“I am excited. I’m also realistic.” He wipes my cheek with his thumb. “Ababy. Our family is having a baby.”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus.” He exhales slowly. “I’m going to be a grandfather.”
“Thecoolgrandfather.”
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling and the corner of his eyes crinkle.
The thing about families is that they don’t start in one place. They don’t begin with a wedding or a birth or a single, definitive moment. They begin in pieces, scattered across years and cities and people who don’t even know each other yet.
A woman in Galway, teaching a little girl how to plant bulbs in autumn. A twenty-nine-year-old neuroscientist, holding his four-year-old daughter’s hand in Central Park, having no idea what he’s doing. A nanny in overalls, who once stared at a gas stove like it’s alien technology, determined to figure it out.
These pieces don’t look like a family. Not yet. Not from a distance.
But then the years pass. The pieces drift closer, overlap, interlock. The woman in Galway becomes a voice on the phone every Sunday. The neuroscientist becomes a father, then a husband, then a grandfather-in-waiting. The nanny becomes a mother, then a matron, then the person everyone calls when they need someone to hold the center.
And the little girl becomes a woman. A woman who carries an ultrasound in her purse, who is learning how to be brave, who is standing in her mother’s living room surrounded by the people who made her.
“Hey, where’s Grandma Elaine? I thought she was coming tonight.”
Dad shakes his head. “She’s flying in on Tuesday. Wanted to give us space for the big party, she said. But also I think she has some charity thing this weekend. You know how she is.”
I do know. Elaine Collier—my grandmother, technically Annie’s mother, but she claimed me the minute Annie married my dad. She swept into our lives like a perfumed hurricane, allsilk scarves and silver bracelets. She’s taken me to the Met more times than I can count. She took me to the ballet every Christmas—the Nutcracker, always, because tradition mattered to her—and to the opera once, which I didn’t understand but pretended to because she was so excited to share it.
Grandpa Graham died when I was eleven. Prostate cancer. I didn’t get to know him well enough. That’s one of those regrets that sits quietly in the background, not loud enough to demand attention but present nonetheless. I wish I’d asked him more questions. I wish I’d sat with him longer.
“She’ll be happy to see you all,” Dad says. “She’s missed you kiddos.”
“I’ve missed her too.” I smile. “Tell her I’m taking her to the Met next time she’s here. Just the two of us.”
“She’ll like that.”
“She always does.”
Mom finally hangs up the phone and then crosses the room towards us. She kisses my cheek and her lips are warm, slightly damp. She smells like the same perfume she’s worn since I was a kid.
