I crossed the room to the nursing chair.
Cole had moved it from the corner, I had come in one and found it repositioned beside the crib, angled toward the window so whoever sat in it would have the morning light across their right shoulder and the full view of the wall. I lowered myself into it now the way all sitting had become a process rather than an act, one hand on the arm, the slow controlled descent, the familiar rearrangement of weight once I was down. My back found the chair’s cushion and I settled, and both hands curved around my bump. My thumbs moved in slow circles without instruction.
I looked at the wall.
The wildflowers moved in loose clusters from the baseboard to the space above the crib, larkspur and the pale pink bloom I didn’t have a name for, and the vines curved between them in that sage green. In the morning light the raised texture of the brushwork was visible from across the room, each petal and leaf slightly distinguished from the flat plaster around it, the work of hands that had gone slowly and carefully. And at the center, in wide looping brushstrokes in a cream-white that caught the light at a slightly different angle than the wall: Hope. The letters filled the wall above the crib, unhurried and certain, and I looked at them the way I had been looking at them all morning, with the particular attention of a person still learning the shape of something they can finally afford to keep.
Wade, Rhett and Cole finished what they were doing and gave me the space I needed to enjoy the room. I was alone, well alone plus one. I could never truly be alone with a baby bump ready to birth. I smiled and listened to the barn sounds through the window.
“I met your father at a livestock auction,” I said to Hope. “A Tuesday. Late May, I think, though I got the date wrong the first time I tried to remember it, and then I couldn’t be sure, and eventually it became a Tuesday in late spring and I stopped arguing with myself about the rest.”
The memory had the quality they all had, the real ones, the specific sensory details that had survived everything else. The smell of warm hay and manure and the faintly metallic smell of the pens. The flat spring light and the mud along the south side of the auction yard where the drainage always failed. His boots were mud-caked, work mud, not careless mud, the kind a man doesn’t notice because he’s been moving too fast through a day to stop for it. He’d been standing at the near pen arguingcheerfully with a seller about the price of a yearling heifer, his hands demonstrating the size of some point he was making, the seller unimpressed and Ethan entirely unbothered by that.
“He was wrong,” I said. “About the heifer. The price was fair. But he was enjoying the argument so much I didn’t say so.”
He’d turned around at some point, and caught me standing fifteen feet away watching him with what must have been the least subtle expression in my history of expressions. He’d looked at me. And then he’d laughed.
Not a polite laugh. Not the quick, social laugh of a man caught doing something mildly embarrassing. A real one, from somewhere low in his chest, the kind that surprised the people near him into turning their heads to find the source of it. His whole face changed when he laughed, the laugh lines, the slight crinkling at the corners of his eyes, the way his shoulders moved with it. I’d watched it happen and thought, with the involuntary clarity of recognizing something you haven’t seen before: oh. There you are.
“He laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d seen all week,” I said. I shifted in the chair, resettling my weight. “That was the whole of it, really. That was the whole reason. He laughed and he wasn’t embarrassed and he walked over and said something completely ordinary about the heifer, something about the confirmation of the haunches, which was not a romantic opening line, and that was it.” I looked at the painted wildflowers above the crib. “That was just completely it.”
The morning light moved on the wall as the clouds shifted above the property.
“The night we found out about you,” I said, and I had to pause there for a moment, not because the words stopped but because I needed to be sure of my voice before I gave them tothe room. “He went still. That was the thing I hadn’t expected. Three full seconds of complete stillness, which if you knew your father, he was not a still person. He was always in the middle of something, always moving toward the next thing. Three seconds of stillness from him meant something had gotten all the way through.”
I could still see his face. The quality of the stillness on it, not shock, or not only shock. Something underneath the shock that was older and readier than he’d expected to find in himself.
“And then he took my face in his hands,” I said. “Just held my face. And he said, Hope.” My voice dropped a half-register. “Just that. Just the word. Like it was the only one that fit anything.”
I had not thought of the name yet. It had not occurred to me, not in those first minutes. He had given it to her before either of them existed as a fact in my own understanding, and it’d gone into me the way those words went in when the person saying them meant them completely, the way things settled into you and stayed settled.
“His eyes went bright,” I said. “He was grinning. And his eyes went bright at the corners and he didn’t do anything about it, he just kept grinning, and he said it again, Hope. Like he was telling you, not me.”
“Although I did talk him into calling you Peanut for a while, especially when I read you were literally the size of one. That seemed to stick after that. But then, the other day, in the light of the happiness I felt, in the tearful expression Wade held, and the hope that the three of them being in our lives meant… it came to me, and I remembered. Hope.”
The morning light had moved again. The cream-white letters on the wall sat fully in it now, and I looked at them and felt the warmth of them across the room.
Then I looked at the corner.
The shelf ran low along the east wall, just below the window height, a narrow, practical shelf, the kind you put small things on. Ethan had measured it. I knew because I had watched him do it, standing with his back to me and the pencil tucked behind his ear, the tape measure running from the stud to the mark he’d made on the plaster. He had looked back at me once over his shoulder and said something about the depth, whether it was deep enough for the ceramic rabbit he’d seen at the dry goods place in town, and I had said yes, and he had made the pencil mark on the wall, at the height he’d decided. And then three weeks later he was gone. The shelf stayed as a pencil line after that.
The shelf was there now. They’d built it, at the height he’d marked, the exact height, and I did not know how any of them had known the mark was meant for a shelf. It was barely visible, just a thin line under the new paint that you would only see if you were looking for it or standing close enough that the light caught it at the right angle. I was sitting close enough now. In the morning light, from the nursing chair, I could see it.
The line was still there. Under everything.
“He would have loved this room,” I said.
My voice had gotten quieter without my deciding. The sentences came shorter now, the way they always did when I was managing something that wanted more space than I was giving it. “He would have stood right here. Right in the middle of it with his hands in his back pockets and that low laugh of his,looking at those flowers. He would have said something about the rabbit.”
My jaw was tight. My eyes stayed on the pencil line under the paint, that thin dark evidence of his handwriting on the wall of a room he had not gotten to finish.
“He would have stood here with you,” I said. “Every single night.”
The exhale that came out of me was not clean. It came out in pieces, slow and uneven, and I held my palm against my baby bump, holding Hope.
“Wherever he is now Hope, he loves you so much, he always will,” I said. “We all love you, always and forever baby girl, always and forever.”
Chapter Thirteen – Lila
