The first time the phone rang, I ignored it. Emma was humming at the kitchen table, her cereal going soggy while she tried to balance a marshmallow on her spoon, and the little TV on the counter was playing some forgettable morning show with canned laughter. The second time it rang, my mom’s name flashed across the screen.
I wiped my hands on a dish towel patterned with tiny red, white, and blue stars and grabbed the phone, bumping the cheap American flag magnet that held Emma’s latest spelling test to the fridge. “Morning, Mom,” I said, tucking the phone between my ear and shoulder. “You’re up early.
Everything okay?”
“Stuart!” Her voice was so loud Emma actually flinched. “How could you not tell me?!”
My stomach dropped. “Tell you what?
Is Dad okay? Are you okay?”
“Turn on the TV,” she yelled. “Channel Seven.
Right now. Do you hear me? Right.
Now.”
Emma’s spoon clinked against the bowl. I fumbled for the remote, pointed it at the ten-inch screen, and flipped to Channel Seven. A news anchor in a red blazer smiled into the camera.
Beside her, under studio lights, sat an elderly couple I had last seen shivering on the side of a snowy highway—with my daughter’s drawing propped carefully between them. A week earlier, I hadn’t even known their last name. The highway stretched ahead like a ribbon of gray silk, and the first snow of the season was falling in soft, lazy spirals that caught the afternoon light.
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and glanced in the rearview mirror at Emma, my seven-year-old daughter, who sat strapped into her booster seat with her boots knocking together in that rhythmic way she did when she was happy. “Daddy, do you think Grandma’s gonna make her apple pie this year?” Emma asked. Her breath fogged the glass as she pressed her nose to the window, watching the flakes smear by.
“I’d bet my last dollar on it,” I said, smiling at her reflection. “And probably those cinnamon rolls you like too.”
She squealed, kicking her heels. That sound never failed to warm something in my chest, even after four years of trying to patch over the cold spots.
It had been just the two of us ever since her mother decided motherhood—and marriage—weren’t what she’d signed up for. The divorce papers had arrived with the same clinical efficiency as a shutoff notice from the power company, and she’d left without so much as a backward glance at the three-year-old who kept asking for her for months. We survived.
More than that, we found a way to be okay, just the two of us. Emma collected rocks and people’s stories. She drew elaborate pictures for the school secretary, the mailman, the cashier at Target.
Last week she’d informed me she was going to be a veterinarian and an astronaut, “because dogs will need doctors in space, Daddy.”
Holidays were the only times that still felt hollow around the edges, where you could feel the outline of the person who wasn’t there. My parents did everything they could to soften that. They stuffed the house in upstate New York with so much warmth and noise and food that Emma barely noticed her family didn’t look like the ones in her picture books.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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