Roy and I had the whole delivery planned down to the playlist and the little gray hat he’d bought back in March. Then my water broke on a Tuesday and he NEVER SHOWED.
This was our first, after four years of trying and two rounds we paid for with the truck money.
A nurse kept telling me men get stuck in traffic, men get scared, men turn up by morning.
I signed the forms alone.
Naomi came at 6:12 Wednesday, seven pounds even, with a full head of dark hair.
I held her and watched the door.
“He’s parking, probably,” I said to the nurse.
Two days later they wheeled me to the curb and my dad drove us home in his work van and asked NOT ONE QUESTION the whole way.
That was not like him at all.
The house was DEAD SILENT when he unlocked it.
I went up the stairs sideways because of the stitches, with her against my shoulder.
The nursery was EMPTY.
No dresser, no lamp, no rocker my aunt reupholstered. Just the bed, and the yellow blanket folded on the mattress the way I left it.
A piece of paper was lying in the middle of it.
I read it standing up, one arm under her, and my hand moved enough that the letters swam.
“I love you and our baby. But I had to leave forever. Ask YOUR DAD why he did this to me.”
His handwriting. He crosses his t’s low.
There was a dead moth on the sill and I thought somebody should get that.
I do not remember the stairs going down.
My dad was in the living room with his keys still in his fist.
He was not surprised.
“What did you do,” I said.
He looked at the paper and not at me.
“Sit down, Colleen,” he said, and he pulled out a chair.
“I am not sitting down in my own house.”
“He was here Tuesday night,” he said. “Standing right where you are. He asked me one thing and I answered him.”
Then my father told me WHAT HE HAD SAID TO KEEP MY HUSBAND OUT OF THAT DELIVERY ROOM ⬇️
The chair he pulled out
“I told him if he showed up at that hospital I’d have him picked up in the parking lot,” my dad said. “That’s what I said. Word for word.”
He kept his hand on the back of the chair like he was going to hold it out again.
“Picked up by who.”
“By the sheriff, Colleen. I had it ready. I had the paperwork in the van and a man’s name to give them.”
Naomi made a noise against my collarbone and I turned her a little, the way you do without deciding to.
“What paperwork.”
“Sit down.”
“What paperwork.”
He looked at the front window. There was a strip of light on the carpet where the rocker used to sit, a rectangle of color the sun had never gotten to in four years.
“You had a baby,” he said. “You’ve been up two days. This is not the day for it.”
“You emptied her room.”
“I moved some furniture.”
“You moved it where.”
He put the keys in his coat pocket. That was the first thing he did with his hands all week that looked like a decision.
“Some of it’s at Donna’s,” he said.
“And the rest.”
He did not answer that. He asked if I’d eaten, and he went into my kitchen and opened my refrigerator like it was still Sunday, and I stood in the hallway holding a five-day-old and the piece of paper her father left, and I thought, he had a name ready to give the sheriff.
Whose name.
The truck went in January
Roy sold the truck in January and I never once asked who bought it.
That sounds stupid now. It didn’t then. We’d been four years on that road, two years of it with a folder on the kitchen table that had the clinic’s logo in the corner, and by January the folder had a number in it that we could not make out of what we had.
He came in one night in the cold with the plates in his hand and set them on the counter and said, “That’s it. That’s the second round.”
I cried at the sink. He stood behind me and put his chin on top of my head and said the truck was a truck.
He rode with a guy from work after that. He never complained about it. He’d get dropped off at the corner and walk the last stretch, and in March he came up the walk with a paper bag and pulled out that little gray hat, gray with a rolled brim, and put it on his own fist and made it talk.
My dad drove for a small outfit then and still does. A white van, ladders on top, a magnet on the door with the company name and a phone number that rings at somebody’s house. He’s had it eleven years. He keeps everything in it. There’s a folder wedged in the driver’s door pocket, black, held together with a rubber band, and when I was a kid I used to sit in the passenger seat and be told not to touch it.
He and Roy got along fine. Not close. My dad has one way of loving people and it’s showing up with a tool.
He put the crib together in July. Roy held the slats and my dad ran the driver and they had a whole conversation about the difference between a stud finder and knocking on the wall, and I sat in the doorway on Donna’s rocker with my feet up because my ankles had gone.
Donna is my mother’s sister. She did that rocker over herself in a canvas the color of oatmeal because I said once that I liked it. It took her a month. She brought it over in the back of her car and would not let anybody help her carry it up.
The last thing Roy said to me before the ambulance ride, in the driveway, was that he had to run home and get the bag because he had left it by the door.
He never came back with the bag either.
I kept thinking about the black folder in his van door, and how I was never allowed to touch it.
The folder in the van door
My dad slept in my house for three nights, on the couch, in his clothes, and every morning I heard him start the van at five thirty.
He would not talk about Tuesday. He would talk about anything else. He fixed the closet door that had been dragging since we bought the place. He bought the wrong size diapers and then went back and bought the right ones without being asked. He held Naomi one time, standing up, for about ninety seconds, with his arms locked like she was a box he was carrying down stairs.
On the fourth morning he went to the corner store and I went out to the van.
It was unlocked. It’s always unlocked. I put my hand in the door pocket and got the folder and the rubber band was so old it came apart in my fingers.
Registration. An insurance card from two years ago. A dentist appointment card. And under all of it, folded in three, a loan agreement from the credit union out on the highway.
Forty-one thousand, seven hundred. Signed in December.
Two names on it. Roy’s, with the t’s crossed low. And under his, in my father’s block letters, Gene Pruitt as co-signer, except my father is not a Pruitt. He printed my married name. He printed my married name on a credit union document and signed it with his own hand.
I stood in the driveway with a baby monitor clipped to my waistband and read the payment schedule twice.
Then I heard the store bag and I put it all back the way it was, and I got the rubber band in my pocket because it was in pieces and there was nothing to do with it.
He came up the drive and looked at the van and looked at me.
“You need something out of there?”
“Wipes,” I said.
“They’re in the house,” he said.
Donna’s kitchen
Donna made me sit at her table and put Naomi in the middle of it in the car seat like a centerpiece and she talked for ten minutes about nothing, which is how she gets around to something.
The rocker was in her front room. Nothing else of ours was.
“He brought it Wednesday,” she said. “Before you came home. He had the dresser and the lamp on the van too and he didn’t want to talk about where those were going.”
“Wednesday morning.”
“Early. It was still dark when the van pulled up. I made him coffee and he drank it standing at the sink.”
“Did he say anything about Roy.”
She turned the tap on and off for no reason.
“He said Roy had made a mess and he was cleaning it up,” she said. “He’s said that about people since he was nineteen years old, honey. It doesn’t mean much.”
She got up and got the coffee going and then forgot about it.
“He was gray in the face,” she said. “I’ve seen him bury his own mother and he didn’t look like that. He asked me if the rocker was mine or yours. I said it was yours. He said keep it here a while anyway.”
“He was hiding it from me.”
“He was hiding it from somebody,” she said.
I told her about the paper on the blanket. I did not tell her about the folder. I don’t know why. I think because it was the only thing I had that he didn’t know I had.
She sat down then.
“Your dad co-signed something for you two,” she said. “Back around Christmas. He told your uncle he’d handled the clinic bill and to keep his mouth shut about it.”
“He never told me.”
“He wouldn’t. He’d rather you thought it came out of a truck.”
I looked at the rocker in her front room with the oatmeal canvas and the little dent in the arm where Roy used to set a glass.
“Colleen,” she said, “don’t go over there swinging until you know what the man is scared of.”
I said I already knew what he was scared of. I was wrong about that, and she let me be wrong.
I went home and put Naomi down and called the credit union out on the highway and a woman named Pam told me she could not discuss an account with someone who was not on it, and then she said, because she is a person, “But if you come in with ID and the account holder, we can talk about options.”
Then she said the payment was thirty days past and the note had gone to the co-signer.
The credit union, Friday at ten
I asked my dad to drive me Friday. I told him it was the pediatrician.
He put the car seat base in the van himself and checked the belt twice and pulled out onto the highway, and when I said take the next left he did it before he thought about it.
He saw the building through the windshield and slowed down like the road had changed under him.
“Colleen.”
“Park.”
He parked. He left the engine running. Naomi was asleep with her fist up by her ear.
“I know about the forty-one seven,” I said. “I know you signed a name that isn’t yours.”
He put both hands on the wheel.
“I signed it because he asked me to,” he said. “He sat in my kitchen and he cried, and he said the second round was the last one you had in you, and I said fine. I said I’d put my name on it. And they wanted the name off the account he opened it under, and he said just print it, Gene, it’s the same house.”
“That’s not how names work.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
“So Tuesday night he came to tell you it was late.”
“Tuesday night he came to tell me it was gone.” He said it to the windshield. “He’d been paying it out of the checking and then he stopped paying it, and there’s four months of it, and he had a whole thing worked out where he was going to move it somewhere else and he needed one more signature off me. While you were on the floor of the bathroom, Colleen. He drove over to my house from your bathroom.”
“So you said no.”
“I said no. And he said then what am I supposed to do, and I said I don’t know, Roy, but you’re not putting my name on it twice.”
He turned the engine off.
“And then I said the other thing.”
“Say it.”
“I said if he came near that hospital before he made it right, I’d take the paper to the sheriff and let them explain it to him at the door.” He rubbed his mouth. “I thought he’d fix it by morning. I thought he’d be there at six with flowers. Men do the thing you tell them to do, in my experience.”
I sat there and looked at the little bank building with the flag and the drive-through lane.
“You told my husband to stay away from me,” I said, “and then you drove me home and didn’t say one word for forty minutes.”
“I was working out how to tell you.”
“You had two days.”
“I’ve had thirty-one years,” he said, “and I still don’t know how to tell you anything.”
Keys on the table
We went in. Pam had a nameplate and a bowl of butterscotch and a screen she turned partway toward us, which people only do when it’s bad.
My dad talked more in that room than he had all week.
He told her he’d printed the wrong surname. He said it out loud in a bank, twice, once for her and once for the man she called over, and the man went and got a woman in a gray blazer, and my father said it a third time to her with his hands flat on the desk.
“That’s fraud,” the woman said. “Depending.”
“It’s my daughter’s name,” he said. “It’s not a stranger’s. I’ll sign whatever you want signed today with the right one on it.”
“Sir, the loan is four months delinquent. It’s going out for collection Monday.”
“Then I’ll bring it current Monday morning.”
“With what,” I said.
He didn’t look at me. “The dresser and the lamp are at a place on Third,” he said. “And the van’s worth about nine.”
The gray blazer woman said the van wouldn’t fix it. She said what would fix it was somebody assuming the note who could carry it, and she looked at me while she said it, because I was the one with a birth certificate application in my bag and a last name that matched the paper.
Naomi woke up in the car seat and started the wind-up cry.
“He can’t be on it anymore,” I said. “My husband. If he’s on it and he’s gone, what does that do to me.”
“It doesn’t do anything good,” she said.
And my dad said, “Put it on me. All of it. Take her off, take him off, put the whole thing on Gene Doyle and let me pay for what I did.”
“You didn’t take the money,” Pam said.
“I made it possible,” he said. “I’ve been making things possible for that boy since July and not one of you people is going to tell me I get to walk out of here clean.”
The gray blazer woman went to get a form.
My dad sat back in the chair and his hands were shaking, and he put them under the desk where I could not see them, and Naomi cried, and he said, without turning, “Give her here.”
I gave her here. He held her against his shirt in a bank lobby with his elbows out wrong.
“I’d have said it again,” he said. “Tuesday. Knowing all of it. I’d have said it again.”
“I know,” I said.
That’s the part I’m still carrying.
The rocker, back by the window
Donna brought the rocker over on a Saturday in the back of her car and would not let anybody help her carry it up.
We put it by the nursery window, in the strip of carpet that never got sun. The dresser stayed sold. The lamp stayed sold. There’s a milk crate by the bed with the diapers in it and it works fine.
My dad comes Tuesdays and Saturdays. He pays the credit union on the first and I pay it on the fifteenth and neither of us has said out loud how long that goes on. He fixed the closet door and then he fixed the gate and now he’s running out of things.
Roy’s account is closed. His mother says he’s in Illinois. He has never called and I have stopped keeping the phone next to me at night.
The paper is in the drawer with her hospital bracelet, because I couldn’t throw it out and I couldn’t leave it on the blanket.
I got the moth off the sill with a paper towel in the second week.
She’s four months now. Saturday my dad came in with the little gray hat in his fist, the one from March, that I had put in a box in the closet and could not look at.
He said, “It’s cold out.”
I said, “It doesn’t fit her anymore.”
He turned it over in his hands and set it on the arm of the rocker, and he sat down on the floor with his back against the bed frame and put his finger in her hand.
If this one sat wrong in your chest, pass it to somebody who has forgiven a parent for the worst thing they ever did on purpose.
For more wild family stories, read about the time my half-sister sewed my wedding dress on the machine I bought her, or when my mother-in-law stopped answering her phone in October. You might also like this story about the photo I took at two in the morning.
