“Are you leaving too?” I whispered.
He looked like I’d hit him. “No.”
“Everyone leaves.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
He held out his little finger under the table. “I promise.”
He kept it. He walked me down the aisle years later. At my daughter’s christening he stood beside me with one hand cupped under her head, still afraid I might drop her, even though I was thirty-two. Whenever I asked about the years before my mother, he gave me the same line every time: “The part that mattered started when you showed up, sweetheart.”
I always heard love in that sentence. I never once heard what he was leaving out.
His health had started slipping not long after he turned seventy-eight — first the exhaustion, then the weight falling off him, then the tests and the specialists and the careful, rehearsed way doctors talk when they already know how the story ends. I slept in the vinyl chair beside his bed that final week, jerking awake at every change in his breathing, memorizing the rhythm of the monitors.
