by Nicole Baart
For seven days after my one-word response, life at the DeSmit farm settled into a predictable routine. The boys seemed to embrace school, Grandma flourished amid the daily peace and freedom in her quiet home, and I found myself enjoying the hours at Value Foods with a sort of contentedness that I hadn’t imagined possible in a dead-end grocery store job. The truth was, my staff felt more like a family, and our customers part of a close-knit community. Even the gray brick walls of the outdated interior seemed to take on a patina of silver, as if the store itself were a modest treasure—a place that deserved respect for both its generous service and its steadfast longevity.
As for Michael, although we hadn’t seen each other since his failed suggestion in the grove, our relationship defied common sense and deepened. His unexpected gift of flowers, our subsequent telephone conversation, and his startling, earnest apology launched us to a new level of intimacy that convinced me all over again that the man I had loved for five years would be the man I loved for fifty more. When we spoke on the phone, it was as lovers—we finished each other’s sentences, communicated through silence, cherished one another in spite of distance. It felt like we had recaptured the immediacy of our first months of dating, that almost-heartsick longing to know more, learn more, be more. But this was different. It was more.
Looking back from even the close proximity of mere days, I could see that one lone week in August as a respite, a small haven of peace before my world split open at the seams. I did this to myself, I thought when I opened my e-mail one day and found a reply from the father of my son. I have no one to blame but me.
It shocked me to find Patrick Holt’s name among the notes from friends and family in my private in-box, but as I sat staring at the screen, I remembered that I had e-mailed him back. My online account would automatically assume he was a safe contact and reroute him to the inner sanctum of my carefully guarded and privacy-protected in-box. The thought leveled me. He had inched his way in.
“Okay,” I whispered to calm myself. “Of course he wrote back. What did you expect?”
I steeled myself, clicked on the recycled message title, and found one word hiding in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
Yours?
My breath left me in a cough of anger and disbelief. What did he mean, yours? Did he presume ownership, as if Daniel could be ours after all these years of silence, detachment, impassivity? Or even his? Like he had any claim at all. Daniel was mine; it said so on the birth certificate—the line where I was supposed to fill in his father’s name was left painfully, conspicuously blank. Nothing could change that now.
But as I heaved in and out, glaring at the computer screen like it bore the blame for delivering such an indiscernible message, Parker’s carefully chosen question flickered as if caught in the mirrors of a kaleidoscope. All at once I understood. He hadn’t meant to question my claim on Daniel. He meant, Is the child yours, or did you give it up for adoption?
But it didn’t matter what he had intended to say. It mattered how I felt about it.
Mine. I typed avariciously, unaffected by the faint understanding that I had more or less turned my son into a pawn. And though I should have paused to consider the consequences, I clicked the Send button with an almost-vicious abandon.
A few days later there was another lone word in my in-box.
Healthy?
I sent back, Perfect.
The very next day he asked, Girl?
For some reason I took great pleasure in typing the three letters of son. Daniel wasn’t merely some boy; he was my flesh and blood, my offspring, my son. It was a lot more than Parker had a right to say.
Although the back-and-forth exchange with my long-lost boyfriend was utterly serious, it felt like a game of sorts to me. He asked questions that only I could answer, and for a couple of days I relished the power of holding every card in my hand. What did he have to offer me? Nothing. And yet I believed with all my heart that if I simply stopped responding, he’d feel as if he had lost everything. I didn’t know what he wanted from me, what he wanted from Daniel, but each e-mail convinced me a little more that his interest was more than a passing curiosity.
Parker was silent for a while after he learned that he had fathered a son, and a part of me harbored the wild hope that that would be the end of it. I remembered all too well the grad school student who ran like a frightened child when I refused to abort his baby, and I couldn’t stop myself from wishing in some dark corner of my soul that the Parker I knew back then still existed. Maybe he’d run away again, and I could go back to life as normal. Marry Michael—eventually—and let Daniel’s biological father forever be some nameless bum who had taken advantage of an eighteen-year-old girl.
But it couldn’t be that simple.
One day it hit me that I knew what Parker’s next question would be. He was biding his time, working up the courage to ask me the most intimate detail yet. It was what I would ask if I were him, and suddenly I dreaded checking my e-mail for fear that today would be the day he mustered the nerve.
It was hard to believe that I had already let him in this far—I wavered between loathing myself for giving away information about my child like dime-store candies doled out one by one and feeling a sense of relief that the man who gave Daniel the slope of his nose had finally taken an interest in his amazing son. Daniel deserved to be known, to be adored. But I didn’t know if I wanted Parker to be the one to do the adoring.
By the time I received his e-mail, I was a mess of contradictions. For my own sake, I wanted to push Parker away. But for Daniel’s sake, I wanted to draw him close. Instead of reading Parker’s question, I pressed my hands over my eyes, trying to hide from the reality of the road I found myself on. It was uncharted, a bewildering, foreign land, and I was scared of what I would find around the next bend. There were so many uncertainties, so much at stake. Who was Patrick Holt? Did he want to be a part of Daniel’s life? Did I want him to be a part of Daniel’s life? Was it wrong of me to even contemplate preventing it?
I took a shuddering breath and peeled my fingers from my eyes like a little girl watching a scary movie. The question was there, exactly as I knew it would be.
Name?
Before I could doubt myself further, I thrust my hands to the keyboard and quickly typed, Daniel Peter.
It was the first time I had responded with more than a single word.
* * *
I longed to talk to someone about Parker’s sudden appearance in my online world, but the person I would normally run to was the last one I could ever tell. Though I shared everything with Michael, I wasn’t ready to baptize him with the full reality of loving a single mom. It seemed cruel, an unexpected splash of ice water in the face. Of course, we had endured our share of trials already—nap schedules when Daniel was little, jealousy issues as he got older, and blank stares from people when they heard my son call the man whose hand I held “Michael” instead of “Daddy.” But that sort of trouble seemed pale in comparison to the sudden appearance of Daniel’s deadbeat biological father.
If Parker wanted to worm his way back into our lives, it changed the landscape of everything. Michael, who had been a father figure to Daniel—and Simon, too—would be relegated to merely my boyfriend, a man who had no claim on the boys he had grown to love. And Parker, a virtual stranger, could enter our lives out of the blue and profess the title of birth dad. It wasn’t fair.
And it certainly wasn’t fair that I had to shoulder this alone.
I prayed for wisdom, for guidance, but God seemed tight-lipped. Or maybe He was just biding His time, following a schedule that I couldn’t access no matter how earnestly I begged to catch a glimpse of His agenda.
There was a time in my life when I would have waited. I would have worried, chewed my fingernails down to the quick, and obsessed about what people were thinking of me. But much had changed. I had faced my mother, forgiven her, and lost her again all in a span of a couple months. I had become a mother myself. I
had more or less parented my brother through the same heartache I faced as a child—the abandonment of the woman who gave us birth. In some ways, Grandma was right. God was working in me, and I was no longer the sort of girl who just let life happen to her.
I decided that whether or not it would break my heart, it was time to tell Grandma about Parker. We were a family. We existed, for better or worse, together. And I had failed us by keeping Michael’s proposition to myself. I wouldn’t make the mistake of keeping secrets again.
My classes at the local tech school began the second week in September, and before I abandoned myself to the dash and scurry of work, family activities, and night class, I carved a couple hours out of my week for some one-on-one Grandma time. Mr. Durst was willing to let my schedule at Value Foods be flexible as long as I got everything done, and after I e-mailed Parker the final detail that had the potential to unleash the unknown—my son’s name—I worked through several lunch breaks so I could leave early on Friday. Grandma and I would have the rare chance to be alone before the boys got home from school.
Grandma wasn’t expecting me when I pulled into our winding driveway. She looked up from her roost in the garden, where she was plunging a narrow spade into one of our potato hills, and gave me an uncertain wave. I expected her to return to the task at hand while I parked and walked across the browning grass, but instead of thrusting her shovel back into the black soil, she folded her hands over the wooden handle and watched me come.
“What are you doing home at one?” she called when I was within earshot. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Fine.” I smiled, hoping that the sentiment reached my eyes.
“I thought you had to work until four.”
“I’ve been skipping lunch breaks, putting in some extra hours.”
She buttoned her lip on one side in an expression that I had learned long ago meant she was skeptical of my actions. More likely, she questioned my motives. “What for?”
I laughed. “What is this? twenty questions?”
“Something like that. It’s just unlike you to be home in the middle of the day.”
“I’d like to talk to you,” I said, skipping the trivialities so that I could get straight to the point. “I want to take you out for lunch.”
“I already had lunch.”
“You did not! You rarely have lunch when we’re not home. Maybe an apple or a leftover muffin from breakfast . . .”
“Fine.” Grandma leaned against the spade with a resigned sigh. I would’ve been bothered by her less-than-enthusiastic reception if it hadn’t been for the sparkle in her eye. “Let’s have lunch. But I don’t want to go out. We have fingerlings.”
I followed her gaze to the woven basket at her feet and marveled at the modest crop of diminutive potatoes. “I thought we needed to give them a few weeks yet,” I mused, bending to select one of the delicate yellow tubes. It was heavy for its size and crusted with a fine layer of dirt as dark and moist as used coffee grounds. I rubbed it off with my thumb.
“I decided to check this morning, and it turns out there are a few ready.” Grandma thrust the spade into the hill and came up with a fibrous root system and a harvest of potatoes that clung to the tangled vines like fat fish on a line. “This plant was more decayed than the others, so I dug here. For some reason it matured faster. Must be in just the perfect spot.”
“Must be,” I parroted, dropping to my knees so she didn’t have to. I loosed the potatoes from their moorings and placed them in the basket beside me. “I think that’s everything this plant has to offer.”
“Good enough. We’ll give the rest a bit more time.”
In the house, I sent Grandma to go clean up while I prepped the potatoes. They were small, golden cylinders, covered in knots and bumps like the fingers of an arthritic centenarian. I wondered for a brief moment if that was why Grandma loved them so. Maybe they reminded her of my grandfather. Maybe she couldn’t hold his hands anymore, but she could harvest little reminders of him every fall.
I scrubbed the potatoes gently and placed them in a pot of cool, salted water. They didn’t need much to dress them up—a quick boil and a dollop of Dijon mustard was more than enough to make them delicious. While the water began to simmer, I scoured the fridge and came up with some leftover chicken and enough spinach for two small salads.
By the time Grandma emerged from the bathroom, arms rubbed pink from fingertip to elbow and a bemused look on her face, there were two plates on the table all dressed with a piece of cold barbecue chicken and a pear and spinach salad drizzled in a vinaigrette I had whipped up in less than a minute. In spite of the solemn nature of our impromptu lunch date, I couldn’t help but admire my own domesticity. It was impossible to pinpoint the moment I grew up, but it had happened little by little, and I knew that no matter where life took me from here, I would always be equipped to care for my family. Grandma had taught me much.
“The potatoes will be done in a couple minutes,” I told her. “They’re pretty slender; they shouldn’t take long.”
“I’m still wondering why you’re home,” Grandma murmured so softly I wondered if she intended me to hear her or not. She seemed tired to me, as if we were sitting down to a late dinner after a long, exhausting day instead of a quick lunch in the early afternoon.
“I need you,” I whispered back.
She either didn’t hear me or chose to ignore my comment. I let it pass because I wasn’t even sure myself of what I meant by it and moved around the table to pull out a chair for her. At the last second, I found I couldn’t let go and ended up holding on to her arm as she lowered herself. My hardy grandmother had never needed assistance before, but this time she didn’t shoo me away or cluck at my overbearing attentiveness. In fact, I was troubled by the way she leaned into me, by the sudden give of her knees when she was inches above the uncushioned seat. The tiny sound that escaped her lips when bone hit wood was enough to nick a hole in my heart. I made a mental note to add chair pads to my next Wal-Mart list.
We didn’t say much as I drained the potatoes and separated them onto our plates. I grabbed mustard, salt, and pepper and poured tall glasses of cold milk. The entire time I bustled around the kitchen, I watched Grandma out of the corner of my eye. Her blinks were long, her head heavy. I almost wanted to skip lunch altogether and tuck her into bed.
I held her hand as I recited the Lord’s Prayer, feeling the fragility of her bone-thin fingers and wondering when my invincible grandmother had gotten so old. “You shouldn’t have been out in the garden,” I chastised her after I said amen.
“Why not?” She extracted her hand from mine and picked up her knife and fork. The first bite that she brought to her mouth was a sliver of new potato, bare and unadorned, still steaming.
“You seem really tired today.”
“I’ll take a nap after lunch.”
“Do you usually nap in the afternoons?”
Grandma’s timid shrug was enough to tell me that regular naps weren’t the only secret she was keeping from me.
“I’m glad you sleep,” I told her. “If you’re tired, I want you to rest.”
“I don’t sleep for long.”
“Of course not.”
I almost broached the topic of her health then and there, forsaking my reason for coming home early. But Grandma didn’t let me. “So,” she said, touching the corner of her mouth with a napkin, “to what do I owe the pleasure of your company this afternoon?”
For days I had been planning what I would say, practicing the words so that they would slip over my tongue like warm tea. It would be easier for her, I reasoned, if I was calm, confident. But the house was unnaturally quiet, and Grandma’s gaze inescapably weary. It scared me. I didn’t mean to, but I blurted out, “I don’t know what to do.”
“About Michael?”
And then I had no choice but to say his name. “No. About Parker.”
I expected her brow to tighten in confusion, but the way my lips formed the syllable
s of his nickname—as if I were holding shards of glass in my mouth—told her everything she needed to know.
“Daniel’s father?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“But I thought—”
“We’ve been in contact,” I interrupted, my words coming in a sudden rush. “He e-mailed me, and it was . . . not awful. It was nice. He apologized, and I felt sorry for him, so I wrote him back. Then he sent me another message and I sent him one, and it’s been going on for almost three weeks.”
“You’ve been talking to him for three weeks?” Grandma’s appetite must have left her because she pushed the plate away from her and put her hands on the table palms down. I assumed she did it to steady herself, but she began to run her fingers over the worn wood grain, tracing patterns and fitting her fingernails into divots where life had scarred our gathering place. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought that she hoped to divine answers from the knots and whorls.
“Not talking, not exactly . . .” I trailed off, but she didn’t prod me further, and I found myself rambling on. Telling her everything. Who Parker was, how we met. Why I thrilled at his attention in the beginning, and why I loathed him by the end. How Daniel reminded me of his dad every day. “But Parker has no right to Daniel,” I said, shaking my head as if to clear it. “He’s no daddy.”
“Yet he is Daniel’s father,” Grandma reminded me. Her first words in several minutes were the five-pointed tips of a throwing star. I had read once that the Japanese called their tiny weapons shuriken, “sword hidden in the hand.” And though I knew that my grandmother meant no harm, it pierced me to hear her say the very thing I feared.
I had known the truth before, pressed it down deep and tried to ignore it, but I could disregard it no more: Patrick Holt was about to reenter my life.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I breathed.
Grandma raised her hand to my face and let her fingertip trace my hairline, the curve of my jaw. She said simply, “You have to.”
All This Time