“You want to be a dad, you get on a plane. You don’t think about it on my phone bill.”
My brother didn’t get on a plane. He never did.
The cards stopped after that. Sometimes I wondered if the girls noticed. They never said.
***
I’d lie awake some nights and run the numbers in my head, the way you do when you’ve been broke long enough. Not money. The other kind.
- Did I do enough?
- Did I say the right things at the right time?
- Did they know I loved them, or did they just know I was tired?
I wondered if the girls noticed.
There was a fear under all of it that I never said out loud. That somewhere in the back of their hearts, the triplets were still waiting for their real father.
That I was the man who’d been there, but not the man they wanted.
I didn’t blame them for it. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
There was a fear under all of it.
***
The morning of the triplets’ graduation, I sat in my truck in the parking lot for a full 20 minutes before I could make myself get out.
I was 49. My beard had gone gray in patches. My knee hurt from a fall off a ladder two summers earlier and had never quite healed.
I’d brought a cheap camera, which I didn’t fully know how to use, and it was shaking in my hand.
And in my wallet, behind the expired insurance card and a food receipt, I’d kept Daniel’s original note. It was faded, but still readable.
I’d brought a cheap camera.
I unfolded it with both hands.
I wondered if the girls would mention Daniel today. I wondered, even worse, if they’d wish he’d come instead.
I folded the note back up and stepped out into the heat.
***
The auditorium smelled of floor polish and cheap perfume. I sat seven rows back with my camera resting on my bad knee, trying to keep my hands steady. Twenty-two years of waiting for this exact morning, and I still felt as if I were about to drop a milk bottle.
I unfolded it with both hands.
