He smiled.
“He said you corrected his grammar at the library the day you met,” he said. “And he went back every day for a month until you agreed to have coffee with him.”
I laughed. Then I cried. Darlene brought a box of tissues and a pot of coffee without being asked.
The little girl had been watching all of this very seriously. She slid her placemat across the table toward me.
“I drew you something,” she said.
It was a picture in crayon. A house with a red roof. A big orange tree in the yard. A woman with gray hair standing in front of it, holding hands with a little girl with dark hair.
Above it, she’d written in careful purple letters:
GRANDMA FRAN AND BABY ROSE.
I looked up at her.
“How did you know about Baby Rose?” I asked.
She looked at her father. Daniel nodded.
“Daddy told me,” she said. “My whole life. He said a baby named Rose helped fix his heart when he was little. So he named me after her.”
She smiled with her missing tooth.
“He says I have to take extra good care of the name,” she said. “Because it’s borrowed.”
Part Fourteen: What I Said
Daniel and I talked for three hours.
Darlene kept the coffee coming. Little Rose ate a waffle and a side of bacon and colored three more pictures. At one point, she fell asleep with her head on her father’s arm.
Daniel told me about his mother. About his surgeries. About nursing school and his wife, Megan, and the NICU at Dayton Children’s Hospital, where he’s worked for fourteen years.
“I work with babies who are born with heart defects,” he said quietly. “Like Rose. Like me.”
He looked down at his hands.
“Some of them make it,” he said. “Some of them don’t. And sometimes I’m standing in the hallway with a family when the doctor asks them the question. The same question Dr. Hollings asked your husband.”
He swallowed.
“Some families say yes,” he said. “Some say no. Both answers are right. I tell them that every time.”
“Daniel,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“When Arthur met you,” I said. “Was he—did he seem sorry? For lying to me?”
Daniel was quiet for a long time.
“Every single time,” he said. “He’d tell me about the promise in the hospital. About how you held his hand and asked him. He said it was the only time in his whole life he ever lied to you.”
He looked at me.
“He said he’d been sorry for forty years,” Daniel said. “But he said the thing he was most afraid of wasn’t that you’d be angry.”
“What was it?”
“He said he was afraid that if he told you, you’d have to carry it too,” Daniel said. “And he’d rather carry it alone than make you hurt like that again.”
I looked out the window. At the parking lot. At the Saturday morning traffic on Broad Street.
At the booth where my husband sat every week for twenty-two years, doing his crossword puzzle, carrying the heaviest thing a father can carry.
Alone.
“I was so angry at him,” I said. “This week. When I read it. I’ve never been so angry.”
Daniel nodded.
“That’s fair,” he said. “He’d have understood.”
“I’m still angry,” I said.
“That’s fair too,” Daniel said.
