Chapter 13: Her Father

My daughter came off the monitors on a Friday, three weeks and six days after she was born.

The neonatologist signed her discharge at ten in the morning.

By eleven I had a car seat, a folder of instructions and a nurse explaining the feeding schedule for the third time.

"You know all this," the nurse said.

"I know it for other people's babies."

"Same thing, with worse sleep."

I was buckling the straps over a blanket with ducks on it when I felt someone standing in the family room doorway.

My father stood there with his cap in both hands.

He was a big man who had shrunk since January.

His work jacket hung off his shoulders, and he had shaved badly, with a nick under his jaw.

"Your mother doesn't know I'm here," he said.

I stood up and put myself between him and the car seat.

"She told me you were at the school board meeting."

"I drove to the school and sat in the lot for an hour."

He looked at the car seat, and then at me.

"Is that her?"

"That's her."

"Can I look?"

I thought about every Sunday dinner where he had passed the potatoes and said nothing.

I thought about the notice in the Dispatch, with his name in it.

"You can look," I said.

He came across the room slowly.

He bent over the seat with his hands clasped behind his back, afraid to touch.

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