“Okay,” I whispered instead, still looking at June. “Okay. Okay, I’ve got you.”
Mrs. Hunter fell silent. The porch light flickered once more.
I carried them inside one by one, and somewhere between the second trip and the third, I stopped being Uncle Noah and became something I didn’t yet have a name for.
I became Uncle Noah, then Dad, by accident.
—
Twenty-two years passed, the way a long workday does: slow while you’re inside it, gone when you look back.
I packed lunches with the wrong bread. I braided their hair so badly that Mrs. Hunter had to fix it on the porch before school.
“You’re going to give those girls complexes, Noah,” my neighbor said once, pulling a brush through Ava’s tangles.
“I know you are. That’s the problem!” she teased.
—
I worked double shifts at the hardware store. Then triple shifts whenever one of the kids needed braces, a science fair board, or new shoes because somehow the old pairs fit no one anymore.
There were science fairs and fevers I sat through. There were broken hearts I had no idea how to mend, so I made grilled cheese and let them cry on the couch.
There were three different seasons when all three of them seemed to hate me at once. June, at 13, slammed doors. Claire, at 15, refused to look at me for a month. Ava, at 17, told me I didn’t understand a single thing.
I didn’t. But I stayed.
—
I missed things, too.
A cousin’s wedding in Denver because Claire had the flu.
A fishing trip I had promised myself for 10 years.
The chance to build my own family.
And Diana, the woman I loved.
Diana waited a long time. Longer than she ever should have.
“I’m not asking you to choose,” she told me one night at the front door. “I’m asking if there’s room.”
“There isn’t,” I said. “Not the kind you deserve.”
She nodded like she had already known the answer. She left a sweater behind. I never gave it back.
