Bonus Epilogue
Emory
Here is a thing nobody tells you about being thirty-nine weeks pregnant: you will lose the ability to see your own feet, but you will gain the ability to sense, from two rooms away, that someone has moved your snacks.
“Sofia.”
“I didn’t touch them.”
“Sofia Winslow.”
There’s a pause from the kitchen. Then, sullenly: “You had four bags. Four. Who needs four bags of spicy Funyuns?”
“A woman carrying your niece needs four bags of spicy Funyuns.”
“We don’t know it’s a niece,” Aria calls from the couch, where she is painting Juliette’s toenails and simultaneously watching something on her phone at full volume. My sisters-in-law bring multi-tasking to a new level.
“Jude has decided it’s a nephew,” Juliette says. “He announced it. Like a proclamation.”
“He announced it,” Aria agrees. “In the kitchen. Standing up. After clearing his throat like he was making an official decree.”
I lower myself onto the arm of the couch, which is now the only piece of furniture in this house I can get out of unassisted. “He told Donovan he was only having sons. Like it’s a policy.”
“I mean, he has been surrounded by girls his entire life,” Juliette says. “So it would be fair.”
Aria snorts. “Fair, maybe. But it will be funny as hell if he only produces girls.”
Sofia cackles from the kitchen, then comes back into the living room, carrying an opened bag of my spicy Funyuns. Evidently, she has a death wish.
“So damn funny.” She looks at me and motions to my stomach with red-coated finger tips. “Can’t you do anything about that?”
“No,” I say.
“Girl, give Emory her Funyuns. What is wrong with you?” Aria asks. “Are you pregnant?”
Sofia chokes. “No.” Then shoves the bag at me and heads back into the kitchen.
Huh… that was odd. I shrug, then grab a few of my current snack hyper-fixation and shove them into my mouth.
My dog, Rosie, who has spent the last two months acting as an unlicensed medical device, hauls herself up off the floor and comes to press her whole body against my shins.
She’s been doing this for a week. Sitting on my feet.
Following me to the bathroom. Sleeping with her chin on the curve of my belly like she’s holding the whole operation together with sheer force of will.
“She knows,” Sofia says from the doorway. She’s wiping her hands with a paper towel.
“She doesn’t know,” I argue.
“Cruz says dogs have a sixth sense about these kinds of things. It’s why so many breeds can be trained for medical purposes. They can scent an insulin spike, predict a seizure, and all kinds of things.”
It’s on my tongue to argue that Rosie is not any of those specialty breeds. But then my water breaks all over the living room floor.
For one long, silent second, the four of us just look at it. Rosie shakes the liquid off her fur. Poor girl.
“Holy shit,” Aria says. Then she drops the nail polish.
* * *
Jude
I am under a 1969 Camaro when my phone starts going off like an emergency alert.
I don’t answer the first one, because I’m on my back with my hands full and a bolt that’s been fighting me since Tuesday. I don’t answer the second one either.
Then it rings a third time, and something cold goes down my spine, because there are exactly four women in this world who call three times in a row, and every single one of them lives in my house.
I come out from under that car so fast I take skin off my knuckles.
“WHAT?”
“Don’t yell at me,” Aria says. “It’s happening.”
“What’s happening?”
“It, Jude. The baby. The baby is happening.”
I am already moving. Past the lift, past my cousin Ray, who says something I don’t hear, out into a suffocating wall of Texas August heat. “Where is she?”
“We’re getting in the car—Sofia, get the bag—no, the OTHER bag, the hospital bag, why would she need her makeup bag—”
“I heard that,” Sofia says in the background. “She’ll want her makeup bag.”
“She is having a baby—”
“She has FOUR MILLION FOLLOWERS, Aria—”
“ARIA.” I have my truck door open. “Put my wife on the phone.”
There’s a scuffle, and then Emory’s voice, and it’s calm in a way that makes my chest hurt.
“Hi, babe.”
“Peaches.” I can’t get anything else out for a second. “Baby. Are you—”
“I’m okay. I’m okay, I promise. It’s early yet, my water broke, but my contractions are still pretty far apart.” A pause. Then she says, “Your sisters are not okay.”
“I hear that.”
“Sofia’s crying.”
“Of course she is.”
“Aria has already posted about it.”
“Of course she has.”
“Juliette’s the only one being useful; she’s helping me breathe and has my ID and insurance card.” Her breath catches, just slightly, and then evens out, and I grip the steering wheel hard enough that it’s a miracle it survives. “Jude.”
“Yeah, baby.”
“Drive normally. Do not drive like a maniac. I need you at the hospital, not in a ditch.”
“I’m not going to—”
“Normal, Jude.”
“Fine.”
I drive about as normal as I’ve ever driven in my life, which is to say Ray later told me he watched me take the turn out of the lot on what he described as “mostly two wheels.”
They will not leave.
That’s the thing. I get there, I get to her, I get my hand in hers and my forehead against her temple and my whole world back in one piece—and then I turn around and my sisters are in the room.
All three of them.
“Y’all can’t be in here.”
“The nurse said family,” Sofia says.
“The nurse did not mean all of you.”
“She said family, Jude.”
“She meant the husband!”
“That’s a very narrow reading,” Aria says.
Emory laughs, which turns into a breath she has to work through, and I forget about all three of them for about forty seconds while I put my hand on her back and she squeezes my fingers hard enough to grind the bones together. When it passes, she leans back and sighs.
“Let them stay a while,” she says.
“Peaches.”
“They’re going to sneak back in anyway.” She looks up at me, sweaty and flushed and so beautiful it takes a piece out of me. “You know they are.”
I do know they are. I raised them. That’s on me. “I should have punished them more. Grounded them for days on end.”
Juliette chuckles. “You would never have lasted.”
I exhale, knowing my youngest sister is completely accurate in that assessment.
So for the next several hours, my sisters occupy the corner of a labor and delivery room like a bunch of nosy, loud aunts. I can’t say they aren’t also helpful though.
Sofia braids Emory’s hair off her neck, and then re-braids it, and then does it a third time because the second one “wasn’t giving.
” Aria fetches ice chips with the intensity of a woman running a pit crew.
Juliette sits quietly on the other side of my wife.
She has Emory’s phone in hand, and she’s clearly texting updates to a group chat that I am, apparently, not in.
“Who are you texting?”
“Nobody.”
“Juliette.”
“The book club.”
“The book club—”
“They asked!”
At some point, Chelsea sends a photo of a casserole. Kathryn sends a message that just says tell Jude to breathe, which I don’t appreciate, but I heed the advice anyways.
And at some point around hour six, when things have gotten quiet and serious and Emory’s got her eyes closed between contractions, my phone buzzes with a number I don’t know.
I almost don’t take it.
Then I look at it again, and I see the area code, and I know exactly what it is, and my heart does something complicated.
“I have to take this,” I say.
Emory’s eyes open. She looks at my face and she knows too. That’s the thing about her. She always knows.
“Go,” she says.
I take it in the hallway with my back against the wall, one hand over my other ear, and a woman from the state tells me—in the flattest, most bureaucratic voice I have ever heard in my life, on the single most insane day of my life—that our home study has cleared.
That our license is approved. That there are two brothers, fourteen and sixteen, whose caseworker has our file.
And that they’ll let us know as soon as possible.
Sixteen. Nobody picks sixteen.
I say thank you. I say we’ll call her Monday. I hang up.
And then I stand in a hospital hallway in my work clothes with grease stains on my fingers, and I put my hands over my face for a second, because my mother and father have been gone nineteen years, and there has never been a day I wanted them here more than this one.
When I come back in, Emory’s watching the door.
“Well?” she says.
I nod. “Two brothers. Fourteen and sixteen. Nothing is official, but their case worker has our file.”
She starts to cry, and then she starts to laugh, and then she says, “Oh, that’s—that’s terrible timing—” and grabs the rail, and everything after that happens very fast.
* * *
Emory
Here is what I remember.
I remember Sofia getting shoved out the door and yelling I love you through it. I remember Juliette taking Rosie—she’d smuggled my dog in inside a duffel bag, and as far as I know, the nurses never said a word.
I remember Jude’s face by my head, exactly where I told him to stay, because I’ve read enough books to know men do not need to see the business end of this.
I remember him saying, “You’re okay, baby, you’re okay, I’ve got you.” over and over, the same way he said it in a snowstorm in a van when I was too cold to answer him. I remember thinking that I was loved and safe and so very lucky.
And I remember the moment they put her on my chest.
She was furious. Red-faced and outraged and squalling, with a shock of dark hair like her father’s and a set of lungs like her aunts’. I looked down at this brand-new person, and I waited for the panic.
I’d been waiting for it for nine months. The bathroom floor panic. I never had a mom. I don’t know how to be a mom.
It didn’t come.
What came instead was a memory of Buck.
Standing in that garage in the Georgia heat, wiping his hands on a rag, telling a fourteen-year-old girl nobody wanted that the whole point of the work was finding value in things other people cast aside.
That when you bring something back, you put a piece of yourself in it.
That it’s not just a way to get from one place to another—it’s the story of everybody who came before, and it’s your story too.
He thought he was talking about cars.
He was never talking about cars.
“Hi,” I say to my daughter. “Hi. I know you. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Above me, Jude makes a choked sound.
* * *
Jude
Her name is Willa.
Willa Diana Winslow—Willa for Buck, whose given name was William, which Emory found out from a lawyer’s letter fifteen years ago and has never once forgotten. Diana for my mother.
She is nineteen inches long, she weighs eight pounds and one ounce, and she is, unmistakably and irrevocably, a girl.
“I said sons,” I tell Emory.
“I know you did, babe.”
“I made an announcement.”
“You did.” She’s exhausted and glowing, and she can’t stop looking at the baby. “Your sisters said it was more like a decree.”
“I’m outnumbered.”
“You’ve been outnumbered. Now it’s just official.”
Out in the hall I can hear all three of my sisters, who have been asked twice to lower their voices, absolutely failing to lower their voices.
“Four of y’all,” I say. “Four girls.”
“Five, if you count Rosie,” Emory says.
“Six, if we count Lola.”
Emory grins at me. “Lola’s a van, Jude.”
“Lola has a personality,” I say. “And a following on social media that rivals yours.”
She laughs, and Willa startles and squawks, and Emory shushes her and puts one finger against that impossibly small hand, and my daughter grabs on like she’s been doing it her whole life.
“Y’all are gonna put me in an early grave,” I tell my wife.
“Probably.” She doesn’t even look up. “You want to hold her?”
I don’t even bother answering. I just take my daughter and hold her up against my chest. Thankfully, the nurses gave me some scrubs to put on, so I wasn’t greasy for the birth.
“I thought I wanted a boy,” I say. But one look at the chubby, screaming baby and everything inside me calmed. “This is right. I’m a girl-dad, and that just makes sense.”
“You’re a great dad, no matter what,” Emory says.
“I love you,” I tell my wife. Then I kiss Willa’s head. “I love you too, little Peanut. I’m your daddy.”