Chapter Twenty-Six
“I don’t want to make this decision alone,” she said. “Please come.”
?
I was at the house in nineteen minutes. I broke every speed limit between my mother’s garage and our front door, and I didn’t care, and some part of me, arriving breathless in the driveway, understood that this was the first time since March that my wife had asked me for something instead of setting a term for it.
?
We took him to the emergency room together.
I sat in the waiting room as a father, not a physician, and made myself stay in that seat, hands folded, while a resident half my age examined my son and asked me basic questions about his birth history that I answered from a father’s memory instead of a surgeon’s chart.
“Ear infection,” the resident said finally, gently. “Common at this age. He’ll be uncomfortable for a few days. He’ll be fine.”
?
Wren cried in the hallway, the specific crying of a person who has been braced for something much worse and is only now allowed to feel how frightened she’d actually been.
I didn’t try to fix it. I didn’t offer a binder, a plan, a percentage. I just stood beside her and let her cry, and after a while, without either of us deciding it in advance, she leaned sideways until her shoulder was against my arm.
?
“You came the second I called,” she said, into the quiet of the hallway.
“I’ll always come the second you call. That was never the problem.”
“I know.” She wiped her face. “The problem was you deciding, ahead of time, which calls I’d get to make.”
“I know that now too.”
?
We drove home separately—her car, my mother’s borrowed car—but we drove the same route, and at the stoplight two blocks from the house, I watched her taillights ahead of me and thought, for the first time in months, not about what I owed her.
I thought about what I wanted. Which was simply this: to keep following those taillights home, for the rest of my life, at whatever distance she needed, for as long as it took.