Chapter 10
Duke
I don't remember the drive home. I remember parking.
The truck was crooked in the driveway, the front left tire on the grass, and I sat behind the wheel for a while with the engine off and my hands on my knees.
The streetlight was on. The house was dark.
Somewhere inside it was a couch, a kitchen, a bed I was supposed to sleep in, and none of those rooms had a plan for the man who was about to walk into them.
I went inside.
The house was what it always was. A firefighter's house, small and functional, the furniture secondhand except for the couch I'd bought new because Reese told me the old one was a health hazard.
The kitchen had a coffeemaker, a toaster, and a cast-iron skillet I used for everything.
The nonfiction stack on the nightstand—Krakauer, Junger, a dog-eared copy of Endurance I'd read three times—sat where I left it.
The pinball machine in the basement was still running the high score I'd set in February, the one I told Easton I'd beat and hadn't.
I stood in the living room, sat on the couch, stood up, went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and looked at what was in it—eggs, hot sauce, a takeout container from Thursday I should have thrown away.
I went to the bedroom, but didn't lie down.
I sat on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees, still in the uniform, still in my boots.
The pieces came.
Audrey's face through the car window, the gray eyes wide with pain, the recognition hitting us both at the same time. The baby in my hands, the weight of her so slight it barely registered against the gloves, the scream filling the back of the medic unit. I told her I wasn’t ready in the hospital room, and I meant it, and the honesty of it sat in my chest like something I'd swallowed wrong.
Tuesday date you never see again. She said that, and she was right about the pattern, and she was wrong about what the pattern meant, and I couldn't have explained the difference if she'd given me an hour.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
My mother's face came next, from nowhere, from twenty-five years ago.
A morning in the kitchen when I was seven, maybe eight, and I'd done something at school—a fight, probably, or something I'd said that got me sent to the office.
My dad was going to find out when he got home.
I sat at the kitchen counter eating cereal.
My mother stood at the stove, watched me, and waited until I looked at her.
When I did, she held the look for a beat, and then went back to the eggs.
She saw me. She always saw me.
The baby had a dimple on the left side. I'd noticed it in the medic unit when her face scrunched against Audrey's chest, the small crease on the left cheek that I recognized because strangers told me about mine at every bar, every family dinner, every shift party, and I hated being told about it. The baby had the same dimple.
My daughter.
The words sat in the dark above me, and I let them sit.
I didn't sleep. Or I slept in pieces, twenty minutes here, a stretch that might have been longer, a period where I was staring at the ceiling and then wasn't and then was again.
My mind ran the same circuit: the window, the baby, the hospital room, Audrey on the bed telling me she wasn't asking me for anything, and the fact that I wanted her to ask me for something.
By six-thirty, the sky outside the window was gray. I was at the kitchen counter in last night's clothes. The coffeemaker was off. I hadn't turned it on. My keys were in my hand.
The screen door clapped shut behind me. My mother turned from the stove, looked at my face, and didn't say anything. She poured a mug of coffee, brought it to the table, and set it in front of the empty chair.
I sat down.
My father put the paper down. "You good?"
"Yeah." I picked up the mug. I put it down without drinking. "No."
He waited. My mother went back to the eggs.
I told them.
"There was a call yesterday. A maternity emergency on Route 9. We rolled out, and the woman in the car was Audrey Callahan. From the wedding." My mother turned from the stove. "She delivered in the back of the medic unit. A girl. The baby's mine."
The kitchen went quiet. The radio kept going. The eggs hissed.
My father set his coffee mug down.
Then his face did the thing. The pride thing. I knew it before it started—I'd seen it at every game, every trophy ceremony, every Sunday dinner when I came home with news that fit the frame.
He stood up.
"A baby." His voice filled the kitchen. "You're telling me I have a granddaughter."
"Ray," my mother said quietly.
He didn't hear her. He came around the table and put his hand on my shoulder, heavy, the same grip every time.
"What's her name?"
"I don't know yet."
"When do we meet her?"
"Dad."
"Have you told your sisters? Caroline's going to lose her mind. Reese is going to want to know everything." He was already pacing. "We should do Sunday. Bring the baby, bring the mother. That's Audrey Callahan, right? The nurse?"
"Dad."
"You should call Caroline today. She'll want to get Henry's old stuff out of the attic—the bassinet, the high chair. That high chair is practically new; she barely used it." He stopped at the counter. He pointed at me. "The baby's got Rhodes bones. I can already tell."
"You haven't seen her."
"I don't need to see her. She's your daughter. She's got Rhodes bones."
He kept going. The Sunday dinner, the high chair, when the baby was old enough for the rink, whether Audrey needed anything, whether the house was big enough, whether I'd thought about the room situation.
Each question was a brick in the thing he was building, and the thing he was building was a plan, because my father didn't receive news—he organized it.
He turned it into a schedule. He gave it a play.
I sat at the table and watched my father fold my daughter into the family.
It was love. I knew it was love. My father loved his children with a force that could fill a stadium, and the force was genuine, and it never occurred to him that the force was also a weight.
He was already building the version of this where the Rhodes family expanded by one and the highlight reel kept going, and somewhere in the planning, pacing, and the questions that kept coming, he walked past the thing I came in here carrying without ever seeing it.
I came in needing a father. Dad gave me a coach.
He loved me in the only language he'd ever learned, which was forward motion and game plans, and he didn't know how to love me in the language I needed this morning—a man sitting at a kitchen table who didn't know what he was doing and needed someone to tell him that was okay.
My mother was still at the stove.
She’d been listening to Ray for the last ten minutes without interrupting him. She turned the eggs over and pulled two pieces of toast from the toaster. She put the eggs on a plate beside the toast, carried the plate to the table, and set it in front of me.
Her hand stayed on my shoulder.
"You don't have to figure it out today, honey." Her voice was quiet. "Today, the only thing you have to do is the next right thing."
It landed.
The next right thing. Not the whole answer. Not the plan. Not the Sunday dinner, the high chair, or the highlight reel. Just the next right thing, and the permission to not know what came after it.
She took her hand off my shoulder and went back to the stove.
I ate half the eggs. The toast went cold on my plate.
My father circled back to the house—did I have room, did I need to think about the spare bedroom, because a baby needed a room, a baby needed space, a baby needed a plan.
I let him talk. I drank the coffee. I watched him pace, and I loved him, and I was grateful for the love even when the love didn't know how to hold what I'd brought into the kitchen.
I stood up.
"I gotta go."
"Tell Audrey we want to meet the baby," my dad said.
"I will."
My mother walked me to the door. She didn't say anything. She stopped at the side door and looked at me.
She touched my cheek with the back of her hand.
The gesture was hers. She'd done it when I was seven, when I was seventeen, when I came home from the hospital after the ACL and sat on the couch, trying to smile.
The back of her hand against my cheek, and nothing else, and it said everything she didn't need to say.
She let me go.
I walked to the truck. The morning had come up the rest of the way while I was inside—full daylight now, the valley green and warm, the trees along Cedar Lane sharp against a sky that had finished deciding what it was going to be. I sat in the cab with the keys in my hand.
The next right thing.
I knew what it was. I didn't have an answer to the question Audrey asked me in the hospital room, because are you ready to be a father was not a question you answered with words.
It was a question you answered by showing up, and showing up was the thing I'd been trained to do since the first morning I walked into a firehouse and somebody handed me a pair of boots.
I turned the key, pulled out of my parents' driveway, and pointed the truck toward Hartsdale General.