Chapter 17
Audrey
The New York State Department of Health had the form on a page that took two clicks to find.
I sat at my kitchen island with my laptop open and my coffee going cold, Nova in the bouncer on the floor beside me, and I typed "amend birth certificate add father" into the search bar like I was looking up a recipe.
The PDF downloaded in three seconds. I printed it on the printer in the corner of the living room, the one I used for insurance forms and Nova's pediatric records, and I picked the pages up still warm from the tray.
Three pages, state seal in the upper left, boxes with labels I could have filled out in my sleep because I worked in a building where these forms were part of the plumbing.
I brought the pages back to the island. I uncapped a pen.
Baby's information first. I filled in Nova Callahan, her date and time of birth, her place of birth—Route 9, southbound shoulder, mile marker 14, vehicle delivery attended by Hartsdale Fire and EMS. I wrote it all in the handwriting I used for charts, neat and fast, and the form sat with my handwriting on top of it for a beat before I moved to the next section.
Father to be added.
I wrote Duke Anthony Rhodes, his date of birth, his address on Elm, his phone number.
I wrote each line without checking my phone, because I knew all of it.
I knew his birthday, his address, and the number I called at two in the morning when I was on the bathroom floor, and I knew the middle name because his mother said it once at Sunday dinner, and I filed it without meaning to.
The signature block was at the bottom of the last page—two lines, mother and father.
The form required both signatures, his in front of a notary.
I wasn't going to ask him to sign tonight.
I was going to wait until the conversation felt real and then bring the form to his place, or have him bring it here. Whichever felt less like a ceremony.
I signed my line. The ink went down clean. I set the pen on the counter.
Ten weeks ago, I sat in a hospital bed and signed a different form with his name missing from it.
I signed it with my mother's fear in my hands, and I told myself I was protecting Nova, and the protection was real, and underneath the protection was a woman who couldn't let a man she barely knew have a legal claim on her daughter's life because legal claims were what her mother had trusted and her mother's trust was the thing that broke.
Now, I was sitting at my own kitchen island, undoing that signature with a second one. The two forms existed in the same world now. I was the only person who knew both of them were there.
I looked at Nova. She looked back at me from the bouncer with the calm, unblinking focus of a baby who had opinions about everything and words for none of it. Her fist was in her mouth. The fox onesie was on, which meant it was a good day.
I was going to tell my mother on Sunday, tell Astrid and Easton when they came over for dinner. I was going to do the things in the order that made sense, and the order was going to land somewhere good. I believed it. I wanted to believe it.
I slid the form into a manila envelope from the desk drawer, put the envelope in the kitchen drawer beside the takeout menus, and closed it.
The chicken was on the table. Nova was in the carrier on the chair beside me.
My mother was at the counter putting the gravy in a boat she'd owned since before I was born, the white one with the small chip on the lip that she kept because her mother had kept it.
The radio was on low. The kitchen on Birch Hill smelled like Sunday.
"Mrs. Finch came in Thursday with the most extraordinary alpaca blend," my mother said. She set the gravy boat on the table and sat across from me. "Hand-dyed. Teal and rust. She'd driven up from Cold Spring for it. Marcie nearly fainted."
"Marcie faints at every new yarn."
"Marcie has taste."
I laughed. She smiled. We sat down to eat, and for two minutes, the Sunday was the Sunday it always was—the good plates, the linen napkins, the conversation about The Yarn Room that meant my mother's week had been full and her days had been warm.
I ate the chicken. She refilled my water without asking.
Then I said it.
"Duke asked to be on Nova's birth certificate. I said yes. I'm filing the amendment this week."
I didn't soften it. I didn't offer a preamble, an apology, or the three-paragraph explanation I'd been rehearsing in my car on the way over. I said it like she would have—over the chicken, casual on the surface, the weight in the words.
My mother set her fork down.
The shift happened in front of me this time.
Not underneath, not behind the Sunday composure she wore to this table every week.
The polite Colleen, the one who had been atmospheric for eleven weeks, was gone.
The woman sitting across from me now was the one who had been building to this moment since the morning she walked into my hospital room and saw Duke holding her granddaughter.
"Honey." Her voice was careful. "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Have you thought about what that means?
Legally?" She folded her hands on the table.
"If anything changes between you two, he has rights to her.
He can take her on vacation without your permission.
He can put her in a different school district.
He can move, Audrey, and petition for her to go with him. "
"I know what it means. I'm a nurse, Mom. I know what every line on every form means."
"Then you should know better than to sign one with a man you've been seeing for ten weeks."
The sentence landed across the table between us. She didn't raise her voice. She never raised her voice. The control in her delivery was what made it hit—the same measured tone she used when she was telling me something she believed completely and expected me to hear as fact.
"Duke has been showing up every day for ten weeks," I said. "He asked because he meant it."
"Of course he meant it. They always mean it on the day they ask.
" She picked up her water glass, took a sip, set it down.
"I'm not questioning whether he means it today.
I'm asking you whether he'll mean it in a year.
In five years. When the newness wears off, the shifts are long, the baby is screaming at three in the morning, and he remembers he used to have a life that didn't include any of this. "
"He already does that, Mom. He already comes at three in the morning."
"Coming at three in the morning is not the same as staying for eighteen years."
"You don't know him."
"I know what a man looks like when he's in love with the idea of something.
" Her voice was quiet now, and the quiet was worse than volume.
"Your father was in love with the idea of our family.
He showed up. He was present. He was wonderful, Audrey, for as long as it lasted.
And then one morning, I woke up, and the idea wasn't enough anymore.
He was gone, and I spent three years sitting at this table waiting for a phone call that never came. "
"Duke is not him."
"That's exactly what I said." She looked at me across the table, and her eyes were wet, and the wetness was not performance.
It was the real thing, surfacing for the first time in eleven weeks of composure.
"That’s exactly what every woman says, sweetheart.
He's different. He's not like the others.
He means it. And then the paper is signed and the name is on the form and you've handed a man legal standing over your child, and if he decides to leave, the paper doesn't stop him.
It just makes the leaving more expensive. "
"I'm not you, Mom. This is not your marriage."
The line landed. I watched it hit her face—the small fold, the tightening at the corners of her mouth, her chin lifting a fraction, her eyes going still.
Her gaze dropped to the table, then to the chicken getting cold on the good plates, then to Nova in the carrier, who was watching both of us with the placid attention of a baby who didn't yet understand that the two women in this kitchen were standing on opposite sides of a wound that was twenty-three years old.
"I just don't want you to be me, Audrey." Her voice was barely above a whisper.
"I'm not going to be you."
The kitchen was quiet. The radio played something I didn't register. The gravy boat sat on the table with its chipped lip facing me, the same direction it always faced, and neither of us reached for it.
I stood up. "I should get back."
She didn't try to stop me. She walked me to the door as she always did—through the hall, past the photos on the wall, past the hook where her coat hung beside the one that used to be my father's and was now just a hook with nothing on it.
She touched Nova's foot through the blanket.
She didn't say anything to me beyond "Drive safe. "
I put Nova in the car and sat behind the wheel at the curb with the engine off.
The conversation I'd been afraid of was behind me. I defended my choice. I told my mother no. I was supposed to feel lighter.
I didn't feel lighter. I felt the older thing—the thing her voice did to me every time it carried the weight of her marriage into a room I was standing in.
She was afraid for me. She loved me. The fear and the love were the same thing in her mouth, and I couldn't separate them no matter how many times I tried, because I grew up inside both of them at once.
I turned the key and drove home.
Astrid was rounder than she'd been two weeks ago. I noticed the curve under her sweater when she came through my door, her hand going to her lower back when she straightened from the hug. I clocked it. I didn't comment.