Epilogue
AMELIA JEAN DRAKE ARRIVES on a Thursday morning in January, three days past her due date, which Dad says proves she inherited the O’Hara disregard for scheduling.
She weighs seven pounds, four ounces. She has a full head of dark hair and a grip strong enough to make the delivery nurse comment on it.
During labor, the nurse asks whether we want the room temperature adjusted. Evan opens his mouth to answer, stops, and turns to me. “What do you want?”
I’m mid-contraction. “I want the room colder, I want more ice chips, and I want you to stop asking me logistical questions while I’m in active labor.”
“Noted.”
“But thank you for asking.”
They place her on my chest. She’s warm, impossibly small, and alive.
I spent so long trying to get Evan to talk about how we might become parents that holding our daughter doesn’t seem real at first. Then she grips my finger, and she’s real.
I’m crying in a way I haven’t cried since the night I drove to Annapolis with Dave in the passenger seat.
These tears come from a completely different place though.
Evan holds her next. He takes her from me and settles her against his chest, looking at her face before touching her fingers. He doesn’t say anything for a long time, and when he does speak, his voice is so quiet I have to ask him to repeat it.
“Hi, Amelia.”
IT’S SUNDAY DINNER at Dad’s house, with the whole family gathered.
Dad holds Amelia Jean in the crook of his arm with careful confidence.
He has done this before, though he maybe never expected to do it again.
He walks her around the living room while he talks, pointing out his bookshelves, the Naval Academy photographs on the wall, and the view of Mom’s garden through the kitchen window.
This is a brief history of the house narrated for a baby who is six days old and has no interest in architectural commentary, but Dad has never let an inattentive audience stop him from delivering information he considers important.
Oscar sits on Dad’s foot. He’s positioned himself at the base of the armchair where Dad usually reads, watching the baby with the concentrated suspicion of a small dog who has just realized he’s no longer the youngest member of the household.
Dave is under the dining table, asleep, untroubled by the change in family structure because he’s never been troubled by anything except an empty food bowl and the occasional squirrel.
O’Hara Miniatures has a six-month waitlist now, and the proper studio Amy found me is four blocks from the apartment. For the next few weeks though, I’m on maternity leave, a concept Amy enforces with threats involving my X-Acto knives.
Tonight she’s distracted by her date, Richard.
Glynnis and Frank sit together on the couch, quietly settled back into each other’s lives, as though the twenty-five years since the divorce were only a delay rather than an ending. Glynnis holds Amelia Jean when Dad’s arm gets tired. Frank watches from the couch, his attention fixed on them.
Amy is in the kitchen with Richard. She has organized the dinner with his help. The table is set for seven adults, two dogs, and one baby in a bassinet between my chair and Evan’s. The bassinet was Amy’s gift. She chose it without asking Sam for input, which Sam notes aloud and Amy ignores.
“I’ve retired from dating,” Dad announces over the pot roast. He’s addressing the table at large, but the announcement is directed at Amy, sitting with Richard.
“This young lady already has my calendar full.” He nods toward Amelia Jean, who is asleep in the bassinet and contributing nothing to the conversation.
“Does this mean I can stop screening your matches?” Amy asks.
“You may stop screening, curating, and editorializing. All three.” He cuts his pot roast. “Amy told me if I introduced her to one more man whose primary qualification was a bibliography, she would hide my reading glasses permanently. I took the threat seriously.” He says that to Richard with a chuckle.
“This old man knows a thing or two though.”
Amy catches my eye across the table and raises her water glass an inch. I lift mine back. Three years around Dad have given us our own language.
AFTER DINNER, I STAND at the kitchen sink.
Mom’s sink, the one she chose during the renovation, under the window where she used to watch the garden.
The garden is dormant in January, the beds covered in straw, with the peonies asleep underground.
In a few months, they’ll bloom. Dad will water them.
The cycle continues. My mother isn’t here to see the flowers, the granddaughter, or the family assembling itself in her kitchen, but her blanket is on the couch in my apartment, finished in yellow yarn, waiting for her daughter’s daughter to sleep under it tonight.
Evan takes a dish towel from the rack and starts drying without being asked.
He glances over while he dries a plate. He looks at me with the same open, unguarded attention he had that first day in the park, when Dave jumped on his suit, and he didn’t care.
I smile.
Dave wakes up long enough to steal another roll. The other happy couples—Frank and Glynnis and Amy and Richard—leave within minutes of each other.
Dad launches into a story about a seventeenth-century naval engagement that he insists Amelia needs to hear. Oscar barks at nothing.
Dave rolls over between us, and we hold hands on his tummy. He considers that close enough to belly rubs and soon starts snoring.
This life isn’t much like the one we had before. It’s so much better.