“I intend to try.”
“That ceiling is thin.”
“I know.”
He grumbled for several minutes.
Then he handed me the keys to the empty storage room behind my apartment.
“You can knock through the wall.”
“I can’t afford the rent.”
“I didn’t mention rent.”
Emmett never admitted that he had become attached to the girls.
He simply began leaving boxes of diapers near the stairs.
Mrs. Fenwick watched them while I worked.
At night, I repaired locks and sharpened tools for extra money.
The girls slept in three mismatched cribs donated by customers.
For their first birthday, I stayed awake after midnight writing in a notebook.
I had started it because I was afraid I would forget things.
The first time Liora stood.
The way Carys sneezed whenever she laughed too hard.
The way Maisie refused to sleep unless she could hear one of her sisters breathing nearby.
That night, I wrote:
To my three girls,
You are one year old today. I don’t know if you will ever read this. I don’t know if I am doing any of this correctly. I only know I am not going anywhere.
Then I closed the notebook and pushed it into the back of a kitchen drawer.
Twenty-two years passed the way a long shift does.
Slowly while you are living it.
All at once when you look back.
I packed school lunches using the wrong bread.
I burned pancakes and called them crispy.
I braided hair so badly that Mrs. Fenwick waited on the porch each morning with a brush.
“You are giving these children emotional damage,” she said once while undoing the knot I had created in Carys’s hair.
“I watched a tutorial.”
“You watched the wrong tutorial.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know. That is what worries me.”
I worked double shifts.
Sometimes triple shifts when one of the girls needed braces, new glasses, a school trip, or shoes because all three had somehow outgrown theirs in the same week.
There were fevers.
Science fairs.
Dance recitals.
Parent meetings.
Three separate heartbreaks during which I had no useful advice, so I made grilled cheese and sat nearby while they cried.
There were also years when all three seemed to dislike me at once.
Maisie was thirteen when she began slamming doors.
Carys was fifteen when she refused to speak to me for nearly a month because I would not let her attend an overnight party.
Liora was seventeen when she shouted:
“You don’t understand anything about us!”
She was right.
I did not understand everything.
But I stayed.
