I laughed. It came out before I had decided to laugh, the involuntary sound of disbelief that the body produces when the mind has not yet developed a better response.
“Home,” I said. “This home.”
She nodded. “He says the relationship didn’t work out. He says he’s been thinking about us. He says he made mistakes and he misses us and he wants to make things right.”
I pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. Behind her, along the wall above the kitchen window, she had hung school photographs in mismatched frames, ten children at different ages, different haircuts, different stages of becoming ourselves without him. They had been gathered there for years, added to as younger siblings had school picture days, a documented record of the family he had called his blessing and then decided was too inconvenient to maintain.
“Mom,” I said. “He walked out when you were eight months pregnant with Hannah. He didn’t make a mistake. He chose to leave nine children and a pregnant wife. That’s not a mistake. That’s a decision.”
“I know,” she said. “I remember.”We were both remembering the same thing, though we had been in different positions when it happened. I was fifteen, sitting on a metal folding chair in the church basement, one of nine children arranged in a row with their feet not quite reaching the floor, my mother beside us with her belly so large she had to sit sideways, her ankles swollen, her eyes swollen worse from crying she had done before she got to the church and was trying to hide. My father stood in front of us with the worn leather Bible that had been his constant companion and the particular voice he used for difficult announcements, the voice that made them sound like something that was happening to him rather than something he was choosing.
“Kids,” he said. “God is calling me elsewhere.”
My brother Liam, who was ten and still believed that adults meant what they said and said what they meant, asked if it was another church. My father gave him the practiced smile of a man who has already decided what this conversation will be and is simply performing his version of it, and said something about that, something that did not actually answer the question, and then he talked about a new season and God’s calling and faith that he was making the right choice, and he never mentioned the twenty-two-year-old soprano from the choir who had been appearing in the pulpit with increasing frequency, and he never mentioned the suitcase that was already in the trunk of his car.
