“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.
