A stamped Christmas card from a place I had never been.
He called the girls when they were twelve.Noah, I want to get back in touch. I’ve been reflecting.”Exactly what are you thinking about?”about them and fatherhood.”
My hand cramped from holding the phone so firmly.
He called the girls when they were twelve.You board an aircraft because you want to be a father. You don’t consider it while calculating my phone bill.”
My brother did not board a plane. He didn’t.
After that, the cards stopped. I used to wonder if the females were paying attention. They never mentioned it.
Some evenings, after being broke long enough, I would lie awake and mentally calculate the figures. Not cash. the alternative type.
Did I accomplish enough?
Did I speak the appropriate things at the appropriate times?
Did they only know I was exhausted, or did they know I loved them?
I wondered if the females took notice.
Underneath it all was a fear that I never spoke aloud. that the triplets continued to wait for their biological father in the back of their minds.
that although I had been there, I wasn’t the man they were looking for.
I didn’t hold it against them. I was unable to put that out of my mind.
Underneath it all was a fear.
It took me twenty minutes to get out of my pickup in the parking lot on the morning of the triplets’ graduation.
I was forty-nine. There were flecks of gray in my beard. Two summers ago, I fell off a ladder and injured my knee, which never fully recovered.
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