“I can’t believe you live here now.”
“You were right. Ithaca is freezing! But it is where I belong. I bought a big old house near Fall Creek.”
“You did?” I smooth his hair, wipe a tear from his cheek. He has stubble on his face. He never used to let it grow.
“With plenty of room for you and Max,” he says.
I hold Ethan’s face with both hands. He’s real and he’s here and he knows everything about me. “You want us to live with you?”
“It’s empty without you,” Ethan says. “I need you there. We’ll paint wild things on the walls in Max’s room.”
Margo comes back with a nurse and Max, and Ethan gets to hold him. “I’ve been waiting so long to meet you, kiddo,” he says, and Max opens his eyes and gurgles and I think that maybe he remembers Ethan. All that time Ethan spent talking to my belly counted for something. Ethan being here, holding him now, counts for everything.
* * *
Carly returns with eggplant pizza from The Nines and her girlfriend, Erin, who has a mass of crazy yellow curls and round wind-burned cheeks. Carly blushes when she introduces her. And Erin gives me a hug that makes me feel like we’re already good old friends.
We all camp out on my hospital bed and everyone takes turns holding Max so someone else can eat. I’m sleepy, but I can’t let my eyes close. I can’t stop watching. They already love him. It’s the most beautiful thing I can think of. Even if I had all the things I could ever need, I would still love these people. I would have chosen them anyway.
Carly dances around the room with Max, singing Cat Skin songs to him, using fudge and shush and mothertruckers instead of the real words. Erin sits next to me and tells me about how it took her five espressos to get up the nerve to ask Carly out. The way she looks at Carly when she says it is the way Carly deserves to be adored.
Margo tells Ethan how I started working for her at the diner when I was a kid.
“Oh, she was so cute,” Margo says. “Marching up to people and writing orders in her school notebook. ‘Hi, I’m April, may I take your delicious order today?’ I don’t know where she got that from.” Margo smiles at me. “You’re something else, you.”
Ethan laughs and gives my foot a squeeze.
“She was just so serious about it,” Margo says, laughing too. “In the beginning, she wrote all of her orders out in full sentences! ‘Ida Winton would like french fries with melted cheese and some gravy, not too much, but enough, on a plate, please.’？” She wipes her eyes. “April just figured it all out on her own. I’ve never seen a kid with her kind of determination.”
“Sounds about right,” Ethan says.
“That first apron went all the way to the tops of her sneakers.”
“Do you have pictures?” Ethan asks with his mouth full of pizza.
“Sure do,” Margo tells him. “I’ll bring them with me next weekend.”
She hugs me. “Girlie, get ready to see a lot of this face. Now that I know where you are, you and Max are gonna get sick of me!”
“Never,” I say, fighting tears.
* * *
Later, when the nurse brings paperwork for Max’s birth certificate, I write Ethan’s name on the line for who his father is.
Someday I’ll look for Justin again and give him another chance to be a good person to Max. But Max already has a family—the kind that counts the most. Me and Ethan and Carly and Margo. We have people we get to keep, who won’t ever let us go. And that’s the most important part.
That’s what’s true.
Acknowledgments
After turning in the final draft of this book, I went digging through my files for the first glimpse of April and found my original short story about April and Ethan. It was dated September 22, 2006. By the time this book is published, my relationship with April will be about a year shy of April’s age in part one. Thinking her thoughts and loving her people has been my favorite pastime for so long that the characters in this book exist in my mind like old friends who are just a phone call away—like if only I could find the right phone number scribbled on a napkin buried in the pile of papers on my desk, we’d have a good long chat. So although there’s a part of me that knows this is a bit silly, my first thank you is to April Sawicki, who popped into my head while I was writing something else and gave me a parallel universe where I could paint new stories with every feeling I’ve ever had. And then, of course, I have to thank Ethan, and Carly, and Margo, because getting to keep them in my heart for this long has made my whole life better.