"Rosie, I can't ask you to do that."
"You didn't ask." The microwave beeps. She puts the pasta in front of me with a fork. "Eat."
I eat. She sits across from me with a glass of water and we don't talk much, just the odd word, and EJ breathes quietly in his basket in the corner, and outside the compound is dark and still and somewhere down the row one of the other houses has a light on.
She leaves at quarter past three. She doesn't make a thing of it. She just picks up her bag and goes.
I sit at the kitchen table for a while after she's gone. EJ's chest rises and falls in the basket. I can hear the hot water heater knocking in the back room and the wind doing something to theback door. My pasta bowl is empty and I'm tired in a way that goes all the way down.
I think about my mother for a second, which I don't do often. She'd have been good at this part, the three a.m. part. She had that practical warmth that some women have that doesn't make a production of itself, it just shows up when it's needed and gets on with it. She died when I was twelve and I don't have enough memories of her to do her justice, just impressions, the smell of her, the sound of her laugh, the way she'd put her hand on the back of my neck when I was sick.
Rosie does that sometimes. It’s not the same, but something registers the same.
The compound is quiet outside. I can hear someone's dog down the row, the low rumble of it as it settles, and then nothing. In a few hours the garage will start up and the yard will fill as another day begins. Right now it's just me, the noisy hot water heater, and EJ breathing in his basket. We’re wrapped up in that particular hush that falls over a place when the rest of the world is asleep.
This is what family looks like. Not blood, not obligation. A woman in scrubs at three in the morning who takes a screaming baby out of your arms because she knows you need her to, and heats up your leftover pasta, and tells you to sleep, and leaves without waiting to be thanked.
This. This right here.
I check on EJ one more time and then I go to bed and for the first time in weeks I sleep straight through until six.
EJ at Four
The bike has been in the garage since before EJ could walk. He's been aware of it the way kids are aware of things that belong to the important people in their lives. It’s not something he can touch but something that exists in the landscape of who his dad is. Every time I roll it out he watches from wherever he is with this particular stillness he gets, like he's storing the information for later.
Today I lift him up and put him on it.
Engine off. Bike on the stand. I'm right there with both hands on him and he's not going anywhere. But I put him on it and I wrap his small hands around the handlebars and I step back just enough to look at his face.
His face does something I don't have words for.
It's not excitement exactly, though his eyes go wide. It's more like recognition. Like something he already understood in theory just became real under his hands.
"Dad," he says. Just that.
"Yeah," I say. "That's your seat, buddy."
I don't know where that comes from. But I mean it.
The brothers have drifted over from wherever they were, the way they always drift when something's happening in the yard. Cash is leaning against the wall with his arms folded and a grin that means he's about to say something. Pops has come aroundfrom the back of the garage and he's standing with his hands in his pockets looking at EJ the way he looks at things he finds genuinely good.
"Look at that," Pops says. "He’s a natural."
"He's four," I say.
"So? Some men are seventy and never sit on a bike right. He's sitting on it right." He points at the way EJ's shoulders are, relaxed and forward. "See that? That's not taught. That's instinct."
"Don't tell him that or he'll want to start the engine."
Cash pushes off the wall. "I'll give you a hundred," he says to Ramsey, who's appeared at his shoulder the way Ramsey always appears, quietly and without announcement.
"For what?" Ramsey says.
"That the kid rides solo by ten."
Ramsey looks at EJ on the bike. EJ is now making engine noises with his mouth, which is the best thing I've ever seen. "Fifty," Ramsey says. "He'll do it by nine."
"You're betting against me?"