I wrote back one line, because my father had taught me that the shorter the answer, the harder it is to argue with.
“Their names are on the birth certificates. Start there.”
He has not started there.
Ruth says he will, eventually, because men like Barrett come back when the company’s gone and the girlfriend’s gone and there’s nothing nearer to reach for.
I’ve decided I’ll believe that when he can say all three without looking at a card.
Vivienne came in April.
To Halloway Street.
She stood in my father’s front room, where three cribs had replaced one, and she said, “I told you to let it go.”
“You did.”
“I’ve been thinking about why.”
“And?”
“Because it was easier for me if you did.
I’d have had to say what I read in the chart.”
“That’s the whole answer,” I said.
“Everybody who says it.”
She comes on Sundays.
She asked their names in April, on the porch, before she came in.
“Josephine.
Marchetti.
Isabel.”
“Marchetti’s a girl?”
“After my father.”
“Good,” she said.
“He was right about my son.
Somebody should carry his name.”
Ruth retired in December.
She came to Halloway Street with the file cabinet drawer — the actual drawer, in her nephew’s truck — and set it in my father’s front room and said, “Twenty-two years of Joe’s paperwork.
Article Seven’s the only clause he ever wrote himself.
Everything else, he dictated.
That one he brought in on a legal pad, in pencil, the morning after your engagement dinner, and said, ‘Ruth, don’t fix the grammar.
I want him to be able to read it.'”
“He never did.”
“No.
But it was readable.
That’s the point.
Your father didn’t hide anything.
He just knew who wouldn’t look.”
Petra sent a card in June.
No return address.
Four words.
“I read his paperwork.”
I put it in the folder.
And Dr. Farouk.
Lena.
She comes on the first Tuesday.
She holds whichever one is crying — she can tell from the driveway; she says it’s the pitch — and she sits in my father’s front room and does not talk about the hallway, except once, in October, when she said, “I’ve written a lot of families down.
Twenty years.
That’s the first time I got to read it back.”
“Was it worth it?”
“Mrs. Marchetti,” she said — she’d stopped saying Kane in March; nobody asked her to — “I did four minutes of compressions on a woman whose husband was signing papers in the hall.
I’d like to think there was a reason I didn’t trust the count.”
“What reason?”
“Somebody had to be there on day thirty.
To say the names.”
The crib is still in the front room.
The one my father built in 1990.
Three babies don’t fit in it anymore, so it holds the folder.
Article Seven.
The chart.
