“You could have gone to Chicago,” Emma added.
Suddenly he stood up.
His chair squeaked hard on the ground.
“You lost your whole life because of us.”
The look.
“No.”
“But you could have had everything.”
“What exactly is ‘everything’?”
Silence.
I took my keys.
“Come.”
Grace wiped her face.
“Where are we going?”
“I need you three to see something.”
***
The old apartment was smaller than I remembered.
I pointed to the window above.
“Three cribs didn’t fit in the bedroom, so I slept in the living room.”
Sophie covered her mouth.
“You never told us that.”
“They never asked.”
Emma seemed guilty.
I touched his shoulder.
“That’s not an accusation.”
Then I pointed to the entrance to the building.
“Grace screamed every night for three months.”
Grace frowned the gathered.
“It’s not true.”
“You absolutely did.”
Sophie snorted.
Emma laughs in spite of herself.
For a minute, Mom’s letter disappeared.
It was just us.
Again.
***
Our second stop was the grocery store where I once worked at night.
An older employee recognized me immediately.
Then he saw the girls.
“No.”
I smiled.
“Yes.”
“The babies?”
Emma roamed.
“We will apparently always be babies.”
The woman laughed in her teeth as she pulled out my three plastic baskets for clothes, those marked with E, G, and S that I was dragging everywhere.
They contained diapers, clothes, snacks and essentially everything for emergencies.
I had kept those ridiculous baskets long after the girls had little ones left.
Sophie apparently used to get into hers.
Grace was hiding cookies in hers.
Emma once fell asleep inside one during a move.
The woman smiled at me.
“Your brother worked to the exhaustion.”
I corrected it automatically.
“Dad.”
Silence.
The girls looked at me.
I didn’t even realize I said it.
***
We ended up in the old playground where I had spent hundreds of Sundays because free entertainment was the only guy I could reliably afford.
Emma sat next to me.
“Dad… Mom was right.”
I waited.
“You had another option,” she muttered.
“That part is true,” I admitted.
Grace whispered, “Would you like to have known?” I stopped breathing.
I looked at them at three.
“I wish she had told me.”
Sophie’s face crumbled.
“You deserved the choice.”
“You too.”
They kept quiet.
Continue.
“I could have gone to Chicago.”
Emma started crying again.
“I could have let someone else raise them.”
