Part 2: The Years Between
Twenty-two years went by the way a long shift does, dragging in the middle but completely gone by the end. I packed their lunches every morning, sometimes with the wrong kind of bread, and I braided their hair so badly that Mrs. Gable would sometimes redo it for them on the porch before school.
“You’re going to give those girls complexes, Owen,” Mrs. Gable teased one morning as she pulled a brush through Harper’s tangled hair.
“I’m doing my best,” I replied, holding up three lunchboxes.
“I know you are,” she laughed warmly. “That’s the problem!”
I laughed too, grabbed my keys, and headed out to work. I put in double shifts at the hardware store, and when that wasn’t enough, I took on triple shifts to cover everything they needed.
There were braces to pay for, science fair projects to fund, and new sneakers to buy because somehow all three girls’ feet had grown at the same moment. There were fevers I sat through, school meetings I attended, late-night homework sessions, and broken hearts I had absolutely no idea how to mend.
So when one of them was hurting, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I made grilled cheese sandwiches, sat beside them on the couch, and let them cry it out.
There were years when all three of them seemed to hate me at once. Sadie was thirteen when she started slamming doors so hard the pictures shook on the walls.
Claire was fifteen when she refused to look at me for an entire month after I grounded her for staying out late. Harper was seventeen when she looked me in the eye and said I didn’t understand anything about her life.
“You don’t understand anything!” Harper yelled before running to her room.
She was right, because I didn’t understand half of what they were going through. But I stayed, because staying was the one thing I knew how to do.
I missed things along the way, too. I missed a cousin’s wedding in Phoenix because Claire came down with a sudden case of the flu.
I missed a fishing trip to Idaho that I’d been promising myself for ten years. And somewhere along the way, I missed my chance to build a conventional life or start a family of my own.
Then there was Laura, the woman I truly loved. She was patient with my situation for a long time, longer than she probably should have been.
One night, she stood at my front door with tears welling in her eyes. “I’m not asking you to choose, Owen,” she told me softly. “I’m just asking if there’s room for me in this life.”
I looked at her, knowing exactly what she was really asking. “There isn’t,” I said, my heart breaking into pieces.
She looked at me with deep understanding. “Not the kind I deserve?”
“Not the kind you deserve,” I confirmed quietly.
She nodded as though she’d known my answer before she asked. Then she walked off into the night, accidentally leaving a blue sweater on the chair, which I never returned.
I stayed with the triplets, not because they had asked me to sacrifice everything, but because someone had to be there for them.
Lucas turned up over the years the way bad weather does, arriving unexpectedly and briefly before vanishing again. A birthday card came once with no return address, and a Christmas card another year with a postmark from a town I had never visited.
When the girls were twelve, Lucas finally called the apartment line. “I want to reconnect, Owen,” he said over the crackling connection. “I’ve been thinking.”
I gripped the receiver so tightly my knuckles turned white and my hand cramped. “Thinking about what, exactly?”
“About them,” he replied hesitantly. “About being a dad.”
I stared at the peeling yellow paint on the kitchen wall. “If you want to be a dad, you get on a plane and come here,” I told him sternly. “You don’t think about it on my phone bill.”
Lucas never got on a plane, and he never called again. The cards eventually stopped coming altogether, and though I wondered whether the girls noticed, they never mentioned his name. But I noticed everything, and I carried the weight of it every single day.
