PART 1 — FENNWOOD
When Cait told me she was expecting she was three weeks past her eighteenth birthday.
I asked about the father more times than I can count and she gave me the same sentence every time.
“Mum. Please. I can do this on my own.”
No name. Not once, in seven months. Not whether he knew. Not whether he was still around.
I asked her in the car, in the kitchen, at two in the morning in the July when she could not sleep, and at a family lunch in front of twenty-five people, which I will come back to and which I have to.
Then the day Bram was born everything changed.
There were complications. I was in a corridor for four hours and then a consultant came out and sat down opposite me, which is how you know.
“I’m so sorry. We did everything we could.”
I said, “The baby.”
And he said, “He’s fine. He’s going to need you.”
My daughter did not come home. My grandson did.
For ten years it has been the two of us.
He is a good boy. Baseball, pancakes on a Sunday, and questions I cannot answer.
One in particular, first asked at about five and about eleven times since.
“Grandma, who was my dad?”
And all I have ever had is: I don’t know, love.
In the April we went out to Fennwood for Cait’s anniversary, and Bram went back to the car for the card he had made because he had left it on the seat.
And there was a woman standing at my daughter’s headstone.
Late thirties. Good coat. She had not put anything down and she was not crying, and she had been there before I got there.
I said, “Did you know my daughter?”
She turned round and something went across her face.
“You’re her mum.”
“Who are you?”
She looked past me, down the path, at a ten-year-old boy walking back toward us with a piece of card in his hand.
Then she opened her bag.
“I made Cait a promise,” she said. “I should have done this years ago. I couldn’t.”
And she took out a sealed envelope.
My name on the front, in my daughter’s handwriting.
PART 2 — THE PHONE
I have to put this in now rather than later, because everything after it is about it.
In the September, when Cait was seven months, there was a lunch at my sister Ruthanne’s. Twenty-five people. A christening for somebody else’s baby.
My daughter had been asked about the father about four times that afternoon before we sat down.
At the table Ruthanne asked her again, straight out, in front of everybody, with a serving spoon in her hand.
And Cait said, “I’d rather not.”
And Ruthanne said, “Well, we’d all rather know.”
And I watched my eighteen-year-old daughter go the colour of the tablecloth and reach for her phone, which is what she did when she wanted to be somewhere else.
And I took it out of her hand.
I reached over and took my own daughter’s phone out of her hand and put it face down beside my plate.
And I said, to twenty-five people:
“Give me that. You’ll tell this table who he is, Cait. I’ve been asked eleven times this month and I’m not covering for you again.”
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