The second line was at the bottom, under Aaron.
Part Twenty: The Watch
Gerald gave the watch back to Aaron at our son’s homecoming three weeks later. We had a small party at our house in Kentwood with streamers and balloons and a cake from Meijer that said WELCOME HOME DANNY in blue frosting. The girls had made a banner out of construction paper and taped it over the front door: four sets of handprints in four colors, and a fifth tiny set in blue that the nurses had helped us make at the hospital.
Gerald stood in our living room in his best flannel shirt and held out the velvet box.
“Open it,” he said.
Aaron opened the watch. He read the names inside, and his face changed.
Thomas.
Walter.
Gerald.
Daniel.
Aaron.
And below his name, where there had always been an empty space waiting for a first son, there was new engraving. Not one name. Five.
Hazel. Iris. Clara. Maisie. Danny.
Aaron looked up at his father. He couldn’t speak.
“First children of the first son,” Gerald said gruffly. “All of them.” He cleared his throat. “Took me too long to figure out that’s what the line was for.”
Then he did something none of us had ever seen him do. He walked over to the couch where Hazel was sitting with her sisters, and he lowered himself, slowly, with his bad knees, onto the cushion beside her. He put his big arm around her shoulders.
“Hazel,” he said. “I’m sorry I never asked you to go fishing at the cabin.”
Hazel looked up at him, startled. “I’ve never been fishing,” she said.
“I know,” Gerald said. “That’s what I’m sorry about.”
Part Twenty-One: The Cabin
Six months later, in the spring, we all went up to the cabin on Lake Michigan for Memorial Day weekend: Aaron and me, all four girls, Danny in his car seat, Carol, and Gerald.
Danny’s scar is a thin pink line down the middle of his chest now. He’s eight months old and twenty pounds and laughs at everything. His cardiologist says his heart is perfect.
On Saturday morning, Gerald woke the girls up at five-thirty. He’d bought four little life jackets in four different colors and four little fishing rods from the Meijer in Ludington. He took them down to the dock in the gray morning mist, all four of them, and he taught them to bait a hook.
I watched from the kitchen window with a cup of coffee. Aaron came and stood beside me with Danny on his hip.
Down on the dock, Gerald was crouched beside Maisie, holding her tiny hands on the rod, showing her how to cast. Hazel was sitting on the end of the dock with her feet dangling, already fishing, serious as a surgeon. Iris and Clara were arguing about whose turn it was with the worm container.
“He never took me fishing after Danny,” Aaron said quietly. “Not once. I used to stand at this window and watch the other dads on their docks with their kids.”
Danny grabbed his nose. Aaron laughed and let him.
“Look at him now,” Aaron said.
Down on the dock, Hazel’s rod suddenly bent. She shrieked. She stood up so fast she almost fell in, and Gerald was there in a second, his big hands over hers on the rod, not taking it from her, just steadying. “Reel,” he said. “Slow. That’s it. You’ve got it, Hazel. You’ve got it.”
She reeled in a perch, a little yellow one, maybe six inches long. She held it up in the gray morning light with both hands, her face blazing with pride.
Gerald looked at her and said, loud enough that we heard it all the way up at the kitchen window, “That’s my granddaughter.”
Hazel looked up at him. She didn’t say anything. She just grinned.
Part Twenty-Two: What He Said
People ask me sometimes what Aaron said when he first held our son. They’ve heard the story. They expect it to be something terrible. He’s not mine. He’s not what I wanted. Something to make their stomachs drop the way mine did.
And it did make my stomach drop. He looks like Danny. His lips are blue.
But I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and I’ve come to believe that those were the most loving words my husband has ever said.
Because a man who only wanted a son for the name, or for his father, or for a line engraved inside a gold watch, would have been looking for himself in that tiny face. He’d have been looking at the nose and the hair and the chin. He’d have been looking for proof that he finally got what he was owed.
Aaron looked at our son and saw that something was wrong. He saw it because he’d spent twenty-nine years carrying a seven-year-old’s guilt about a brother nobody believed him about. And this time, when he said it out loud, somebody listened.
Last night, Aaron was putting the kids to bed. All five of them now share the two bedrooms upstairs: the four girls in bunk beds in one, Danny in his crib in the other. I stood in the hallway listening, the way I always do.
He went into the girls’ room first. I heard him read them a chapter of Charlotte’s Web in four different voices. I heard Clara ask if Wilbur dies, and Aaron say, “Nope, Charlotte saves him.” I heard Hazel say, “Daddy, you’re doing the spider’s voice wrong,” and Aaron say, “Then you do it,” and Hazel read the next page herself in a perfect, quiet, serious Charlotte voice.
Then he went into Danny’s room. I heard him lift Danny out of his crib, and the rocking chair creaking.
And I heard him sing, off-key, an old Bob Seger song. The same one he sang to Hazel at three in the morning eight years ago.
When he came out, he found me in the hallway. He leaned against the wall beside me in the dark.
“Mer,” he said. “Can I tell you something?”
“Always.”
“I used to think I needed a son,” he said, “to be enough for my dad.”
He looked at the girls’ door, with the construction-paper sign Hazel made taped to it: NO BOYS ALOWED (EXCEPT DANNY AND DADDY).
“And it turns out,” he said, “I just needed my kids to know they were enough for me.”
He went into our bedroom, opened the top drawer of the dresser, and took out the velvet box. He opened the watch and looked at the names inside. Hazel. Iris. Clara. Maisie. Danny.
Then he closed it, put it back in the drawer, and came to bed.
He doesn’t sit up at night running his thumb over the empty space anymore. There isn’t one.
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