Malcolm and I got married three weeks later at a courthouse with two witnesses we’d met that morning. I wore a dress from a clearance rack. He wore the only suit he owned that wasn’t the navy driving uniform. We were happier that day than I had ever been inside my father’s house, and scared in a way I hadn’t let myself feel since I was fifteen years old hearing my father cry through a wall.
He’d been let go from the Whitmore household the same week I was cut off — my father didn’t fire him outright, which would have looked bad to the board; he simply stopped needing a driver, effective immediately, and had Mr. Dabney, his longtime chief of staff, hand Malcolm his last check with a look that said you understand why. Malcolm understood. He took work fixing cars at a garage on the east side of Millhaven, the kind of place that smelled like motor oil and old coffee, and within a year he’d saved enough to buy into a share of it.
I found out I was pregnant with our son eleven months into the marriage, and I remember sitting on the bathroom floor of our one-bedroom apartment with the test in my hand, crying two different kinds of tears at once — joy, because I wanted this baby more than I’d ever wanted anything, and terror, because I hadn’t forgotten what the specialist told my father when I was fifteen.
We found a doctor, a maternal-fetal specialist two counties over who took payment plans, and Malcolm picked up night shifts on top of the garage to cover what the payment plans didn’t. I remember him coming home at four in the morning smelling like gasoline and exhaustion, lying down beside me just to put his hand on my stomach for a minute before his alarm went off again at six.
Our son, Isaiah, came into the world loud and healthy, seven pounds two ounces, and I have never in my life heard a sound as good as his first cry. I thought about calling my father. I picked up the phone twice. Both times I remembered the gate that didn’t open, and I put it back down.
Two and a half years later, I was pregnant again, and this time my body didn’t cooperate the way it had with Isaiah. I went into labor at thirty-one weeks on a Tuesday in March, and our daughter, Nadia, arrived four pounds one ounce, silent for the first eleven seconds of her life, which were the longest eleven seconds I have ever lived through. She spent six days in the NICU under lights that turned her skin the color of a photograph left out in the sun too long. Malcolm slept in a plastic chair beside her incubator every one of those nights after working full shifts at the garage, because we couldn’t afford for both of us to miss work, and somebody had to be there breathing when she couldn’t be sure she’d keep breathing on her own.
I thought about calling my father then too. I didn’t.
