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on both sides. The baby’s skin color, like her parents’ before her, was always going to be the result of
a spin on a blessedly infinite wheel of hues.
Still, a blood test was administered, and the results were immediate. If Will, head hung low, could
have dragged a dirty ”blankie” behind him through the maternity ward, Tracina told me later, it
wouldn’t have made the scene any sadder.
She tried to get him to stay and talk. Even Carruthers offered to go for a walk around the block with
him. But Will kept walking.
I almost missed him while checking messages at the pay phones, my cell phone long run out of
batteries.
“Will! Wait!” I yelled, leaving the receiver dangling, unsure of what went down, though it was
pretty easy to glean from his face what the test results must have showed.
I called his name three, four times through the parking lot before he finally stopped and turned, and
by that time his key was stuck in the lock of his door, again.
“Do you want me to drive? Let me drive you home, Will,” I said, bending over with my hands on
my knees to catch my breath. It was officially fall, but the noonday sun was hot as mid-summer hell.
We’d both been at the hospital for a full twenty-four hours, taking turns sleeping in the cab of his
truck.
Will turned around slowly, leaving the keys dangling.
“Know what the worst part is?” he said, not meeting my eyes, still searching the air around me for
answers. “I never wanted kids. I don’t think I ever told you that. All my friends had them—my
brother, cousins, all of them—but I was like, Nope, there are just too many of ’em in the world. And
I work too hard, and I don’t make enough money to do it the way it’s supposed to be done. My dad
owned that café. He was never around. And he was always broke. But I tell you what,” he said,
pointing to the whole hospital, “I wanted that baby. Ah … fuck.”
His emotions overcame him, everything he’d been bottling up over the past nine months, all of his
doubts and fears about becoming a good enough father for a child whose mother he struggled to love,
let alone like, all the while expanding his business on precarious loans and his own blood and sweat,
all of it—it came out and he cried. But not for long. In fact, less than fifteen sharp seconds. I threw my
arms around him, inhaling the smell of hospital in his hair. He didn’t embrace me back. Instead, he
kept his paint-spattered hands tightly covering his face. And when I let him go, reluctantly, he stepped
far away from me and shook off the pain, so all you might have gleaned from our body language if you
drove into the empty parking spot at that exact moment (which, in fact, Jesse Turnbull had) was that
two acquaintances had just had a quick catch-up and were now saying their goodbyes.
That’s why Jesse leaned out the window of his own truck (a newer, better one, of course, than
Will’s) and said, “Hey, babe. Thought I’d bring you a coffee on my way to work,” handing me a
medium takeout with soy.
He wouldn’t have said “babe” if he knew who I’d been hugging and what Will had just been
through—what we’d been through. He wasn’t that kind of guy; he wasn’t boastful, territorial, dickish.
And Will was rarely impolite. But in that moment, his skin so thin, his heart so bruised, all Will could
do was ignore Jesse, shoot me a pained look, rip the keys out of the lock of his stupid busted truck,
whip around to the passenger side and enter the damn thing from there. It was awful and awkward
watching him slowly inch from the spot next to us, only to fishtail out of the lot like those idiot showoff
teenagers testing their wheels in a WalMart parking lot.
“That your boss?” Jesse asked, handing me the coffee.
I nodded.