My husband looked at our newborn for ten seconds and said I shouldn’t bother coming home. His mother put a hand on his arm and said, “Well, she didn’t get that from our side.” The next morning he stood on my father’s porch crying, and his hair was a color I’d never once seen on him.
We’d spent three years and $23,400 at a fertility clinic to get her here.
Two retrievals. One transfer that didn’t take. One that did.
Nicolas came to every appointment.
He learned to do the shots so I wouldn’t have to look, and he held the heating pad on my stomach through the cramps after.
His mother, Jolene, came over Sundays with a casserole and a fistful of paint chips.
She picked the green for the nursery. He built the crib in one afternoon and had a single screw left over.
He kept that screw in a dish on the dresser like it was a trophy.
The only odd thing about my husband in seven years of marriage was the basement shower.
Every third Friday he’d lock himself in the downstairs bathroom for an hour, and I’d bang on the door and ask if he was building a boat in there.
He always laughed.
Our girl came at 4:40 on a Tuesday morning, after nineteen hours.
Small. Furious. A full head of dark hair, except one patch at the very front, white as cotton.
The nurse, who had cartoon pineapples printed on her clogs, said, “Look at that little lightning bolt.”
I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted her on me.
Nicolas had his phone up, filming.
Then he lowered it.
He bent close and stared at that white patch for a long time.
His face went the color of the sheets.
He backed up one step, then another, until he bumped the blood pressure cart.
“Nico?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t look at me. He looked at his mother.
Jolene had come in from the hallway for the first cry. She stood at the foot of the bed with her purse clamped under her arm.
She never glanced at the baby.
She put her hand on his sleeve and said it loud enough for the nurse to hear.
“Well, she sure didn’t get THAT from our side.”
The nurse stopped wiping the scale.
I honestly thought she meant it was cute.
“It’s hair,” I said. “Babies lose it.”
Nicolas zipped his jacket.
“When they let you out,” he said, “go to your folks’. Don’t come to the house.”
“What the hell does that MEAN?”
“I can’t do this right now, Angie.”
“Do WHAT? She’s ten minutes old.”
Jolene walked him to the door by the elbow, the way you’d steer a drunk uncle out of a wedding.
“Jolene,” I said. “What did I do?”
“Get some rest, sweetheart,” she said, and the door eased shut on its arm.
The baby screamed and I screamed with her.
Later a nurse held up the bassinet card and said, “What are we calling her?”
We’d picked the name together. I couldn’t get it out.
The card stayed blank for two days.
I texted him forty-one times.
I sent a video of her yawning. I sent a close-up of the white patch with nothing but a question mark.
Read, 11:52 p.m.
Nothing.
On Saturday my dad came for us. Emmett Bruno has driven the same Buick since 2009, and he wouldn’t let me lift the car seat.
I asked him to swing by the house for my prescriptions and the pump.
The keypad on the garage blinked red when I punched in our code.
Twice. Three times.
He’d changed it.
My maternity clothes were stacked beside our door in the clear tubs we kept the Christmas lights in, lids snapped down.
The diaper caddy sat on top. Somebody had filled it.
Through the front window I could see the green wall at the end of the hall and one corner of the crib.
I called him from the porch and heard his ringtone go off somewhere in the house.
It rang out.
Dad loaded the tubs without a word. He kept watching the windows the way you’d watch a dog you don’t trust.
“Did he say anything to you?” I said.
“Get in the car, honey,” he said.
That night in my old bedroom in Muncie, I fed her at two in the morning under the glow-in-the-dark stars I’d stuck to the ceiling in sixth grade.
My mom, Myra, sat on the end of the bed and didn’t ask one question. That isn’t like her.
Sunday, a little after eight, somebody knocked. Knuckles, not the bell.
Mom pushed herself off the bed. I said I’d go.
I opened the door with the baby on my shoulder.
Nicolas stood out there on the step. Jolene waited two steps behind him on the walk, keys in her fist.
He’d been crying. His nose was raw.
And his hair.
A stripe of white ran back from his forehead, two fingers wide, exactly where hers was.
Seven years, and I’d never seen it.
“Can I hold her,” he said. “Please.”
I pulled her closer.
“You changed the code,” I said. “You put my clothes in the Christmas tubs.”
“I know.”
“You let your mother say that with a nurse standing right there.”
“I KNOW.”
He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“I’VE COLORED IT SINCE I WAS TWELVE,” he said. “Every three weeks. Mom buys the box.”
The basement. Every third Friday.
“Nicolas,” Jolene said from the walk. “Not on their porch.”
He turned and looked at her, and she closed her mouth.
“She told me if anybody in this town ever saw it, they’d know,” he said.
“Know what?”
“The man I called Dad had brown hair till the day he died.”
Behind me, my father had come into the hallway.
I heard him set his coffee mug on the radiator cover. Very carefully.
Nicolas looked past me, straight at him.
“There’s one other man around here who had this before he went gray,” he said. “Ask your dad why Clyde Montalvo cried through his whole toast at our wedding.”
My father didn’t move.
“Angelica,” he said. “Bring the baby inside and shut the door.”
The radiator cover
I didn’t shut it. He did.
I backed into the hall with her on my shoulder, and my father went past me in his socks, stepped out onto the porch and pulled it shut after himself.
The latch clicked. I was inside with the baby. Nicolas was outside with my dad.
Mom came up behind me and put her hand flat between my shoulder blades.
“Come away from the door, Angie.”
There’s a strip of pebbled glass down the side of my parents’ front door. If you put your eye right against it you can see the porch in pieces.
My father with his hand on the back of Nicolas’s neck. Not hard. The way he used to steer me through the county fair.
Jolene on the walk, talking. My father not turning around.
Then her heels going down to the curb, her car door, her car.
The baby rooted at my collar. I fed her standing up in the hall, which you’re not supposed to do, with one eye on the glass.
Twenty minutes. His coffee went cold on the radiator cover.
When he came back in, his socks were wet through from the porch. He took the Buick keys off the hook by the door.
“What did he mean?” I said. “Dad. What about Clyde?”
“Feed the baby, honey.”
“I am feeding the baby.”
He went back out without his shoes.
I put my eye on the glass again.
Jolene’s car was gone. Nicolas was in the passenger seat of my father’s Buick with his forehead on the dash.
Strikes & Spares, 1988
There’s a picture in my parents’ hallway that has hung on the same nail my whole life.
Four men in matching bowling shirts, gold with brown collars, holding a trophy that’s mostly plastic. A brass plate says STRIKES & SPARES, MUNCIE, 1988. My dad is second from the left with a mustache we’re not allowed to mention.
Clyde Montalvo is on the end. Dark hair, and a stripe of white running back from his forehead, two fingers wide.
I’ve walked past it ten thousand times. I’d only ever known Clyde gray.
He taught me to ride a bike in the cul-de-sac because Dad was working doubles. He came to every piano recital I ever bombed. Mom used to say he was the first boy who ever bought her a Coke, the summer before she met my father, and Dad would say, “One Coke,” and they’d both laugh.
At our wedding Clyde stood up with a glass of champagne and said, “I’ve known this girl since she was in a car seat.”
Then he couldn’t say anything else. He just stood there.
Nicolas got up from the head table and handed him a napkin, and Clyde held onto his wrist a second too long.
People said it was sweet.
Jolene left before the cake. She said it was a migraine.
She had a key to our house from the first month. She said it was for emergencies and for letting the dog out, and we never had a dog. She used it on Sundays. She’d come in already talking, set the casserole on the stove and deal the paint chips across our table like cards.
She called me sweetheart from the day I met her. She called the cashier at Kroger sweetheart too.
I took the frame off the nail and held it under the hall light, the baby asleep on my other arm.
“Put that back, Angelica,” Mom said from the kitchen doorway.
She has never once called me by my whole name.
0614
Dad drove Nicolas home Sunday. He came back an hour later and went to bed at four in the afternoon.
Monday morning I texted Nicolas.
“I need the pump. Give me the code.”
Forty-two. Read at 9:10. Then: “0614.”
June fourteenth. Jolene’s birthday. I’d made the potato salad for it six years running.
Mom kept the baby. Dad drove me, and in the driveway he said, “Let it lie till you’re stronger, honey. Whatever it is will keep.”
“Will it?”
He looked at the steering wheel.
I punched in 0614 and the light went green. The garage door went up on Jolene’s white Camry, parked in my spot.
The house smelled like bleach and pot roast. Jolene was at my stove in my apron.
“Sweetheart. You shouldn’t be on your feet.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s resting. He hasn’t slept since Tuesday.”
“I’m going up.”
She stepped into the bottom of the stairs, still holding the wooden spoon.
“You’ll get what you came for,” she said, “and you’ll go back to your mother’s. That’s what’s best for everybody right now.”
“For who?”
“For that baby.”
Nicolas came to the top of the stairs. His hair was wet, and the stripe was still there, bright white against the rest.
He looked at me. He looked at her. He went back into our bedroom and pushed it shut.
“He didn’t do it Friday,” Jolene said. “First Friday he’s missed since seventh grade. You did that.”
She already had the pump in a Kroger bag by the door. My prescriptions were in there too, stapled shut.
“What did I do, Jolene? Say it to my face.”
She put the bag in my hand and folded my fingers over the handles.
“Ask Myra about Clyde Montalvo, sweetheart.”
Then she shut my own front door on me.
Two in the morning
Mom was at the kitchen table when I got back, peeling an orange she had no plan to eat.
“One dance,” she said before I opened my mouth. “Spring of 1979. Clyde took me to one dance and bought me one Coke, and then I met your father at the Marsh on Tillotson and that was the end of it.”
“Then why is she saying your name?”
“Because she called here Tuesday night at a quarter to midnight.” Mom set the orange down. “She said if you went anywhere near that house, she’d tell this whole town about me and Clyde. I said there’s nothing to tell. She said that never stopped anybody.”
“That’s why you didn’t ask me anything.”
“You’d just had a baby, Angie.”
My father was in the doorway. I don’t know how long he’d been there.
“Clyde’s his father,” he said.
Mom closed her eyes.
“The week that boy was born, Clyde sat in our garage on a bucket of salt and told me. Jolene was married. Her husband was a mean drunk who’d have killed somebody. Clyde made me swear on my mother.”
“And you let me marry him.”
“He’s a good boy. None of it was his doing.”
“Did you know Saturday? With the car seat?”
“I knew when I buckled it in.”
I fed her at two in the morning under the stars, and when she went back down I opened the Christmas tubs, because I couldn’t lie there.
Maternity jeans. My robe. Under them, the screw from the crib, still in its dish, wrapped in one of my dish towels.
And the clinic binder off my nightstand, the blue one with the colored tabs. Jolene had packed that too.
I knew what page it was. Page eleven, the embryo report. Pooja at the clinic in Indianapolis had walked us through it like a weather forecast. She’d said the chip reads both of you, end to end. “It’ll even flag it if Mom and Dad turn out to be cousins,” she’d said. “Small towns. You’d be amazed.”
Her purple sticky note was still on the page.
All clear. Not even cousins! —P
The passenger seat
At six on Tuesday, one week to the hour, Nicolas texted: “Can I come.”
I told him the driveway, nowhere else. My mother’s house was off limits, and so was standing up.
So we sat in my father’s Buick with the engine off, our girl asleep in the back. The seat covers smelled like the pine tree on the mirror, which has been there since 2009 and stopped smelling like pine about 2010.
His eyes kept going to her in the rearview.
“You can turn around,” I said.
He didn’t.
“When she came out of the room Tuesday,” he said, “Mom took me down by the vending machines. She said, ‘Now you see why I kept it covered.’ And I said I always knew it was Clyde, Mom. I’m not stupid. I’ve known since I was fifteen.”
“Then what was the face? Nico, what was the face in there?”
“I thought the baby would just have my hair. Like me. And I’d keep coloring mine and nobody would put it together, or they would, and fine.”
He rubbed his thumb along the seam of the dashboard.
“Then she said, ‘Why do you think he cried at your wedding?'”
I didn’t say anything.
“‘She sure didn’t get it from our side,’ Angie. She said it where the nurse could hear. I thought she was talking about me. She wasn’t. She meant yours.”
“I filled the caddy,” he said after a while. “That was me. I changed the code because she said if you walked in and I saw you two together I’d never be able to leave.”
“Leave me.”
“I sat in the basement for six days with the box in my hand and didn’t use it.”
He finally turned around to see her.
“She told me Clyde’s your father too,” he said.
Page eleven
I got out of the car. I went in and got the blue binder and came back and put it on his knees, open.
He read the sticky note three times. I watched him not believe it.
“She’ll say it’s wrong,” he said.
“Then she can say it to Pooja.”
The clinic opens at eight. I called at 8:01 from my mother’s kitchen and told Pooja the favor I was after and the reason, and she was quiet for a second and then she said, “Two o’clock. I’ll be at my desk.”
“Get your mother,” I told Nicolas. “Our kitchen. Two.”
Dad drove me. He didn’t ask. Mom kept the baby.
I punched in 0614 and walked into my own house.
Jolene was at the kitchen table with her purse in her lap like she was waiting on a bus. Nicolas stood by the fridge. Dad stayed in the doorway.
I put the binder on the table, open to page eleven, and set my phone on top of it on speaker.
“Mrs. Kouris,” Pooja said. “Every embryo we tested from these two shows a mother and a father who share no more than any two strangers off the street. If they’d had the same father, it would have been the first thing on that report. I’d have called them myself before we transferred anything.”
“Those places mix things up all the time,” Jolene said. “Everybody knows that. You read about it.”
“Then there’d be a stranger’s baby in that house,” Pooja said. “Is there?”
I hung up.
Jolene looked at the binder. Then she looked at Nicolas.
“Fine,” she said. “So it isn’t true. Fine. What was I supposed to do? You tell me. That baby was going to go down Walnut Street in a stroller with Clyde Montalvo’s hair on her head, and every woman over sixty in this town can count backwards from 1990. Every one of them. I’ve been at that church thirty-four years.”
“Mom.”
“I kept that off you since you were twelve years old. Twelve. I sat on the edge of that tub and did your roots myself till you were old enough. Clyde moved back from Fort Wayne and walked into the IGA and I bought the first box that same afternoon. And her.” She pointed at me with her keys. “She’d have had it all over town in a week. Better you think it for a week than this town thinks it for the rest of my life.”
She turned in her chair.
“And you, Emmett. You sat at that wedding. You knew whose boy he was and you ate the chicken.”
“I gave Clyde my word,” Dad said.
“Your word. I gave thirty-six years of Clairol.”
Nicolas went down the basement stairs. We heard the cabinet under the sink. He came back up with the box, Natural Black, and put it in her open purse, and then he held his hand out flat.
She looked at the hand for a long time.
She took the house key off her ring and set it in his palm, and she walked out through the garage. Nobody went after her.
I turned around.
“At my wedding,” I said. “You knew.”
“Yes,” Dad said.
“Go wait in the car, Dad.”
He let himself out, and he shut the door like it might wake somebody.
The third Friday
Three weeks later it was a Friday, the third one.
The bassinet card is on the fridge now, held up by a pineapple magnet Nicolas bought as a joke. It says Sierra, in his handwriting. The screw is back in its dish on the dresser.
Dad’s Buick pulled up at the curb at ten with groceries, the way it’s pulled up every other day since. He set the bags down by the steps and went back and sat behind the wheel with the engine running.
He hasn’t been inside since that Tuesday. I haven’t asked him in.
I carried Sierra down the walk and held her at his window. He looked at her a long time, at the white patch on her head.
“She’s got a good grip,” he said. “Tell your mother I’ll be by Sunday.”
At four, Nicolas went down the basement stairs, the way he has every third Friday for seven years. I went down after him with her.
The bathroom door was open. There was nothing under the sink.
He took her from me and stood at the mirror with her held up against his chest, two white stripes in the glass, one big, one small.
“You got that from me,” he said.
If this one stayed with you, share it with somebody whose family has a picture on the hall wall that nobody explains, and tell me in the comments which picture hangs in yours.
For more family drama where the truth surfaces in unexpected places, read the unsettling discovery in Joel’s basement and the $300 that never left Mom’s glovebox. And for a sharp comeback at a family milestone, see the $14,380 acceptance-dinner reveal.
