Chapter 2 - Raising Him Alone
The adoption took eleven months. My lawyer was a woman named Diane who cut her fee in half and told me to pay the rest whenever I got on my feet.
I moved Cole into my one-bedroom apartment and gave him the bedroom. I slept on a pull-out for two years and told him I liked it better that way.
I taught myself to cut his hair the night before second-grade picture day. Botched it, honestly, but he smiled in the photo anyway. I made peanut butter sandwiches every single morning for ten years. I burned through vacation days on fevers, on a field trip to the science center, on the afternoon he went headfirst into the boards at the rink and broke his wrist.
My boss would have let me go twice over if it hadn't been for Sal.
Sal worked the next bay. Wiry, mid-fifties, always chewing a mouthful of sunflower seeds and never wasting a word. He'd take my jobs without me asking.
"Go watch the kid's concert, Ray. I've got your bays."
"Sal, I owe you one."
"You don't owe me squat. Go."
Kurt never called. Not one birthday. Not one Christmas morning. Fourteen years of silence, clean as a snapped wire.
And Cole grew up. He shot up tall, got his mother's eyes and a wrist shot that made grown men in the stands turn and look at each other. Senior year he was putting up close to two points a game, and half the pickup trucks in Millbrook had his number stuck in the back window.
The state final was a week out. I watched him swing his hockey bag off the kitchen chair one morning and I thought about Nicole, and how she should have been the one standing there.
"You good, Dad? You're staring at me."
He'd started calling me Dad when he was six. Never announced it. Just did it one night at dinner, and I had to get up and leave the table for a minute.
"Just thinking," I said.
May you like
He gave me a smile that stopped somewhere short of his eyes.
He'd been off for a couple of months. Quiet. Always on his phone, and twice I'd walked into the living room and watched him flip it face-down against his leg. I told myself it was a girl. I knew it wasn't.
