Ben learned how to change a diaper. Badly at first. Evelyn screamed the whole time.
“She hates me,” he said, horrified, holding a dirty diaper at arm’s length.
“She screams at everybody,” I said. “That’s not you failing. That’s just babies.”
My mom, from the kitchen, laughed out loud.
He learned the song I sang her when she was fussy. He learned that she liked to be bounced, not rocked, and that she liked the sound of running water, and that if you blew gently on her forehead she’d stop crying for exactly four seconds out of sheer surprise.
He never once asked me to come home. Not once. He never asked what we were. He never pushed.
On a Wednesday in January, I finally asked him the question I’d been holding onto.
We were sitting on my parents’ back steps, wrapped in coats, with Evelyn asleep in the stroller beside us, bundled up like a tiny marshmallow.
