“You will need a larger place, background checks, home inspections, childcare arrangements, legal hearings—”
“What forms do I sign?”
Mrs. Fenwick closed her eyes.
Later, she told me that was the moment she realized arguing would be useless.
The next several months were a blur.
Finch & Nail Hardware belonged to an elderly man named Emmett Crow.
When I explained what had happened, he stared at me over his glasses.
“You intend to raise three babies above my shop?”
“I intend to try.”
“That ceiling is thin.”
“I know.”
He grumbled for several minutes.
Then he handed me the keys to the empty storage room behind my apartment.
“You can knock through the wall.”
“I can’t afford the rent.”
“I didn’t mention rent.”
Emmett never admitted that he had become attached to the girls.
He simply began leaving boxes of diapers near the stairs.
Mrs. Fenwick watched them while I worked.
At night, I repaired locks and sharpened tools for extra money.
The girls slept in three mismatched cribs donated by customers.
For their first birthday, I stayed awake after midnight writing in a notebook.
I had started it because I was afraid I would forget things.
The first time Liora stood.
The way Carys sneezed whenever she laughed too hard.
The way Maisie refused to sleep unless she could hear one of her sisters breathing nearby.
That night, I wrote:
To my three girls,
You are one year old today. I don’t know if you will ever read this. I don’t know if I am doing any of this correctly. I only know I am not going anywhere.
Then I closed the notebook and pushed it into the back of a kitchen drawer.
Twenty-two years passed the way a long shift does.
Slowly while you are living it.
All at once when you look back.
I packed school lunches using the wrong bread.
I burned pancakes and called them crispy.
I braided hair so badly that Mrs. Fenwick waited on the porch each morning with a brush.
“You are giving these children emotional damage,” she said once while undoing the knot I had created in Carys’s hair.
“I watched a tutorial.”
“You watched the wrong tutorial.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know. That is what worries me.”
I worked double shifts.
Sometimes triple shifts when one of the girls needed braces, new glasses, a school trip, or shoes because all three had somehow outgrown theirs in the same week.
There were fevers.
Science fairs.
Dance recitals.
Parent meetings.
