Daniel showed up the way the weather does. A birthday card once, with no return address. A Christmas card with a stamp from somewhere I’d never been. When the girls were 12, he called. “I want to reconnect, Noah. I’ve been thinking.” “Thinking about what, exactly?” “About them and being a dad.” I held the phone so tightly that my hand cramped.
“You want to be a dad, you get on a plane. You don’t think about it on my phone bill.” My brother didn’t get on a plane. He never did. The cards stopped after that. Sometimes I wondered if the girls noticed. They never said.
I’d lie awake some nights and run the numbers in my head, the way you do when you’ve been broke long enough. Not money. The other kind. Did I do enough? Did I say the right things at the right time? Did they know I loved them, or did they just know I was tired?
There was a fear under all of it that I never said out loud. That somewhere in the back of their hearts, the triplets were still waiting for their real father. That I was the man who’d been there, but not the man they wanted. I didn’t blame them for it. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The morning of the triplets’ graduation, I sat in my truck in the parking lot for a full 20 minutes before I could make myself get out. I was 49. My beard had gone gray in patches. My knee hurt from a fall off a ladder two summers earlier and had never quite healed. I’d brought a cheap camera, which I didn’t fully know how to use, and it was shaking in my hand. And in my wallet, behind the expired insurance card and a food receipt, I’d kept Daniel’s original note. It was faded, but still readable.
