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“Honey, you can’t raise three babies alone!”
“I know!”
“You don’t even know how to warm a bottle.”
I sighed.
My neighbor knelt beside me. I was thinking she was probably right when the smallest baby reached up, blind and searching, and her fist closed around my index finger. It was tiny, warm, and strong in a way that didn’t make any sense for a six-month-old.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t.
I was thinking she was probably right.
“That’s June,” Mrs. Hunter said quietly. “Patricia made sure we’d know how to tell them apart. Said the smallest one would always be June.”
“June,” I repeated, saying the name as if I were testing whether my mouth still worked.
Baby June kept holding on. She didn’t know I had no money, had never changed a diaper, or that her father had abandoned them. She just knew someone was there.
“I’ll call social services in the morning,” my neighbor said gently. “There are good families, Noah. Ready people.”
Baby June kept holding on.
I opened my mouth to agree. I really did.
“Okay,” I whispered instead, but I was looking at June. “Okay. Okay, I’ve got you.”
Mrs. Hunter went quiet. The porch light flickered again.
I carried them inside one at a time, and somewhere between the second trip and the third, I stopped being Uncle Noah and started being something I didn’t have a word for yet.
I became Uncle Noah, then Dad, by accident.
“Okay, I’ve got you.”
Twenty-two years went by, the way a long shift does: slow in the middle, gone by the end.
I packed lunches with the wrong kind of bread. I braided their hair so badly that, before school, Mrs. Hunter would fix it on the porch.
“You’re going to give those girls complexes, Noah,” my neighbor said once, pulling a brush through Ava’s tangles.
“I’m doing my best.”
“I know you are. That’s the problem!” she teased.