Page 85 of Harper

“Us!”

“How?” she demands. “Your mother was gone! Mine was long gone! Your aunt worked full-time. Your cousin already had two kids.” She shakes her head at me. “My dad was a single parent to six kids, including three who were still in elementary school. Gran ran the lodge, and Paw-Paw ran the camp. Dad was the only one taking tourists on the long runs, gone for days at a time with only Hunter for help. He was stretched way too thin to help with a baby. Not to mention, I was nowhere near ready. I didn’t want to be a mom!”

An uncomfortable feeling unfolds in my stomach.

Maybe she’s right.

My anger and frustration have been so overwhelming since I learned of my daughter; maybe I’ve been remembering those days through rose-colored glasses. Because no matter how much I want to believe that we could have made it work, if I pause and think back, I have to admit to myself, if not to her, that Harper’s making valid points.

“You didn’t give us a chance!” I say, digging my feet into the argument. “Maybe we could’ve made it work.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “We couldn’t have, Joe. We would have both had to work full-time to pay rent and buy groceries and support her. She would have been in daycare, always picking up coughs and colds and needing clinic visits. We would have struggled.”

“My cousin did it.”

“Be serious! Bart graduated four years before Sandra, and you know it. He was already working full-time with an apartment of his own when she got pregnant. Not to mention, she had her mother in the picture.”

“We could have—”

“No!” she yells, her voice shrill. “We couldn’t have!” She clenches her jaw, her eyes furious when they slam into mine. “You only see what you want to see, Joe! And part of me loves that about you—your idealism, your blinding belief in beautiful things like love always finding a way—but it’s not always practical. We couldn’t offer her a good life, and I wanted that for her.”

“I can’t believe you had so little faith in us.”

Her shoulders slump. “We were just kids.”

“And you didn’t want a baby.”

“No, I didn’t. Not at that time.”

I sit back on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, trying to swallow over the lump in my throat. The fact that Harper didn’t want our child—my child—hurts so much, I have to close my eyes against tears.

“All I ever wanted was a family,” I whisper. “With you.”

“I know,” she says, her voice thin and choked up. “I know that, Joe.”

“Why couldn’t you even tell me?”

“Because you would have tried to talk me into making the wrong choices. And I loved you so much, I might have let you.”

Loved.

Past tense.

“And now?” I keep my head back and my eyes closed.

“Now I’m ready to have a baby,” she says, “but this is never how I wanted it to be, with us barely speaking!”

Quiet settles over the room.

Outside I can hear the sound of the nightly Stewart campfire—snapping logs, the clink of beer bottles raised in toasts, the soft thrumming of a guitar.

“Joe.”

“What?”

“I…I don’t know if you read the—the thing about forgiveness that Gran gave us, but I did. And…and I want you to know that I acknowledge your pain,” she says slowly and carefully, a calm gravitas to her words. “I know that I hurt you. I know that I lied to you. I know that I betrayed you. I know that you are angry and frustrated. I know that you don’t trust me anymore. I acknowledge all of this, Joe.”

I wait for the “but.” I wait for her to tell me all the reasons that my pain is a necessary by-product of decisions she felt compelled to make. But we sit in silence again. Finally, I lean forward, open my eyes and look at her.

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