“I’m sorry, Gordie.”
“She was a good woman. Better than I deserved. She ran the church nursery for twenty years.” I swallowed. “We never had kids of our own. We tried for a long time. Doctors, tests, all of it. It just wasn’t meant to be. So she loved everybody else’s babies instead.”
June went quiet.
She set the applesauce down very carefully on the tray, as though it had become heavy.
“You’d have been a good father,” she said softly.
“I like to think so. I suppose I’ll never know.”
She turned her face toward the window. For a long moment she didn’t say anything at all, and I thought she might have drifted off. Then I saw her throat move as she swallowed, and her hand on the blanket curled into a fist and slowly let go.
“June?”
“I’m fine.” She turned back and gave me a smile that didn’t quite reach the cinnamon fleck. “Morphine makes me sentimental.”
