My mother, Marilyn, sat beside him with her pearls and her good purse.
They said we would figure it out together.
I believed them, because I was 18, and because I had never had a reason not to.
My grandmother Edna was the only one who didn’t ask me questions.
She lived out at Alderwood Farm, among sixty-two acres of apple trees, and she was d*ing slowly in the back bedroom that summer.
She pressed her silver cross into my palm and closed my fingers around it.
“Whoever he is, he’ll be loved,” she said. “Give him something from me.”
It was small, worn smooth by eighty years of her thumb, with a tiny notch in the bottom arm where it had caught on a pew once.
She d*ed in August.
My son was born on November 10, 1995.
I named him Kieran.
He had a full head of dark hair and a fist that wouldn’t open.
