The Slap At The Reunion

Then Tom’s heart stopped on a Tuesday in the cab of his truck in the co-op lot, forty-one years old, and they said it was over before he hit the wheel. And I was thirty-eight and I did not have each other anymore. I had a house that was paid for most of the way, and a small bookkeeping business I ran out of the front room, doing taxes and payroll for half the little businesses in town, and a silence in that house so heavy I used to leave the television on all night just to have a voice in the dark.

I thought that was my life. A widow with a calculator and a casserole dish nobody needed.

The children came two years after Tom died, and they did not come the way I had spent nine years praying for. They came through a caseworker named Priscilla and a phone call on a Thursday afternoon. There were two kids, a brother and a sister, pulled out of a bad situation over in the next county, and the emergency foster placement had fallen through, and did I still have my license current from the class I had taken on a whim after Tom passed just to have somewhere to be on Tuesday nights. Micah was ten then. Abby was six. They came to me with everything they owned in two kitchen trash bags, and Micah would not look at me, and Abby would not let go of a stuffed dog so dirty I had to wash it in the sink while she watched to make sure I gave it back.

I am not going to pretend it was easy or that I was good at it. The first year I cried in the pantry more times than I can count. Micah tested me the way a boy tests a floor he does not trust, waiting for it to give. He broke things on purpose. He told me more than once that I was not his mom and I was never going to be. And I would say, every time, in the same even voice, “That’s alright. I’m still going to make you breakfast.” Because I had learned something in nine years of losing babies I never got to hold. I had learned that love is not a feeling you get. It is a thing you do, over and over, whether or not anybody thanks you for it, until one day the person you did it for turns around and the floor holds.

The adoption went through on a cold morning in a courthouse in Cookeville, the three of us in our church clothes, Abby in a dress I let out twice because she would not stop growing. The judge asked Micah, who was twelve by then, if he understood what was happening. And Micah, who had told me a hundred times I was not his mother, looked at that judge and said, “Yes sir. She’s my mom now.” I did not cry in front of the judge. I waited until we were in the truck.