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How it had come up Teacake couldn’t remember. His mouth had just walked him into it, like usual…but no, wait, huh, this time it had been Naomi’s mouth, actually. They were sitting on the couch after getting Sarah to bed, this was after her sister’s—Naomi’s, not Sarah’s, Jesus, no way were they to that point yet, though a guy could dream, and then again maybe a guy shouldn’t, he couldn’t decide if dreaming of a sister for Sarah, even a brother, a little thing with maybe Teacake’s eyes, his mom having always said those were among his best features, his eyes, but as for everything else, let the kid get Naomi’s brains, no question, and barring the eyes, possibly, the rest of Naomi’s looks, too, Teacake was okay to look at but Naomi, Naomi was everything, anyway, he couldn’t decide if this dream, this wish was respectful of Naomi and Sarah and the family they’d made together since long before he’d shown up, borne on the not-terribly-auspicious winds of a fucking nuclear blast, or if—
Jesus Christ. Anyway, and speaking of, this was after Naomi’s sister’s Fourth of July picnic-bash-cum-illegal-fireworks-set-off, the proud annual tradition of many an Atchison household, good old-fashioned lawbreaking mixed with plenty of booze. The fireworks they’d stuck around for, but of course Naomi didn’t drink, and Teacake himself was trying to cut back, and it was past Sarah’s bedtime. So they’d come back home, they’d put her to bed—a torturous process—and now they sat on Naomi’s couch sharing an already half-finished six pack of Diet Snapple. And for some reason or another she mentioned that Mike had been Catholic, and Teacake said, “Huh?”
He’d known Mike for about, say, five to six hours, give or take, and from what he’d seen—which, admittedly, did not comprise of Naomi’s ex and Sarah’s dearly departed dad at his best, or even vaguely in his right mind—Catholicism would not appear to square with Mike’s general vibe.
“Jesus Christ,” Teacake said. “Sorry, I mean, but, uh. Literally—like, Jesus Christ? Sacred hearts, Mother Mary, all that sh—that stuff? Really?”
Naomi said, “Are you aware of another kind of Catholicism?”
“No?”
“Me either.” She shrugged, twisting the lid off the last bottle of Snapple. Naomi lifted it to her lips and eyed him sardonically. “People. They’ll surprise you.”
“No shit. Or should I say, amen to that?” Teacake sipped at his bottle, thought. “No. Nah, I think that’s more or a Pentecostal thing, or Baptist or something. I don’t know.”
“You were raised Pentecostal? Or Baptist?” Her tone indicated genuine curiosity, but also the conviction that this would maybe explain certain things.
“Oh, I wasn’t raised much of anything,” he said. “But, you know, every once in a while I’d have, like, a great-aunt or somebody come around, try to save my soul. So.”
They talked about that for a while, growing up not much of anything, and growing up in close proximity to people who were something, sometimes too much of something, how it was a good thing until it wasn’t and a bad thing until it wasn’t and it was all about balance, yin and yang if you believed in that kind of thing, which as a Catholic would Mike have been supposed to, Naomi wasn’t sure; Mike’s whole family had been Catholic, and she’d grown up alongside his whole family. That maybe explained certain things.
“Did it help?” Teacake asked.
Naomi shrugged. “They’ve been very supportive,” she said, “in some ways.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Like, no offense, you give these type of folks the opportunity to do right by God and raise you up off your benighted ass, they can’t thank you enough. It’s like getting on Jeopardy! for them. Winning on Jeopardy!, even.”
Naomi shrugged again. “It helps if you’re Black, too,” she said. “Pretty sure that alone doubles their score.”
“You said it, not me.” The Snapple was entirely too sweet, shit. Teacake drank some more. “But, yeah. You are absolutely right on that. Right on the money.”
After a while he said, “But what I meant—”
She looked at him.
“—did it help, I don’t know, if you really believed it, if you felt you were doing the right thing, did that help? Of course, like, obviously you did the right thing, you know that now…well, you did one thing, and it turned out right, for you, you know what I mean, I guess I’m just asking…”
Naomi set her bottle down on the rickety coffee table. She set her hand on his knee. “Honestly?” she said.
Teacake thought a number of things, only somewhat related, like how her hand was warm and her eyes were warmer, but sharp, considering—Naomi always considered, she was sometimes impulsive but never thoughtless, never threw things away without realizing what she’d thrown and what was now lost to her, not like he’d done, and been, or might still be, but he was working on it, please God, was he ever working on it—how she could see right through him and how this, bizarrely, made him want to have a baby with her in the most unhinged and bone-deep way, like, he’d have her baby, were such a thing possible, he wanted so badly to be a part of this family, to contribute rather than break it apart, only if Naomi could see right through him surely she could see this inmost desire, and how objectively fucking insane and presumptuous it was, and also she smelled like cut grass and the summer night and Sarah’s toothpaste while he probably smelled like B.O. at best, and her hand was still on his knee.
He swallowed. “No, please,” he said. “Honesty always.”
“I like you,” said Naomi, a statement Teacake always welcomed, though this time it hit him as kind of a non-sequitur, also something that he’d hoped had already been established. Her lips quirked—again, seeing right through him. “I guess,” Naomi continued, “I guess I honestly don’t know, like—true conviction? I think that’s a luxury, really. I don’t think we always get it.”
Well, he’d certainly not always gotten it. Teacake nodded.
“And—I’ve been thinking about this, with Mike and everything—sometimes it isn’t a good sign.”
“Right,” he said.
“If you’re sure of yourself all the time, like, this is the right choice for me, I know what I want, then…you don’t know yourself. And you don’t know that you don’t know yourself.”
“U-huh.”
“Or something.” Naomi grimaced, flicked her hand in a dismissive gesture. “There’s my two cents’ worth, I just…it’s not like I miss…I mean, literally not a single thing that happened, but—things got really clear, didn’t they? Like for a couple hours we got that conviction.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Would you want it back?”
“Fuck no.”
“Right,” she said. “There you go.”
Her hand was warm, but her eyes were the real problem. Those eyes he could drown in. “I like it,” said Teacake. “I dig your point of view, lady.”
Another quirked smile; he thought she’d taste like Snapple and he’d taste like Snapple, and it’d all be too sweet, except when he leaned over to kiss her the sweetness had faded just enough, and her mouth was warmer than her hand or even her eyes, than anything he’d ever felt before except the times before when he’d kissed her. And all around them, outside in the night surrounding her small apartment, cherry bombs and bottle rockets were going off, like nothing more real than these had ever blown up, nothing had changed, but it had and it had, and here they were. What was left was good, it was growing, it was better.
Two days later Naomi called him: Sarah had gotten sick at daycare.
She said the front office said Sarah had already thrown up twice.
“Yeesh.” Teacake winced, clicked his tongue. “Poor kid. Noted, okay. I’ll put down a towel.”
“You’re a lifesaver, thank you,” said Naomi. Then she said, “I hate to say this, but Sarah has range. You should probably put down a tarp.”
Teacake didn’t have a tarp. And he had very few spare towels, but it was okay. Everything was going to be okay; when he got there they had Sarah waiting in the office for him, eyes wide, a dinky fun-size wastebasket clamped between her knees, and when she saw him her eyes only got wider. Sarah’s mouth opened and she wailed, like, wailed, “Traaaaavissss,” so loud the office lady flinched and said, “Oh my God. Sweetie—I’ve never seen her like this, oh my God,” and Teacake, having to act as though everything was okay, and cool and normal, and the sound of her voice hadn’t hit him like, oh, a bullet straight to the chest, said, “Oh, man, buddy, look at you. It’s okay, Sarah. It’s okay.”
To this she reacted pretty much as he’d expected: “Mama.”
“Mama’s at work.” He approached the blue foam armchair, somehow only slightly bigger than the wastebasket, that they had her sitting in and crouched down, got on Sarah’s level. His left knee popped and something in Teacake’s back complained, fairly loudly; since hauling the suitcase bomb to hell and hauling himself straight back out, his back and his knees were—and this was the technical term—both jacked to shit. “Mama’s at work, all right, she called me to come pick you up. I’m taking you back home. All right? We’ll wait for Mama together. How does that sound?”
Sarah said nothing, but she kicked the dinky wastebasket aside.
“Okay,” said Teacake. “All right, cool. Can I—okay. Here we go. You’re okay.”
She didn’t resist when he picked her up, she even smushed her face against the crook of his neck—hot and clammy, poor kid, and somehow they reached Naomi’s place without her throwing up once. Teacake drove carefully, slowly, but he knew she was trying not to do it in his car, this kid, she was so good; he parked and unbuckled her out of the booster seat he’d had to stop by Naomi’s work to get, wasting probably fifteen minutes securing it while Sarah was stuck barfing into a wastebasket; once she was free and clear, in his arms, he said, “Bud, if you need to let it out just let it out, go ahead,” and Sarah promptly puked all down his shirt.
It was warm, almost hot, looked and smelled like a school lunch deconstructed and left under a heat lamp too long, and Sarah expelled it with a shocking force, even considering Naomi’s warning, which Teacake had most definitely considered. It struck like the blast of a shower-nozzle—he was instantly covered, so was Sarah, and for a second she seemed to be actually choking from the intensity of it, and then she was just crying, wailing again, while Teacake rooted through his sodden pockets for his car keys and the house key, holding his breath, holding her, wondering why he hadn’t waited to dispense that particular nugget of paternal wisdom until they were at least through the damn door, and knowing they were both now quite literally up a shit creek without a paddle.
“Hey, huh, shhhhhh, it’s all right, Sarah, you’re all right—”
“I want to go home.”
“We’re home. I’m getting the door, gimme a sec—"
“It smells!”
“Uh, yep,” he said, “that it does.” Jesus, what was he supposed to do, lie to her?
“It stinks,” she shrilled. Well, yeah, that’s what he just said, what she said before he said it, and was this not maybe belaboring the point, Sarah? Teacake cranked the key in the lock and banged the door open with one shoulder.
“Gonna need you to work with me here,” he said.
What Sarah took this to mean he wasn’t quite sure, maybe You hang on as hard and long as you like, since she wrapped her arms around his neck and fastened her legs, vine-like, even tighter around his waist—all legs, this girl, she was going to get tall, was already kind of tall for her age, awkward to hold and carry. Slippery now, too. Dead straight in the eyes she looked at him, saying, “Get it off, Travis, get it off.”
This was when instinct kicked in. Another shot to the chest, so to speak; Teacake felt a full and painful throb, a squeeze of his heart as she said his name, and then he was through the doorway and down the hall, the entire span, basically, of Naomi’s small space. In the even smaller bathroom he deposited Sarah in the tub, clothes and all, then, because in the moment he could think of no better way to do this, stepped in himself, yanking the plastic shower curtain closed as he did so. He twisted the faucet, held his hand under to test the temperature, swore (quietly), adjusted the faucet, tested the temperature again, tested it a third time, then yanked the diverter upwards, listening for the grumble of the pipes as the water hosed down.
It did. With (he couldn’t help but notice) a force somewhat, or even significantly, less than the force with which Sarah had soaked them both. The water was lukewarm, even a little cold. Teacake shivered as it trickled down the crown of his head, turning to look at her.
“Is this a little cold for you?” he asked. “‘Cause it’s a little cold for me.”
Sarah, plopped down on her butt in a growing puddle of dirtied water, squinted up at him through the spray as though he’d lost his mind.
“Your shoes,” she said. “They’re going to get wet.”
Robert—fuck that guy, no question Teacake owed him, what with the expungement and all, and could probably stand to display some gratitude, but then, no way he forgot that cute little timer sleight-of-hand, whoops, just a precaution, I knew you two would make it, no I fucking didn’t, and so, again, fuck that guy—had asked what did they need. Teacake made no reply. He knew what Naomi would say, and she had: “My daughter.”
This was how he spent something like forty-eight straight hours in the company of the Atchison police and emergency services and the DTRA and the U.S. Army, and, he didn’t know, FBI, CIA, whole bunch of agencies doing a whole bunch of nothing much, that was the point, and with Robert and Trini, who, well, that was fine, and with Naomi and her daughter Sarah, who were, Teacake quickly came to realize, the only people in this godforsaken mess whom he was not sorry to be trapped indefinitely with.
He was already in love with her mom; he’d fallen in love with Sarah as fast, if not faster, than he’d fallen for Naomi. It was when they met at the hospital, Sarah spilling out of some officer’s arms and into her mom’s, the tightness of their embrace and its absolute desperation, too. They’d clung together as if they were all that was left, each the other’s one and only person, and in the face of such naked devotion any other sane person might think, first, Shit. What do I have that compares? Followed by, This? I want this. I want in.
Teacake had of course wanted in. This was no surprise to him. However. It was also no surprise that the family of Naomi and Sarah, their party of two complete in itself, needed nobody else, or, if they needed somebody else, that somebody would not be a parolee fresh out of his parole-conditional minimum wage job, since said job had disappeared, along with his workspace, into a massive and impassable irradiated sinkhole that, who knew, might yet poison all of eastern Kansas. This hard truth being clear to him, Teacake had tried not to gawk too long, and tried not to feel too much, and, after too long, had made himself turn away.
That was four months ago. Today, stooped over in the shower, he was picking undigested corn kernels out of Sarah’s hair.
“What’s up down there, you good? How’s your belly?”
“It stopped,” she said. Her tone implied that it could, and probably would, start up again.
“Not so good,” Teacake translated. “I’m sorry, okay. Could you wait here for just a minute? I’m gonna get, uh, I’m going to get you a bowl, or something, and your pajamas—”
“The throw-up bowl’s under the sink,” said Sarah.
“Under the sink? Jes—man, is your mom organized. I’ll be right back—” he tugged the shower curtain aside, squelched out of the tub.
“You need your pajamas.”
“What?”
“Your pajamas too,” she said. “You’re all wet.”
This kid. “Good thinking,” he said—it was very possible he was choking up, she had that effect on him sometimes, and what the hell, she clearly already figured he’d lost his mind, so. Teacake wiped his nose. Then he wiped the hand that had wiped his nose on his dripping t-shirt. “Be right back.”
Naomi called an hour or so later. They were in bed, both redressed—Sarah in her Bluey nightie and Teacake in a pair of boxers and a spare shirt he kept stored in Naomi’s bottom dresser drawer, alongside her socks and first aid kit and a flashlight and a small sewing kit and a box of condoms, you know, the essentials. The throw-up bowl had been placed strategically, easy grabbing distance for Teacake and easy lunging distance for Sarah. He’d pulled up Bluey on his phone, too; she was loathe to pause it, even for a call from her mom.
“How is she?” Naomi sounded harried.
“Better?” He posed it like a question. Great. How’s that for reassurance, asshole? “She’s not running a fever,” Teacake amended. “And we had popsicles, let me see, I guess fifteen minutes ago now, and she’s keeping that down. Good sign, I’m thinking. You want to talk to her? She’s right here.”
He didn’t put Naomi on speaker, that seemed nosy. Instead he put his phone to Sarah’s ear and let her take it from him, clutching it expertly in one hand while she cradled the other up close to her mouth. Sarah sucked her thumb, talked around it: “I’m good, Mama,” she said seriously, almost stonily, before launching into a vivid play-by-play of her ordeal, dedicating special attention to how she’d puked on some kid named Katey-Anne’s Paw Patrol sneakers and Katey-Anne was saying she’d need to buy her new ones, “But I want Paw Patrol sneakers, Mama, can we get a pair for me and a pair for Katey-Anne,” Jesus Christ, then it was all, “I love you I love you,” making a smooching noise into the phone and shoving it back at Teacake. “Mama wants to talk to you.”
“Yeah.” Naomi sounded no less harried. “Seems like she’s perking up.”
“It was, like, all perdition for a while there,” he said. “Puke and perdition. If that makes you feel better.”
“Actually, it does,” she said, her voice lightening a bit, which lightened his own personal fog of anxiety. Then she said, “Perdition?”
“Gotta beef up my vocabulary. Mopping up after the young minds of tomorrow and what have you—gotta learn the language of the ivory tower, you know how it is.” With his record expunged, Teacake had been able to pick up a custodial job at one of the nearby high schools—the pay was crap but better than night-guarding, and in the summer his hours were flexible enough to allow for, say, middle-of-the-day emergency vomit pickups.
“Louise said I could leave early,” said Naomi. Hard to tell over the phone, but he was pretty sure he’d worked a chuckle out of her.
“Hey, that’s awesome.”
“I’ll pick up something for dinner. Are you hungry?”
“Not particularly, no.”
There. That was definitely a chuckle. “I’ll be home soon.”
He said, “Cool, we’ll be waiting.” Teacake put his phone down. Let his eyelids droop shut for just a second, less than. Exhaustion had settled slowly at first, then all at once, another dense fog to stumble through, and while he stumbled he tallied up his words, what he should or shouldn’t say next. There was always something he could say; that had never been Teacake’s problem.
It was the other one, that was what hung him up most of the time. Another vocabulary builder, that one.
“Let’s finish Bluey.” Sarah poked at his shoulder.
“Decency,” was it? No—“discretion,” maybe. Teacake opened his eyes to look at her. “Hey, bud?”
“What?”
“I know your stomach hurts,” he said, “and you’re feeling bad. And this Katey-Anne, she sounds like a piece of work who doesn’t deserve those cool sneakers, I get that, it sucks—stinks, sorry, it stinks, but go easy on your mom, huh? She’d get you cool sneakers if she could. I mean, come on. I’d get you cool sneakers if I could.”
Saving eastern Kansas, the rest of the United States, and the world didn’t pay as much as some people seemed to think it should. Namely, Teacake’s old man, who’d spent the first eighteen years of Teacake’s life paying the rent (sporadically) and stocking the fridge (when he remembered) and now believed that this bare minimum entitled him to maximum compensation.
Asshole that his old man was, though, Teacake wasn’t thinking about him right now. He was thinking about Sarah, who was staring at him with hard eyes but her chin unfirm, like she hated him, which in small quantities was bearable, for a short amount of time he’d discovered he could live with that, but also like what he’d said had caused her to hate herself. That in any quantity Teacake couldn’t bear.
“I have cool sneakers,” she said.
“All right,” he said. “All right, come here, come on.”
“I’ve got unicorns on my sneakers. Unicorns are cool.” Again, her tone implied more than she’d said. This time, that unicorns were perhaps not, in fact, as cool as Paw Patrol, and Sarah knew this perfectly well. But she persisted: “Unicorns are cool.”
“No, man, unicorns are awesome.” And her sneakers were adorable, not that he’d say so. Even a whiff of pity she could scent like a bloodhound, this kid, and she tended to despise it. “Come here,” Teacake repeated. He scooched himself further upright against the headboard, patted the rumpled bedclothes beside him.
Sarah sniffed. Her chest and belly hitched. For a second he was on high alert, eyeing the bowl, cold with apprehension, possibly actual fear—he’d seen what could come out of her, and holy Jesus—but a gag didn’t develop and instead she scrambled in close to him. Sarah suckered to his side like a barnacle.
“I love Mama,” she said, belligerently, though her voice was as unfirm as her chin had been, and she’d stuffed her face up into his armpit or someplace, where he couldn’t see it.
Teacake nodded. “I know,” he said, how could she think he didn’t know this? “I know, bud, Sarah, I know. You’re good,” he told her. “You are a good girl, I get it, you hear me? Of course you love her, what’s not to love, huh? What’s not to love. I know. I know.”
Sarah said nothing. After a few minutes, though, she brought her face back out, and rested her head heavily in the crook of his shoulder. Teacake picked up his phone.
“Let’s finish Bluey,” he said.
“Shhh.” Naomi’s voice was in his head. Nope, wait—in his ear, her breath tickled the rim of his ear and as Teacake’s eyes blinked open she was a dim shape sliding in at Sarah’s other side, lifting up the puke bowl carefully and placing it down on the floor, carefully, without a sound. Then she turned back, curling around her sleeping daughter. Face-to-face, her eyes met his.
Teacake swallowed. “Sorry we’re in your bed.”
“You’ve been in my bed before,” she whispered.
“Indeed,” said Teacake. Immediately he thought, Huh? Indeed what, what am I trying to say, how fucking tired am I, what? “I mean yes, yeah, and thank you for that, by the way.” His voice strained with his efforts to keep it lowered. “This felt, it feels, like, weirdly more personal. And I hope I didn’t cross a line? Just, uh, she wanted to be in your bed and she wanted me to be with her, and, well, no disrespect but obviously we both can’t fit on her tiny-ass cot—”
“It’s a daybed. From Ikea.”
“Structural marvel, shows your impeccable taste. Perfect for a kid. For me, though, functionally? It’s a tiny-ass cot. And so I was considering options, as you do, and that’s out, and she’s tired, doesn’t want the couch, and—”
“I get it.”
“I’m trying to illuminate my thinking here.”
“Clearly.”
“It’s a lot,” he said, “I know. Also, like, it’s just occurred to me that I’ve been trying to illuminate it for myself, since you probably understand without me having to explain everything, or say anything, and I don’t actually know what I’m saying, so, uh. I’ll shut up. But I didn’t want to presume, I guess. That’s it. I don’t want to presume.”
Naomi shook her head. For a few minutes, though, she said nothing: they lay together, on either side of Sarah, in a silence longer than any Teacake could possibly have sustained with any other person in a similar situation, but then, he’d never been with another person like this, only with her. He only ever wanted to be with her, and with Sarah—that was the point, Teacake thought, maybe that was the problem. But he couldn’t give it up. Not unless she asked him to, he’d do it then. It would admittedly hurt like a bitch, but for Naomi he was reasonably—or unreasonably—sure he would do anything.
With some people it was just like that. Reason didn’t much enter into it.
“Additionally I may have fucked up.”
“Do tell.”
“I told Sarah, ‘Hey, let’s not, maybe don’t bug your mom about sneakers at this time’—”
“Doesn’t sound like a fuckup to me.”
“Not in substance? I mean, that I would gladly tell her again, but, shit, I don’t know, maybe when she’s not already sick and stuff, it really bugged her. I smoothed it over, I think, just—she’s not perfect, but she’s so good Naomi, I don’t want—it’s like how, you get treated like a little shit all the time, no shit, yeah, you’ll turn into a little shit. And I don’t want to be the reason, you know?”
“Relax, trust me. It wouldn’t be you.”
“More me than you,” he said.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Naomi countered. She shook her head, then shifted, propping herself up on one elbow and angling over Sarah and towards him, the better to hear out of her good ear. “You think she’s good?”
“Fuck, Naomi, I think she’s amazing.”
Her expression did something complicated and, in the fading natural light slanting through the old and broken blinds, unreadable. “It’s not that I don’t.” Naomi watched him, hard. “Except, well, sometimes I don’t.”
“She’s yours.”
“Right. I love her. Doesn’t mean I’m always doing right by her.”
“But she’s yours,” he repeated. “You can really tell that, that she’s yours. And that’s a good thing. If I wasn’t being clear.”
She considered. “You’re, I’d say, a pretty sharp judge of human character.”
Huh. “I’ve observed a wide variety of it, yeah.”
Naomi nodded, either in agreement or decision. Or both. “I’m going to take your word on this,” she said, and Teacake said, “Okay, cool. That’s gratifying.”
She said, “Honesty always.”
He swallowed. “Right. Please.” His throat was thick.
“I know what I want.”
“Me too.”
Her face was tired, shaped by that same sly, quirked smile; between them Sarah breathed softly, in and out, and beyond the windows evening was falling, the room growing darker and close, lit only by the warmth in her face, Naomi’s face, and the warmth Teacake felt within himself, looking at her.
She said, “Good.”
There it was. It was enough, and soon enough Sarah would stir awake between them and open her arms to Naomi like she had in the hospital, where as Teacake turned away he’d heard a voice, Sarah’s voice, saying, “Who’s that?” and Naomi’s voice answering, “This is Travis,” and Sarah had said, “Travis?” like, Come again, Mom? But it had just about killed him, had turned him around, this little girl, this beautiful kid with her clean pjs and open face like a flower, saying his real name because Naomi had told her his real name like his name was important, a thing to remember, and so, fuck it, he’d turned back to them, to Naomi beckoning him over, “Want to say hello?” like it was nothing, she thought nothing untrustful about him, while part of Teacake had been sure this was a mistake, true conviction, you never got it, and as for his soul, he himself had never managed to save it, and what if he fucked this up—what if he fucked them up—like every other opportunity ever offered to him, except, okay, maybe what had just happened, saving the world, at least eastern Kansas, that seemed sort of to be going as planned, together he and Naomi had saved the world and so now maybe this, what she was offering, maybe it was something to take, maybe this was where he’d find his soul, maybe, maybe—and anyway, he had turned back to them and here they were, Naomi, Sarah, here he was, in Naomi’s bed, Naomi seeing through him and Sarah about to wake up and open her arms to her mother. There was a future, Teacake sensed suddenly, an entire coming world and shit, spreading before them, where, like, first he’d go and check the laundry, make sure he hadn’t left the bathroom a wreck, then maybe they’d have dinner together, something bland and inoffensive, chicken noodle soup and toast, put Sarah to bed again, only would she sleep, Sarah, maybe she’d have a brother or a sister one day and maybe she wouldn’t, but he would be there, Teacake was sure, he would be in her life, the lives of this kid and this woman who both amazed him.
And this was enough, it was all, for now it was all there was.