A tractor rolled onto my father while my mother was pregnant. I’d always thought that was a tragic, freak thing to happen, but Mom was pretty matter-of-fact about it. “It was the country,” she’d say. “Stuff like that happened.” Mom had done a good job of picking up the slack my father left behind—an exemplary job—but I always knew something was missing. I saw other children being carried by their fathers long after their mothers had lost the strength. Girls giving perfunctory, embarrassed pecks to their fathers’ cheeks at the school gates. Kids asking for—and receiving—wads of notes from their father’s wallets, together with a promise not to tell your mother. Endearments like “princess” and “honey.” Gestures and generosities somehow more special from a father than from a mother.

When I was eight I spent a week with my friend Phyllis at her grandmother’s summer home. On the Saturday night, Phyllis’s dad was instructed by her mother to “wear us out.” He bustled us onto the huge green lawn and asked us to line up. From the way Phyllis’s sister and brother started to giggle, they’d clearly played this game before. I couldn’t see a ball or a Frisbee, so when he said “Go!” I remained where I was, even after the others scampered off in different directions. A split second later, I was flying.

“Gotcha!” Phyllis’s dad said, tossing me high into the air. His voice was animated. “That was too easy. What am I going to do with her, kids?”

Phyllis shouted out from the tree branch on which she sat with her sister. “Tickle her, Dad.” She laughed hysterically. “You have to tickle her.”

“Death by tickling, eh?” He pinned me to the grass and observed me with mock seriousness. “I’m not sure Grace is ticklish. Are you, Grace?”

“Yes,” I said, already feeling giddy. “I am.”

He waggled his fingers in the air, then brought them down on my stomach, my sides, my neck. Giggles rippled through me until my stomach ached and I thought I’d explode. I rolled around until my pajamas were covered in grass stains. I’d never experienced a greater feeling of content, not before or after.

Eventually he let me go and went after the others. They sprinted away squealing, climbing trees and tucking themselves into small cavities under the house. I didn’t understand. Were they trying to avoid the tickling and the throwing? If it were my Dad, I would have just lain there, a sitting duck to his tickling hands.

No, Neva didn’t realize what she was doing by keeping her baby’s father a secret. She had a doting father. She’d had shoulder rides and tickling and nicknames. She would have a Papa for her children one day and, if she chose it, she would be walked down the aisle.

I knew what her baby would be missing out on. And I wasn’t going to let it happen.

3

Floss

It was the same nightmare I’d had for sixty years. There were different versions, but they were fundamentally the same: I go into my baby’s room or pick up my little girl from school and she’s not there. Initially I stay calm; there must be some kind of explanation. She’s rolled under the bed. She’s hiding. It’s someone else’s turn to pick her up. But my neck already feels sweaty and I can’t hear my thoughts too well past the sound of my thundering heart. It’s not long before the hysteria starts. I start thrashing around the nursery or school parking lot, searching for a glimpse of that soft red hair or freckles. Instead I see another face. The face that is synonymous with the end of life as I know it. The end of life with my daughter.

I jerked upward into darkness, my fingers twisted in the bedcovers. Lil was by my side, her warm body a stark contrast to my chilling dream. I lay down again, mimicking her slow breaths—in out, in out—until my heart began to slow. It felt like déjà vu. The situations weren’t exactly the same, but the similarities were striking. Neva was going to be a single mother. The father of her child remained under a shroud of secrecy. And if her reasons for this were anything like my own, well … that was what terrified me.

I needed to go to sleep. But when I closed my eyes, all I could see were gray clouds and seagulls. Wind tangling my hair and briny sea air in my lungs. It was 1954 and I was on my way to America. As I strolled the windblown deck, newborn Grace peeked out of my wool coat, perhaps wanting a glimpse of the new life we were about to start. I continued to stroll until, on the third trip around, she drifted off. I waited until I was sure she was completely out, then gingerly lowered myself onto a plastic seat.

“Do you mind if I have a look?”

A woman about my age hovered over me, tugging the hand of the young man beside her. She strained to see inside my coat. Grace’s eyes flickered under her lids with new sleep, but seeing the woman’s enthusiasm, my motherly pride rose up. I opened my coat an inch.

“Oh, Danny, look—it’s so tiny! A boy or a girl?”

“A girl. Grace.”

“You lucky thing. We’re desperate for a baby, aren’t we, Danny? She’s beautiful. How old?”

“Two weeks.”

“Two weeks? But … shouldn’t you still be in hospital?”

I opened my mouth, releasing a cloud of smoggy air but no words.

“Well,” the woman said, “your husband must be taking very good care of you.”

Ah, my husband. There wasn’t one of those, of course. But my mother, unable to completely turn her back on me, had prepared me with an answer to that question.

“Actually, my husband … passed away. He was a farmer. There was an accident.”

“Oh no.” The woman looked at her husband and then back at me. “You’re raising the baby alone?”

“A lot of people have worse luck.”

Again, the woman turned to her husband. She just couldn’t seem to get her head around it. Life—and love—had obviously been kind to her. “That’s so sad. You’re going to America alone?”

“No.” I smiled at the ginger-haired bundle in my arms. “I’m going with my daughter.”

*   *   *

At some point I must have drifted off. When I woke, it was with a flying start. It was going to be one of those nights. Jolting in and out of consciousness. Skating along that foggy line between reality and dream. Usually, when this happened, I’d take a book into the study—just because I was restless, didn’t mean I had to disturb Lil. But tonight, I didn’t get the choice. Because the phone was ringing.

I sat up and dropped my legs off the side of the bed. In the dark, I located the red numbers of the clock—1:03 A.M. Grace.

Lil, ten years my junior and perpetually nervous of bad news coming at night, was already on her feet.

“I’ll get it, Lil,” I said. “It’ll be Grace.” I reached for my dressing gown on the bedpost, and by the time I’d reached the hall, Lil held the receiver to her ear.

“Hello?” she said. She nodded, then held the phone out to me. “Grace.”

“Thank you, dear. You go back to bed.”

I rubbed her arm as she horseshoed around me. Poor Lil. First she spent the evening huddled in our room reading a book—her choice, of course. But now her sleep was being interrupted. She was as sweet and tolerant as they came, but sometimes I wondered if Grace was wearing her thin.

By the time I lifted the phone to my ear, Grace was already talking.

“I know, I’m sorry. It’s late. It’s just … I’m stunned, flabbergasted, horrified—”

I lowered myself into the seat by the hall table. My old body felt like a sack of rocks. “Yes. It was a big shock.”

“You didn’t know, did you?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“How could I not have known?” Grace whined. “I’m her mother. I’m a midwife. Can she really be thirty weeks? She doesn’t look thirty weeks.”

“You were the same when you were pregnant,” I said. “Nothing more than a thickened waist until the eighth month.”

“And why won’t she tell us who the father is? She didn’t tell you, did she?”