She said she would rather be a good adult in a kid’s life than a bad parent.
She said, once, in the car, that she thought it was a good sign that I still wore my wedding ring on a chain and that she’d be worried about a man who didn’t.
She came to eleven of Hannah’s things over two years.
She sat through a fourth-grade winter concert alone, in a folding chair, while I was on a phone call in a parking lot in Fountain, and she filmed all forty minutes of it on her phone and sent it to me at 9:40 that night, and I watched it in a truck and had to sit there for a while afterward.
There were two nights in that second year that I go back to.
The first was in November, about three months before I proposed.
I had come back from ten days at Fort Irwin and I was in that state you’re in after a rotation, which is not tired exactly but hollowed out, and I had gotten home at nine at night to find Hannah asleep and the kitchen clean and Pamela at my table with a glass of wine and a stack of Hannah’s school papers she’d been sorting.
And she asked me about Rebecca.
Not carefully.
Not in the way people ask, which is to check whether you’re all right.
She asked me what Rebecca had been like to argue with.
Nobody had ever asked me that.
