Chapter 4: Fifty-Fifty
He tried.
I'll say that honestly.
For the first week after the birthday dinner, Ezra tried in the way people try when they've been embarrassed into it — with a kind of effortful, visible performance that was exhausting to watch but impossible to criticize.
He got up with Charlie once in the night.
He made Sophie's lunch on Tuesday.
He asked me, twice, where things were kept, and both times I told him without making a point of it.
By the second week, the effort had softened into something more natural.
Less performance.
More just — doing it.
He still made mistakes.
He packed Sophie's bag without her water bottle three days in a row.
He forgot that Charlie's bath temperature needed checking before he went in.
He didn't know that Sophie's nighttime routine required the hall light left on at a specific angle or she'd be up at two in the morning calling for me.
But he asked.
That was the difference.
He started asking instead of assuming I would handle it.
One evening, about three weeks after the dinner, I came home from work to find Sophie at the kitchen table with a drawing she'd made, and Ezra at the stove, attempting pasta.
The kitchen looked like it had been through something.
There was sauce on the cabinet above the stove that I chose not to mention.
"Mommy, Daddy made dinner," Sophie announced.
"I can see that," I said.
"It might be terrible," Ezra said, without turning around.
"It smells okay."
"That's the garlic bread.
The garlic bread is definitely fine.
The pasta is uncertain."
I put my bag down and picked up Charlie from his bouncer on the floor.
He grabbed my finger immediately, the way he always did, and I pressed my cheek against the top of his head.
"How was your day?" Ezra asked.
Still at the stove.
It was such a simple question.
He'd asked it before, over the years.
But this time he wasn't looking at his phone while he asked it.
He wasn't already turning back to the television.
He was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon, actually waiting for the answer.
"Long," I said.
"But okay."
"Sit down.
I've got it."
I sat.
The pasta was, in fact, slightly uncertain.
Sophie ate it without complaint, which was its own kind of verdict.
Charlie watched the overhead light and waved his arms.
Ezra ate his own cooking with the expression of a man who was going to do better next time and knew it.
After dinner, he did the dishes.
I gave Charlie his bath.
We moved around each other in the kitchen and the hallway without bumping, without negotiating, without the usual low-grade friction of one person doing everything and the other person not noticing.
It wasn't perfect.
It wasn't even close to balanced yet, not really.
Seven years of habit doesn't dissolve in three weeks.
But that night, after the kids were in bed, Ezra sat down on the couch next to me and said, "I've been thinking about what you said in the car."
"Which part?"
"That I knew.
That I just decided not to find out." He was quiet for a moment.
"You were right.
I told myself a story about what kind of father I was, and I never checked whether it was true."
I looked at him.
"Why do you think you did that?"
"Because checking would have meant changing.
And changing is hard." He said it plainly, without self-pity.
"That's not an excuse.
It's just the honest answer."
"I know," I said.
"I'm sorry.
Not the kind of sorry that's just a word.
I mean I'm actually sorry.
I want to be the person I was telling everyone I was."
I thought about Diane cutting Sophie's chicken.
About Rosemary setting down her fork.
About the ten minutes of silence on the drive home.
"Then be him," I said.
"That's all."
He nodded.
We sat there for a while in the quiet of the house, the way you can only sit when the children are finally asleep and the day has finished and there's nothing left to do but be still.
It wasn't a resolution.
Not yet.
But it was the first night in a long time that I went to bed without a list running through my head.
I closed my eyes.
May you like
Charlie slept through until five-thirty.
Ezra got up.
