They tried. They did the appointments and the waiting rooms and the quiet drives home. They did the conversations that start with we and end with I don’t know. After three years Megan said, at this same island, “I can love a child I did not carry.” Richard said, “I know.” Knowing is not the same as being ready. He was ready enough to fill out papers. He was not ready, not then, for the particular way love would arrive: not as a continuation of his face, but as a boy who would look at him from a different country of skin and still call him Dad.
The adoption took fourteen months of files and visits and a social worker named Ruth who wrote everything down and smiled as if smiling were a test they were passing. They were matched with a boy who was four, whose first mother had signed the papers in a room Megan still thought about on certain nights, whose first weeks in their house were a study in how a child checks a door. He was small then. He slept with a light on. He called Megan Mom before he called Richard anything he meant.
The courtroom was a Tuesday. Andre was five by then, in a shirt that scratched. Megan cried in the way that makes a clerk look at the clock. Richard stood with his hand on the boy’s shoulder and felt, without admitting it, that the shoulder was a fact he had agreed to and not yet learned. A judge asked the questions judges ask. When the judge looked at Andre and asked, in language simple enough for a child, whether he wanted this to be his family, Andre looked at Megan and said yes. He did not look at Richard first. Richard noticed. He told himself later that a boy looks at the person who packs the lunches. He told himself that for eleven years.
They took pictures on the courthouse steps. One of those pictures lived on the refrigerator still, under a magnet shaped like a strawberry. In the picture Richard is smiling with his whole mouth. Megan’s mascara is already a little wrecked. Andre is holding her hand as if a hand could be a legal document. It could. It had been.
The years after that were not a commercial, and they were not a tragedy. They were a family. Soccer. Ear infections. A bike in the driveway. Conferences where a teacher said Andre was bright and watchful. Sleepovers Richard inspected too hard. A neighbor who asked, once, in the polite voice of the suburb, whether they had considered how hard it might be. Megan said, “He’s our son.” Richard said, “We’re fine.” Fine did a lot of work on that street.
Andre grew tall. The locs came when he was thirteen, after a summer of asking and a Saturday in a chair while Megan sat nearby reading a book she did not read. Richard had wanted a buzz cut. He said it would be easier. Easier for whom, Megan asked, and the question sat on the island between them like a third glass. Andre got the locs. He kept them neat. He kept the taper clean because he understood, earlier than a boy should have to understand, that neatness was a kind of passport in rooms like theirs.
Richard loved him. That sentence has to be allowed, or the night in the kitchen becomes a cartoon. He coached the team for two seasons. He sat through concerts. He taught Andre to change a tire and then took the wrench back too soon. He said good game and meant it. He also said, in arguments with Megan that the boy was not supposed to hear, “I did everything I was supposed to do,” as if love were a checklist that entitled a man to a certain kind of household quiet.
The quiet had been thinning for a year.
Money was part of it. The equipment market had gone soft. Richard came home with a face that looked like a door left open in winter. Megan’s school district talked about cuts. They were not poor. The house was still the house. The wine was still on the counter. Upper-middle-class fear is a specific weather: not hunger, but the feeling that the marble might be a costume. Richard drank a little more. Megan slept a little less. They spoke to each other in the language of logistics and saved the other language for after Andre’s door was closed, except the doors in that house did not close as well as the adults believed.