Eric put his arm around his son's shoulders and pulled him in. "You get to have Daniel, too," he said into Tyler's hair. "You get to have Rosa, and Sofia, and the tamales, and the cousins in Nogales, and the bus driver grandpa, and whatever else you find. You don't have to pick. Nobody's taking anything from me by you having more people. You hear me? Being your dad isn't a thing I own. It's a thing I do. And I'm going to keep doing it."
They sat on the tailgate under the stars until the tow truck came, its yellow lights sweeping over them, and then they rode home together in Eric's car, and Tyler fell asleep somewhere past Chandler, and Eric drove the last miles with his hand resting on the console between them, close enough to touch.
* * *
Nothing was fixed in a single night. Eric had been sober long enough to distrust the idea that anything was.
He moved back into the bedroom in January, not because he had forgiven Melissa, exactly, but because Dr. Halvorsen asked him one evening whether he wanted to be right or wanted to be married, and he went home and lay on the pullout couch and realized he did not know how to sleep without the sound of his wife breathing. Forgiveness, he discovered, was not a door you walked through once. It was more like sobriety. You did it a day at a time, and some days you did it badly, and some days the old anger came up in you over nothing, over her laughing at a television show or touching his arm in the kitchen, and you had to stand very still and let it pass through. Melissa let him be angry. She did not ask him to hurry. Some nights they sat out by the pool after Lily was asleep with their feet in the water, under the string lights she had never taken down, and talked about that summer, about Daniel, about the girl she had been at twenty-four and the man he had been at twenty-six, two frightened kids making decisions with half the facts. One night in February she said, "I would give anything to go back and tell you in October," and he said, "I know," and then, after a long time, "I don't know what I'd have done. I'd like to think I'd have stayed. I don't know." That was the most honest thing either of them had said, and somehow it helped.
He forgave Jenna faster than he expected. She came by on Lily's birthday with a cake shaped like a cactus and stood on the porch the way he had once stood on hers, and he looked at her and remembered that she had been twenty-six too, holding her little sister's secret like a hot coal for seventeen years, and he let her in.
In April, Tyler turned seventeen, and the whole family drove to Tucson for a birthday dinner at Rosa Reyes's house: Eric and Melissa and Lily, and Carol, who had insisted on coming and spent the evening in Rosa's kitchen comparing grandsons and arthritis medications as if they had known each other for forty years. Daniel and Melissa spoke for the first time in seventeen years in the backyard, briefly and awkwardly, and Eric watched from the patio and found that it hurt less than he had feared. Sofia taught Lily a card game neither of them seemed to know the rules to. Frijol ate an entire tamale, husk and all, off an unattended plate.