Later, that detail would matter to her more than it should have. She did not scream either. She stood in the churned dirt of the midway while Ferris wheel lights moved over all of them in rotating strips of blue, red, white, and gold, and she asked practical questions in a voice she barely recognized. What was the child’s full name.
How old was he exactly. Did he have a birth certificate with David’s name on it. Had David known for five years or less than that. Nia answered what she could. David interrupted where he thought interruption might reduce damage, which only made him look smaller.
Cam was Cameron Brooks.
He had turned five in May. No, David’s name was not on the birth certificate. Yes, he knew the boy was his. He had known almost from the beginning, though for the first months there had been the terrible little dance of “we should be sure,” “I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” and “timing can be complicated,” that men like David perform when hoping probability itself will rescue them from responsibility.
Nia had taken a test when Cam was still an infant and shown David the result in a diner parking lot while Cam cried in the back seat. He had sat in his pickup truck and stared at the paper until she finally said, “You can keep looking. He’ll still be yours.”
Linda heard all this with the eerie distant attention of a person listening through glass.
The fair kept going around them. Somebody won a giant inflatable hammer at the basketball booth and shouted triumphantly. A teenage worker with a pierced eyebrow tried not to stare while collecting tickets. Nearby, a couple argued mildly over whether to let their son ride the tilt-a-whirl one more time.
The ordinary persistence of the world in the presence of private disaster felt obscene. Linda found herself focusing on absurd details because the larger truth was too large to hold all at once. The red dust on Cam’s sneaker toe. The way Nia’s hoop earring was bent slightly at the clasp. The sticky dampness of her own hand where the cotton candy had melted and collapsed into itself.
At last David said the one thing that broke Linda’s numb clarity enough to let anger catch up.
“I was going to tell you,” he said.