“I remember the bus station,” she said. “I always thought it was a dream. Orange chairs. The hot chocolate machine. There was a man with a mop. And Mama’s hand on my back, and it was shaking, but she kept it there the whole time, she never took it off. I used to dream about it. I’d wake up and I couldn’t tell anybody, because how do you tell somebody you dreamed about a bus station?” She was quiet. “When I was pregnant with Jayden, I dreamed about it again. Every night for a month.”
She sat down at the table. After a while he sat down across from her. The bag sat between them.
“What do I do, Daddy?”
He had known she was going to ask. He had been sitting in the dark for two hours knowing it. And every part of him that was a grandfather, that had sat on the front steps of a school in his mind all evening beside a ten-year-old boy telling a teacher that his dad was definitely coming, every part of him that had once been a five-year-old girl’s father coming home early to a quiet house—all of it wanted to say: Leave him. Pack the bag. Take my grandson and go. I will drive you to Durham myself.
And there was another part of him, older and quieter, that had sat on a kitchen floor in this exact room and been given a second chance by a woman who had every right in the world not to give him one.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said.