One More Morning
Pancakes
Chapter 2 · by Iris
He decided, standing there with the cold phone in his hand, that he was not going to waste a second of it being afraid.
That was easier to decide than to do. His whole body wanted to do something: call someone, scream, drive straight to a hospital and demand they scan a healthy child for a thing that hadn't happened yet. But Nora was singing down the hall, and it was 7:14 in the morning, and the one thing he understood for certain was that he had her now, alive, in this kitchen, and he had wasted enough of his life looking at this exact phone instead of at her. He put it down. He left it face-down on the counter, the way you'd leave a snake you didn't want to wake.
"Okay," he called, and his voice only shook a little. "Pancakes."
She came running. That was the first thing that nearly undid him: that she came running, socks skidding on the kitchen floor, like he was someone worth running toward. She climbed up onto the stool at the counter and put her chin in her hands and watched him, and he had to turn to the cupboard for a bowl so she wouldn't see his face.
He had never made pancakes in his life. He realized this with a kind of distant horror as he stood holding the box. Thirty-seven years old, a daughter for seven of them, and he had never once made the simplest breakfast there was, because there had always been an email, a call, a flight, a thing more important than a Sunday. Claire had made the pancakes. Claire had made everything.
He read the back of the box like it was a legal document. He measured the mix wrong and added too much milk and fixed it with more mix. Nora watched the whole operation with the deep, generous patience of a child watching an adult be bad at something.
"You're supposed to let the lumps stay," she said. "Mom says if you mix it too much they go like rubber."
"Does she."
"Mm-hm." Nora picked at the edge of the counter. "I can show you. I help her do it on the days you're not there."
On the days you're not there. He kept his back to her and stirred and let the lumps stay and breathed through the thing that wanted to come up his throat.
He poured the first one too big and it spread into a shape like a country. When he flipped it, half of it folded over, and Nora laughed, a real laugh, surprised out of her, and the sound of it went into him like light into a dark room. He made the second one smaller. He made the third one almost right.
She wanted hers with the syrup on the side, in a little bowl, for dipping, not poured on top, because poured-on-top made them soggy and she didn't like soggy. He hadn't known that. He had not known the single most basic fact about how his own daughter liked to eat breakfast, and now he knew it, and the knowing felt like both a gift and an accusation. He found a little bowl. He poured the syrup into it. She dipped a torn-off piece and ate it and kicked her feet against the legs of the stool, and the morning sun came in flat and yellow across the counter, and Ethan thought, I would burn down the world to keep this. I would do anything.
The phone buzzed against the countertop.
He saw her notice it. He saw her whole small body go still and careful, the way an animal goes still. The way, he understood now, she must have learned to go still a hundred times, waiting to see if the phone would win. Her eyes went to it, and then to him, and she said, in a bright voice that was much too grown-up, much too practiced:
"It's okay if you have to get it, Dad. I don't mind."
And there it was. The thing he had done to her, handed back to him in her own cheerful little voice. She wasn't hurt. That was the worst part. She had stopped being hurt a long time ago, because being hurt every weekend is too much work for a seven-year-old, and so she had quietly rebuilt herself into a girl who didn't mind, who expected the phone to win, who got out ahead of the disappointment by forgiving him for it before it even happened.
She had made it easy for him to leave her. He had taught her how.
"I don't have to get it," Ethan said.
Nora looked at him. "You always have to get it."
"Not today." He picked up the phone. He saw the name on the screen, Rick, and the start of a message about numbers and a Monday closing and a client who would not wait, and he turned it off. All the way off, held the button down until the screen went black, something he could not remember ever doing in the daylight. He set it in a drawer and shut the drawer.
Nora watched this happen the way you'd watch snow in summer.
"Is something wrong?" she asked. Not worried, exactly. Just a kid who knew the shape of normal and could tell this wasn't it.
"No," he lied, and it was the biggest lie he had ever told, and he smiled at her while he told it because she could never, ever know what was wrong, not for one second of the hours he had left with her. That was the one rule he made for himself, right there, with syrup on his hands. Whatever this morning was, however it had to end, she was not going to spend a minute of it afraid. The fear was his. He would carry it the way he should have carried everything else.
"Eat your pancakes," he said. "And then," he heard himself say it, and his heart turned over, "then I'll teach you to ride your bike. Like a big kid. Today."
Her face. He would remember her face for the rest of both his lives.
"Today?" she said. "For real today?"
"For real today."
She started talking then, fast, all of it future: how she'd ride it to school, how she'd show her friend Priya, how next summer they could ride all the way to the duck pond, how when she was big she'd get a bike with gears. And Ethan stood and listened to his daughter plan a future she was not going to have, and he smiled and nodded and felt the certainty harden inside him into something with edges.
No.
No, he thought. He didn't care what he knew. He didn't care how sure he was. He had been given this morning for a reason, and there was only one reason that made any sense, and it wasn't pancakes.
He was going to save her. He had hours. There had to be a way.
He just had to be smart enough, this one time, to find it.