One More Morning
What He Can't Change
Chapter 4 · by Iris
"I'm not crying," Ethan said, and crouched down fast, and wiped his face on his shoulder, and started mopping up the orange juice with the dish towel so she couldn't see him do it. "I yawned. Big yawn. It makes your eyes water. Here, grab the other towel, you're on floor duty."
It worked. She bought it, the way kids buy the lies that let them off the hook, and she got down on the floor next to him with the second towel and pushed juice around importantly, and he stayed down there longer than the spill needed, because being on the floor beside her was the only thing holding him together.
The first time, he had snapped at her over this spill. Careful, Nora, God. He had carried that one second for a year. The meanness of it, the way her face had folded. He couldn't give her back her life. But he had just been handed the chance to take back that one second, to fill it with something else, and he understood, kneeling on the wet floor, that this was the only kind of power he had left. Not over what happened. Only over what he was while it did.
That was when the real thing arrived, the thought underneath all the others, and it nearly put him on the floor for good.
He had been awake in this miracle for almost an hour. And what had he done with it? He had made pancakes. That part, at least, he'd let himself have. But then he had picked up the phone. He had turned away from her and called Claire and argued logistics. He had run a cold little experiment with a glass of juice. He had spent the back half of the only hour he would ever get like this the exact same way he had spent her whole life: looking past her at a problem, certain there would be more time, sure that the important thing was to fix something, manage something, win something. Anything but simply sit still and be her father.
Even now. Even given the impossible. His first instinct had been the phone.
That was who he had always been. He saw it whole, for the first time, the way you see your own house from across the valley. He had told himself for years that he was doing it all for them: the hours, the deals, the missed dinners, the money that bought the good school and the bikes he never taught her to ride. He had believed it. But the truth was simpler and uglier than that. He had looked past her because looking at her was harder. Because being present cost something that money couldn't, and he had always, always found a reason to spend it somewhere else. The phone was never the thief. He was. The phone was just where he hid.
And the cruelest part, the part that turned his stomach there on the kitchen floor, was the arithmetic. If he could not save her, then the clock was no longer the thing that was going to kill his daughter. The clock was the last of her he was ever going to get. Every minute he spent clawing at a door that would not open was a minute stolen out of her arms. Fighting to save her life would cost him her life. He would reach the end of the morning having spent it, once again, on everything except her. And this time there would be no next weekend to make it up.
He could spend these hours trying to cheat a thing that could not be cheated. Or he could spend them with her.
It was the easiest, most impossible choice he had ever made.
He stood up. He took the wet towels to the sink. He took his phone off the counter. Rick, the screen still pleading, the closing, the numbers, the whole loud world that had eaten his life one urgent thing at a time. And he turned it off, and he opened the bottom drawer, the deep one with the takeout menus and the dead batteries, and he put it in there, all the way at the back, and he closed it. And then he stood for a second with his hand flat on the closed drawer, the way you'd hold a door shut against something, and he let it go.
It felt like giving up. It wasn't. Giving up was the phone. This was finally showing up, on the one morning it was almost too late to.
"Okay," he said. He turned around.
Nora was watching him from the table, her chin on her folded arms, that small careful crease still between her eyebrows. The watchful look, the one that had been quietly cataloguing his disappointments her whole short life. He was going to spend every minute he had left taking that look off her face.
"Okay what?" she said.
"Okay, go put your shoes on." His voice came out rough and he let it. "The real ones, with the laces, not the slip-ons. You can't ride a bike in slip-ons, everybody knows that."
She sat up. The crease started to go. "We're really doing the bike? You're not gonna get a call and we have to..."
"No calls," Ethan said. "No phone. No work. Not today. Today there's just you and me, kid, and a purple bike, and the whole entire morning." He crouched down and held out his hand to her, the way he should have a thousand times and hadn't. "Come on. Let's not waste it."
She looked at his open hand like it was a thing she'd been wanting for so long she'd stopped letting herself want it.
Then she took it.
And Ethan held his daughter's warm hand in his, in the morning sun, on the last day of her life, and made himself a promise he intended to keep with everything he had left: that for whatever hours remained, she would not be a problem he was managing or a guilt he was paying off or a thing he loved from across a room while looking at a screen.
She would just be his girl, and he would just be her dad, all the way, right to the end she didn't know was coming.
He would be her father. Every minute that was left.