I don’t know if he wants what I want, but I know this—I haven’t told him that nearly everything I said to him that day at IKEA has changed.
I no longer want to be me against the world.
I no longer want to never settle down.
I no longer want to avoid love.
And I haven’t told him, either, that this—us—does feel like the right place at the right time, and with the right person too.
Maybe I’ve been seeing everything the wrong way.
Maybe wanting the same things isn’t about more kids.
Maybe it’s about commitment. About being a family.
In a burst of clarity, I wonder if I’ve been wrong about what he wants all along.
If I’ve been guessing.
And if maybe what he wants is precisely the thing that I can give him.
A promise that I could be his person.
28
Liam
Ethan wakes me up early on Saturday, like it’s Christmas morning.
He tugs my shirt. “Can we go now?”
Yawning, I flip onto my side. “Give a man a Saturday morning lie-in, would you?”
“You’re zero fun.”
“That is true.”
But a cup of English breakfast, a shower, and a shave later, we’re at the animal shelter.
He’s bouncing, brimming with more energy than I’ve ever seen in him. He checks out nearly every dog. A beagle named Roxy, a golden retriever mix named Gecko, and some kind of white fluffy mutt named Button.
At the end of the next row of kennels, he stops cold, and in a hushed whisper, he says, “Look!”
I follow his gesture to see a min pin dachshund at the back of a cage, cowering in the corner, shaking.
Ethan runs to her. I follow. He beckons me to come even closer, pointing at the brown-and-tan dog with the bat ears and big eyes. “Oh, Dad, look at her. She’s so cute and so scared.”
“She’s absolutely adorable.”
He stares at her a little longer, then turns to me. “Can we get her?”
I blink, surprised. “She doesn’t seem like the type of dog you’d want. She’s not a border collie mix or a shepherd mix like Katrina. I thought that was what you wanted?”
He shakes his head adamantly, pointing to the pooch in the corner, all ten pounds of her by the looks of it. “I want that dog,” he says, and it’s the most earnest, honest thing anyone has ever said in the history of the world.
He sweeps his gaze back to me, his eyes big and blue and vulnerable. “She’s just sitting in the corner, and she’s shaking, and she looks sad. Just look at her.”
She does look sad. She also looks like she needs a home. I take a look at the index card describing her. She’s two and a half.
The woman who runs the rescue walks by, dreadlocks in her hair. She stops and flashes us a warm smile, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “I see you’ve met Ruby. She’s a sweetheart. She’s an owner surrender. Just came in the other day.”
Owner surrenders can mean a number of things, from someone who was evicted to someone who didn’t want the dog anymore, from sickness to behavior problems. “Is there any particular reason she was a surrender?”
The woman’s expression shifts into a sad smile. “The man who had her went into hospice, so we took his dog.”
My heart winces like someone has just tightened it with a rope, knotting it into the smallest shape possible.
“Dad. Can we give her a home?”
I look at the dog again—this sweet, sad animal who no longer has a person, who probably wants a person more than anything, who wants love and a home.
Isn’t that all anyone wants?
That’s what I’ve given my son.
That’s why he’s thrived, why he’s happy.
And why I am too.
Just like that, the glass fills up.
There is no longer a rope around my heart. Everything in it makes sense.
My eyes well with a sheen of tears. One slides down my cheek. Ethan must notice because he grabs my hand, squeezes it, and sets his head against my side. I wipe away the rebel tear.
The woman says in a soft voice, “He was very good to her. He loved her very much.”
That doesn’t do anything to help with the leaking eyeballs. I try to hold back the onslaught of emotions as I think about my son’s mother and how much she must have loved Ethan for him to come to me so full of love already.
Instead of tightening, my heart grows bigger. It swells like it needs more room, like it needs to run across the room, fling open the window, and let in more sunlight.
Ethan pleads one more time. “Can we get her, please? She needs us.”
One more peek at the sweet, scared little min pin dachshund, and I am certain his words are the only ones that matter. “She does need us.”
The woman steps into the kennel, picks up the nervous dog, and carries her to us as we sit on a bench.
