“No.” Nora took her daughter's hand. “I am sick. But I'm here now, and they're checking what I need. I'll tell you what they tell me in words we both understand.”
Maisie nodded.
Her mother glanced toward the curtain.
“Is he still here?”
“Arthur?”
“Yes.”
“He's sitting weird in the waiting room.”
Despite everything, Nora laughed.
“How do you sit weird?”
“Like he thinks somebody might ask for the chair back.”
Nora looked at the ceiling for a moment.
Then she said, “Ask him to come in. June too.”
Arthur stopped just inside the curtain. He seemed absurdly large beside the narrow bed, though he was not a particularly large man.
Nora pointed at the other chair.
“Sit.”
He did.
“I don't know who you are to me,” she said.
“I know.”
“And I can't work that out while Maisie is worried about where she sleeps tonight.”
June spoke first.
“She can stay with me if you'd like. You know my address. Felicia can vouch for my disastrous housekeeping.”
Nora nodded, relief making her look briefly older.
“I'd like that.”
Arthur said, “I can help with anything practical. Food. Transport. No conditions.”
Nora closed her eyes.
“What happens if a test says you're not my father?”
He did not answer immediately.
Then he said, “You would still be ill. Maisie would still need to eat. Nothing about that part changes.”
Nora opened her eyes.
For the first time, she looked at him without preparing to defend herself.
“All right,” she said. “Groceries. For tonight.”
Arthur nodded as if she had entrusted him with something more valuable than the entire envelope.
Maisie looked at him closely.
“Not the cheap peanut butter,” she said.
Everyone turned.
“The kind with the blue lid. Mom likes that one.”
Arthur took out his phone and began a list.
“The blue lid,” he repeated.
Only then did Maisie begin to believe lunch might not have been a trick.
That evening, June drove Maisie home to collect pajamas, a toothbrush, and the stuffed rabbit she would insist she did not need until the car was already moving. Arthur followed in his own car with grocery bags on the back seat.
The Parkers' apartment occupied the rear half of an old house on Mill Street. A narrow porch held two plant pots, one empty, one containing a determined patch of mint. Inside, a sewing machine stood by the window. Fabric samples hung from a string across the wall, arranged by color. The kitchen was clean in the way kitchens became when there was very little inside them to make a mess.
Arthur set the bags on the counter.
He did not open cupboards without asking.
Maisie showed him where the bread went. June put perishables in the refrigerator. Nobody commented on the single bottle of mustard, the wrapped half onion, or the water pitcher Nora kept full because a full refrigerator looked better through a child's eyes.
But Arthur saw them.
He saw the pill bottles beside the tea. The rent notice held down by a spool of thread. A school photograph of Maisie with one front tooth missing, framed in cardboard decorated with yellow stars.
He had spent years walking through hotel rooms larger than this kitchen.
The fact did not make him generous.
It made him ashamed of how easily a person could become accustomed to room.
Maisie came out of the bedroom with a backpack and the rabbit tucked under one arm.
“His name is Walter,” she said defensively.
“Good name,” Arthur answered.
“He's not for sleeping. He's just been places.”
“I understand.”
She looked at the groceries.
There were strawberries.
She stared at the clear plastic box so long Arthur followed her gaze.
“Was that wrong?” he asked.
Maisie shook her head.
“No.”
“Good.”
She put the box in the refrigerator herself.
Then she took it out again and handed it to June.
“Can we bring some to Mom tomorrow?”
June nodded.
“Of course.”
After they left, Arthur stood for a moment on the little porch before walking to his car. Inside, the sewing machine waited beside the window. The apartment was quiet. A child's pink helmet hung from a hook beside the door, its strap repaired with a neat line of stitches.
He looked up at the sky.
For thirty-four years, he had imagined a child growing up somewhere beyond his reach.
He had imagined anger. Rejection. A different country. A life in which his absence had been chosen by everyone but him.
He had not imagined an empty refrigerator twenty minutes from the house where his mother had died with three freezers full of food.