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I thought bringing Adele home would be the beginning of a beautiful new chapter for our family. I never imagined that a whispered conversation in the middle of the night would expose the truth behind it all.
The couch was buried under a mountain of warm laundry. I folded the same pair of jeans for the third time because my mind kept drifting. The dishwasher hummed the way it did every night around 10.
Upstairs, James, six, and Miranda, four, were finally asleep, which meant the house was mine for maybe an hour.
I’m Mary. Forty-two, married for 15 years, with two kids.
My mind kept drifting.
Harold came in from the garage.
He’d been out there again, on his phone, which was becoming a habit I hadn’t decided how to feel about yet.
My husband sat next to me on the couch and didn’t reach for the remote. That’s how I knew something was coming.
“Mary,” he said. “I want to talk to you about something.”
“If it’s the water heater, I already called about it.”
He’d been out there again.
“It’s not the water heater.” Harold put his hand on my knee. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I want us to adopt a child.”
I stopped folding. I looked at him as if he’d started speaking Portuguese.
“Harold, we already have two children of our own. It’s a wonderful idea, but we have a mortgage and a car payment. James needs braces next year. Miranda outgrows her shoes every three months.”
“I know all of that.”
“I want us to adopt a child.”
“Then what are you saying?”
My husband didn’t answer right away.
He looked at the folded shirts, at the ceiling, at his own hands. Anywhere but at me.
“I’ve always dreamed of giving a child a real home,” he finally said. “A family. Someone who wouldn’t have one otherwise. I feel it, Mary. I feel it strongly right now.”
“Why right now?”
“I feel it strongly right now.”
“I don’t know. Maybe Ray dying made me think.”
Ray was Harold’s college friend. He had a heart attack last spring and was gone before the ambulance made it up the driveway.
My husband had been quieter since, and I’d let him be, because that’s what you do for the person you’ve slept next to for 15 years.
“Honey,” I said gently. “That’s grief talking.”
He had a heart attack last spring.
“Maybe. But it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like something I’m supposed to do.”
I set the jeans down. I studied his face.
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