"You don't even know how to warm a bottle."
I sighed.
My neighbor knelt beside me. I was thinking she was probably right when the smallest baby reached up, blind and searching, and her fist closed around my index finger. It was tiny, warm, and strong in a way that didn't make any sense for a six-month-old.
I didn't move. I couldn't.
I was thinking she was probably right.
"That's June," Mrs. Hunter said quietly. "Patricia made sure we'd know how to tell them apart. Said the smallest one would always be June."
"June," I repeated, saying the name as if I were testing whether my mouth still worked.
Baby June kept holding on. She didn't know I had no money, had never changed a diaper, or that her father had abandoned them. She just knew someone was there.
"I'll call social services in the morning," my neighbor said gently. "There are good families, Noah. Ready people."
Baby June kept holding on.
I opened my mouth to agree. I really did.
"Okay," I whispered instead, but I was looking at June. "Okay. Okay, I've got you."
Mrs. Hunter went quiet. The porch light flickered again.
I carried them inside one at a time, and somewhere between the second trip and the third, I stopped being Uncle Noah and started being something I didn't have a word for yet.
I became Uncle Noah, then Dad, by accident.
"Okay, I've got you."
***
Twenty-two years went by, the way a long shift does: slow in the middle, gone by the end.
I packed lunches with the wrong kind of bread. I braided their hair so badly that, before school, Mrs. Hunter would fix it on the porch.
"You're going to give those girls complexes, Noah," my neighbor said once, pulling a brush through Ava's tangles.
"I'm doing my best."
"I know you are. That's the problem!" she teased.
"I'm doing my best."
***
I worked double shifts at the hardware store. Then, triple shifts when one of the children needed braces, a science fair board, or new sneakers because the old ones suddenly fit nobody.
There were science fairs and fevers I sat through. Broken hearts, I didn't know how to fix, so I just made grilled cheese and let them cry on the couch.
Three separate phases, when all three of them hated me at once. June, at 13, slamming doors. Claire, at 15, refused to look at me for a month. And Ava, at 17, told me I didn't understand anything.
I didn't. But I stayed.
I just made grilled cheese.
***
I missed things, too.
A cousin's wedding in Denver because Claire had the flu.
A fishing vacation I'd promised myself for 10 years.
The chance to have a family of my own.
And Diana, the woman I love.
Diana was patient for a long time. Longer than she should've been.
I missed things, too.
