Page 126 of All In
His hand slid around the back of my head and his forehead pressed mine. We didn’t cry. We breathed a shared, shaky breath as twenty years let go of my heart like fists unclenching.
Dad clapped my shoulders and cleared his throat. “Talk is cheap,” he said. “Let’s do this. Get it done before I chicken out, as the kids like to say.”
He waited as I sat in my rolling chair at my desk, transferring mine and Jonah’s names to the stencil paper. He eyed me as I set a needle in the barrel of my tattoo machine.
“It’s going to hurt, isn’t it? I might only get through one name tonight.”
“You can handle it,” I said, grinning and set his elbow on the arm of the chair. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
Just as I readied the needle above his skin, he put his hand on my wrist. “Wait.”
I looked up. “Yeah?”
He smiled, patted my cheek like he hadn’t done since I was a kid. “Do your name first.”
“Jesus, Dad, you’re killing me.” I had to laugh as I sucked in a breath, let it out slowly until my hands were steady. I bent my head over his arm, holding it gently but firmly. The rotor buzzed. The needle went to work. I watched, almost as if from afar as my name appeared on his skin, imbedded there forever in black ink.
Then Jonah’s name appeared under my gloved hands, to the side and above mine. When I finished, I held up a mirror to show him. “See. You’re tougher than you thought.”
He stared at the image of his sons’ names in the fonts he’d chosen.
It was one of the best things I’d ever inked. My brother and I on our father’s skin.
Forever.
My dad stared too long, his face unreadable.
He hates it. He hates that I did that to him, and it’s too fucking late now. Permanent.
I rubbed the back of my neck. “Well?”
“It’s perfect,” Dad said hoarsely. He caught sight of his reflection, and the tears welling in his eyes. He coughed, shot me a stern look. “Stings like a son of a bitch, though.”
I gave him his look right back. “Good.”
His eyes widened. For a moment he stared at me, agape. Then a bellowing laugh burst from him, warm and rich, and it filled my shop and every last empty space in it.
EPILOGUE II
Three years later
The weather in Pittsburgh is hot and sticky at the late end of August. I feel the humidity wrap around me the second I lug my six-month pregnant body out of the rental car and into the parking lot behind Carnegie Mellon’s University Center. Theo unstraps our fourteen-month-old daughter from her car seat in the back.
“Stroller?” I ask.
“Nah, I got her.”
Theo doesn’t like using the stroller. He prefers to hold Frannie as much as possible. He settles her into the crook of his arm, his tattoos stark against the teddy bear pants my mom sent us. She sends Frannie something at least once a month. Through her granddaughter, she’s coming back to me, slowly. Little by little, day by day.
We stroll across the Carnegie Mellon campus. The walkways are less crowded in summer. Only a few students cross our path as we make our way to the University Center.
We pass through a little grove of oak trees, their boughs shading little wrought iron tables and chairs. I smile, as I always do, when I see the placard naming the grove:Legacy Plaza.Theo meets my eye and smiles too.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe in coincidences.
Frannie looks around with mild curiosity. Her light brown eyes—the same as her father’s—catch a squirrel spiraling up a tree trunk. She has one pudgy fist crammed against her mouth. Her hair—brown and curling like her uncle’s was—falls around her face, rounding it out even more. She’s a calm, happy baby. She hardly ever fusses, and I can count on one hand the meltdowns she’s had since officially becoming a toddler. I wonder if she remembers the trip we made here last year. She was only a few months old, still part of me likes to think she was aware of everything.
