Winter + Spring by NR
In spring things were different and Patty was mostly glad about it. Lyle stopped calling him in the middle of the night to tell him he was sorry, stopped sending him sad, meager emails with pictures of his baby son captioned by apologies. In the last one, the child was wearing ears like an Easter Bunny. Someone, probably Erica, had typed “Dawson wishes every-bunny a very happy Easter!” in light pink letters across his little body. Underneath, Lyle had written: “Hey mate. Hope you’re well. Here’s Dawson for you, gotta dress him up while we still can. I know you’ve heard it before, but I’m so sorry about all this.” In the beginning, Patty had enjoyed receiving photos of Dawson, because he had been small enough that it wasn’t possible to see Lyle’s features on his face. He could still imagine what the baby would have looked like if it had been his baby with Erica, as it should have been, and him sending out the emails. Now he was old enough that there was no doubt he was Lyle’s, with his staticky tuft of red hair and weak round chin. In his meaner moments, Patty wondered how Erica could find Lyle attractive after seeing his features so plainly laid out on the face of a baby.
There were traces of Erica in the baby, too, which Patty found it harder to look at for too long. He never knew what people meant when they said babies had the same eyes as their parents until he saw this baby’s eyes.
When June and July passed without more pictures of the baby or calls from Lyle, Patty found him self searching up Lyle’s name in his email, looking at the old pictures he’d sent without scrolling down far enough to read the captions. He really was a cute baby, especially the way Erica dressed him up, like a girl playing with dolls almost. (He remembered, from a visit to her parent’s house when they were still together, a wall lined with expensively dressed dolls with fine hair and features, and Emily’s face, red but a little bit proud, as Patty listened to her mother exclaiming at them.)
He saw the baby in person just once, when he was at the grocery store picking up some cream cheese for the week ahead, to eat on his bagels. It took him a while to notice them at the end of the dairy aisle, looking at yogurts. Erica held the baby on her hip, and his little hands were pulling at her hair, grasping it and staring it and then letting it go like it was some kind of miraculous object he’d never seen before. Lyle had the cart. From behind, they looked so clearly happy that Patty didn’t even want to run out of the store, he just went ahead to the register and paid before they ever saw him.
NR is a college senior from Washington, DC.
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