“Mom,” he says again. “When’s Dad going back to work? I mean, going on the road.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

Eli keeps his eyes on the water. “It’s just weird having him home all the time. I like it better when it’s just us.”

I lean closer. Lower my voice. I know I shouldn’t say this, but I do anyway. “Don’t tell your dad, but so do I.”

“If I don’t go to college, you wouldn’t need so much money, right?”

“I told you not to worry about that. If you don’t want to go to college because you don’t want to go, we can talk about that, but I don’t want you to think you can’t go. Okay? I will always make sure you get what you need, Eli.”

“I don’t need you to stay with him,” Eli says. “If you’re not happy.”

I don’t know how to answer that.

He bends to find a few rocks and tries to skip them. One skips three times before vanishing beneath the water, and he turns to me with a grin so beautiful I want to cry. I let myself drink in the sight of him.

I was never one of those women who yearned for a child. I didn’t babysit for extra money in high school. I didn’t offer to take care of younger cousins at family parties. The idea of growing something inside my body, like a literal parasite, always repulsed me.

Ken was the one who wanted a child. I’d told him from the start I wasn’t interested in parenthood. I didn’t tell him about the abortion I’d had my senior year of high school, or the fact I’d asked my doctor every year since if I could finally get a hysterectomy. If I had cancer, they’d take out everything, but merely deciding for myself how I wanted to use my own body? Forget about it. Some vague shape of a potential father to my unborn children might want me to bear them, and I was told I had to honor that.

While sitting shiva for my mother, I stepped with a bare foot on some broken glass from a dropped casserole plate in her Florida kitchen. The wound got infected, and I was on antibiotics. I was grieving and careless and not surprised when my period was late.

I peed on a stick. Nine-ish months later, Eli was born. Ken had his son, and due to some birthing complications, I had my hysterectomy.

Oh, you hear those stories all the time, about how you look into your newborn’s eyes and everything centers around that child for the rest of your life. It wasn’t like that for me. I held the squalling, writhing bundle of him in my arms in that hospital bed and could think only, Put it back. Or put it anywhere but back. Anywhere but here.

We went home. Ken returned to work within days of our return, traveling for days on end. He’d wanted to be a father, but not to change diapers or do the midnight feedings or comfort a screaming child who can’t be soothed. Eli and I were alone.