43.

My life and Ian’s in the shitter, I drowned myself in crochet. I brought it with me everywhere—on the subway to Ian’s doctor; to coffee with Mom, where it calmed me as she told me things were heating up with Alex the married guy; to the park, looping and twirling while Ian stared at the branches over us. I’d grab it whenever Ian slept, and when he woke up, I’d do just a few more stitches. Sometimes I’d push it, listening as his sharp cries changed to long, low growls. Just a few more stitches. I’d pick him up and he’d scream into my ear, showing me how mad he was, and I’d mash his cheek against mine and beg forgiveness.

It had taken two days to finish the first teal and royal-blue zigzagged bikini. I crocheted from six a.m. Thursday until two a.m. Friday, stopping only to put Ian on the boob for ten minutes a side. When he wasn’t nursing, he lay next to me in a nest of blankets I constructed to help him sleep. On Friday I started again at nine a.m. and went until midnight. By midnight my eyeballs were swollen and frozen in their sockets and my index finger felt like a burnt twig. But Saturday morning I started right in on the second one.

The second bikini had the hardest design—a red, orange and yellow sunburst pattern. It took me almost five days of nonstop crocheting to finish it, and I was feeling so good about it, I thought for sure Will would call before I finished to say he hadn’t been thinking straight. He didn’t.

The third bikini’s pattern was almost identical to the bikini I had when I was six, and as I cast on the first few chains of green, I pulled out the original photo of me, in glorious red, white and blue, that I’d kept in an envelope. I looked at my Mona Lisa–smiling face in the photo and remembered how miserable I was after that fight Mom and Dad had had in the middle of the night, and how hard it had been to smile for my grandmother, who was snapping photo after photo of me on the beach. How long after that had they gotten divorced? Six long years. I did the first row and all the slipknots, remembering the day I found out.

“You know, I was thinking,” Mom had said, standing in my doorway, “last night when I picked you up from Kyra’s and you were running down the hallway to the elevator … your pants are too short. Your ankles are starting to show again.” She’d sat on my bed and examined a chicken pox scab healing on my cheek. “When did I take you to that horrible place for jeans? September, when school started. And already they’re getting too short.”

“I don’t want new ones,” I’d said. She always started an argument with me as I was just waking up.

“Sweetheart, you look like Twiggy.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Let’s just get you a couple more pairs and you can at least alternate. Wherever you want. Your choice. We’ll get some breakfast first.”

“Daddy too?” I’d asked.

“He’s got errands,” she’d said. “Just us.”

I don’t remember what I had. It was gray and windy and there were puffed-up plastic bags in the tree outside our booth window. Mom brought the paper and she read it while we fought about letting me go to some movie that she didn’t want me to see. Then we went to an army-navy store, where I got a pair of black corduroys.

“How about we go look for dresses for Aunt Cecilia’s wedding?” she’d offered. Her face was bright but tense, the way some people looked after snorting cocaine.

“It’s not till July,” I’d said. A strange, open-ended feeling had started taking over the day.

“We don’t need to buy,” she’d said. “Just look and think.”

So we went to Barneys. We walked around the second floor and Mom picked up sleeves of black jackets and long-sleeved shirts and dropped them. She tried on a pair of brown suede boots.

“Let’s get a coffee, shall we?” she’d asked. “Are you hungry again? I love the café next door. Let’s go.”

It was starting to fill up for lunch and we sat down at the last free table.

“Aren’t we lucky,” she’d said, straightening her place mat.

It was one of the few times in my life I remember her sitting still. She held the menu up to her face and read it for a long time. Then she put it down.

“Thea, there’s something I need to speak with you about.”

“What?”

“It’s about your father and me.”

She called him “your father” instead of “Daddy” and I knew right away. She went back to calling him Daddy again after they got divorced. She still calls him Daddy and he still calls her Mom when they’re with me.

When we got home to our lobby, Dad was talking to Tom, the doorman. He was standing with a suitcase between his legs, the same way he stood when he waited for the elevator. He turned around and looked at me, all of a sudden a stranger.

As I started to cry, Mom asked Tom if the mail had come, and Dad hugged me, not saying anything. I thought about how good everything had been since he’d stopped drinking. How he’d helped me do my homework and made popcorn in the lobster pot and did crosswords under the black lamp. Every single night he was Dad instead of the sleepy-eyed, drunk imposter who’d come home late from work and fling his arms around in the air whenever he said anything. But for some reason that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out, the fact that he’d finally quit made no difference to Mom.

“Where are you going?” I’d asked.

“I’ll be close by,” he’d answered, and as I looked at his face, I thought I could see disappointment as big as mine.

Ian stirred and scrunched his face next to me, burrowing his head into my leg. I put down the crochet hook and picked him up as he opened his eyes. The questions that had plagued me since I’d left Florence’s crowded the air around his head: Did he know Will was gone? Did he miss him? Would I be able to love him enough to make up for not having a dad? I kissed him and held him, letting his warm cheek sink into my neck. It was all I could do.