The night is a mother who just had her second child, returning from the grocery store after buying two bananas and a stick of butter for $2.99. She’s strong and buoyant and doesn’t take anything from anyone. Quite characteristic of her long but unruly curly earthy-brown hair that she lets loose and loosen on boiling summer days. She wears sun dresses too short for judgmental mothers, jean shorts too flirtatious for men with wives, and Converse sneakers too young for a mother to wear. Mindy is 9. Lucy had her at 18. Stigma follows shadows at her feet like sunset into nightfall. No matter how quietly she tiptoes, truth prevails and secrets swept under the dark past become unhinged, self-consciousness following suit. In a way, small towns are all the same. New neighbors, new coworkers, new friends, new enemies, all people who pretend to know more than they honestly do. She works night shifts at the local diner, waitresses during the day too, and has just enough time to pick up Mindy from school. She still has a childish button nose and freckles splattered in an array of constellations on her cheeks. She’s young in a new town with too many acres of empty grass, too few people to be entertained in minding their own business, and no husband. So when she entered Moe’s grocery store, rushed and furious, it was only inevitable that she found women by the dairy fridges glaring her way, grandmas in the diaper section whispering false secrets to their husbands, and wary men facing away. 

Bananas—they are Mindy’s favorite fruit. She eats them every day no matter the time or the location. Her favorite game is telephone with her mother. Holding a banana to her ear, she whispers secret sentences as her mother tries to respond appropriately. Two of them. Two bananas left. Just enough and with some extra money for a stick of butter. But as she approached, the women in the dairy section didn’t scramble like she was the plague, like she had hoped. The funny thing was that Lucy didn’t recognize any of them, none of them she met, not the woman who blatantly pointed at her, not the one clutching a crocodile purse similar to her animalistic lips, not the one with a wide-eyed young boy next to her. Keeping her head down, shoulders hunched, she refused to cause a scene for people who didn’t know a thing about her, and she didn’t know a thing about. She wanted to get in and out, eyes fixated on the butter farthest away from them, but still she could hear their gossip. 

“How old’s her kid?” a buzzing voice mumbled lowly and decisively. 

“9, same as your boy,” someone else responded. 

“Well, you better watch out. You know what they say: like mother, like daughter.”

That was it. Lucy held her tongue and walked past with butter stick in hand, pride sunken in her vacant, protruding belly. Suddenly it was all too much. In self-checkout, she only paid for the butter, thieving unpaid bananas, and ran out while clutching a receipt in hand that read $2.99 and today’s date, June 18th, which would’ve been your daughter’s birthday, Drew. It’s been three months since you’ve been gone, but it doesn’t get any easier; in fact, it’s gotten even harder. Because you’re not here and the baby isn’t here and there’s no explanation for Mindy, no tangible reason to justify this “why me” sliced at our throats. No explanation for a 9-year-old who was told her sister was growing in Mommy’s tummy. No explanation for a 9-year-old who felt the kicks of her sister thumping against her hand as her mother told her she was saying I love you. And now her stomach is silent. There is no sister. There is no father. There’s a daughter, a mother, and a grandmother, the last ones standing. 

Lucy collapsed one hand to a telephone pole and one hand on her belly, devoid of a baby who will never meet you. She cracked on the sidewalk, the way a hurricane dreads, swift and catastrophic, teetering and final. It’s the way she viewed her pregnancy, as a storm of acceptance, a battle of recovery, and a happy ending of blessing. And maybe she had some losses, surrendered her sword one too many times, but she’d won the war because a piece of you is within her. Was within her. 

But now there is a point where nothing is the same. There’s a before, and there’s an after, and there’s you. You, Drew, who is probably with the baby now, naming her Lucy, and rocking her to the lullabies of clouds, blues, and heaven. And we are on earth, and we need you. You’re the one thing Mindy wants and the only thing Lucy can’t give her. So help us, would you? A grandmother and a mother can only do so much for a child, let alone two. Don’t get me wrong, she’s happy or at least content. I give all my love to Lucy; she gives all her love to Mindy; we both do our best. So do your best Drew, send a miracle. Visit Mindy’s dreams again tonight, tell her you have the baby now. Please? It’s been a while, and it’s all she wants. It’s what she whispers to her mother through their banana phones. Bring Daddy back. I want him back.