11 October 2026
On Sunday morning Willa wanted to know whether her father knew her favorite color.
“I don’t think I told him,” Maren said.
“Did you tell him my name?”
“Yes.”
“And the birthday?”
“Yes.”
“You should have told him green.”
Maren looked down at the three sweaters she had put on the bed. She had never had difficulty dressing for the park before. One was too nice, one too shabby, and the third was precisely the ordinary navy sweater it had always been. She picked that one up.
She had told Willa last night that she’d spoken to her father and he wanted to meet her. Willa had asked whether she could take the wooden-spoon princess and then demanded another chapter of her bedtime story. Maren had almost asked a second question to make sure she understood, before recognizing her own wish to be given a comforting answer.
Now her daughter sat on the bed swinging her heels against the blanket.
“Do I have to call him Father?”
“You can call him Blake if you want.”
“I don’t call you Maren.”
“No.”
“Except when you’re not listening.”
Maren sat beside her, sweater in her lap. “You don’t have to decide a special name today. You don’t have to meet him today either. We said we’d ask each other again in the morning.”
Willa looked toward the window. She had a little dry patch at the corner of her mouth from licking it when she concentrated. Maren reached to smooth her hair and stopped herself halfway, changing the movement into a tug at her own sleeve.
“Is he still cross with you?”
“Yes, I think he is.”
“Will he say it?”
“Not at the park. That’s something we talk about by ourselves.”
Willa nodded, accepting an ordinary adult conversation she didn’t have to sit inside.
“He wasn’t cross because of me?”
“No. Because I didn’t tell him. Nothing you did.”
“I wasn’t even there.”
“You weren’t.”
That seemed to settle it more effectively than any of the explanations Maren had prepared. Willa slid off the bed and found her leggings in the heap she had been told to put away yesterday.
“I want the park with the low wall,” she said. “Not the one with the big slide.”
“The low wall. I told him that’s where we’d be.”
“And you stay.”
“I stay.”
“Even if I go on the swings.”
“Even then.”
Willa picked up the princess, whose tea-towel skirt now had a green paper apron. “She needs a coat.”
“We could wrap her in a sock.”
“That’s her rabbit.”
“Of course. My mistake.”
They found an old scarf, cut a small rectangle from its fraying end, and tied it around the spoon. Maren let Willa make the knot, although she pulled it so hard the princess appeared to have no neck. Getting ready took twenty more minutes. By the time they left, Maren had stopped wondering what Blake would think of her sweater and started worrying that they would be late.
He was already there, on the bench by the low wall, with a large rectangular box at his feet.
Maren saw the box first. Silver paper, green ribbon, a bag with the name of an expensive toy shop. She hadn’t forbidden presents. She reminded herself of this while something hot and unreasonable rose beneath her coat. He had been a father for forty-eight hours and had already arrived carrying more than she’d planned to spend on Willa’s birthday.
Then she saw how he was sitting: forward on the bench, both hands clasped between his knees, looking up at every adult and child who approached.
Willa saw him a moment later.
“That one?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
Her daughter slowed. Maren matched her pace rather than pulling her forward. They had told him noon. They didn’t owe the last twenty feet any particular speed.
Blake stood. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again.
“Hello, Willa.”
She moved behind Maren’s arm, not quite hiding.
“Hello,” she said to the ground.
He looked at Maren. She had an impulse to fill the silence: say what Willa had eaten, introduce the princess, direct his eye toward the thing he could use to make this easy. She kept her hand loose beside her instead.
“I’m Blake,” he said.
“I know.”
“Yes. Of course.”
There was a beat in which all three of them seemed to be waiting for a fourth person who knew how this should go.
Willa looked at the box.
“Is that for me?”
“It is.” He bent to pick it up. “Your mother said you liked puppets. This one has a stage that lights up. You can record the voices.”
“It’s big.”
“We can open it here, if you like.”
She glanced at Maren, who nodded. The permission wasn’t for the present; it was reassurance that nothing bad happened if she wanted it.
Blake sat at one end of the bench. Willa sat at the other, closer to Maren, and tugged at the ribbon. It had been tied decoratively with a wire Maren could see would resist small fingers. Blake offered to help. Willa shook her head and persisted until it gave way abruptly.
The paper tore, revealing a box covered in bright photographs. The theater could make lightning. There were recorded applause effects. One picture showed three smiling children standing in a row, exactly where a photograph wanted them.
“Where are the people?” Willa asked.
Blake pointed to the side panel. “You use your own puppets.”
She looked mildly disappointed, then became interested in a loose piece of silver paper. She crumpled it into a ball and held it against the princess.
“Now she’s got a baby.”
“A very shiny baby,” he said.
“It’s a dragon egg.”
“Ah. Right.”
He tried to follow. Maren watched the effort appear on his face, watched him offer a line about a knight that Willa ignored because the princess was a doctor now. The present stayed between them, too large for the bench. Maren wanted to move it out of the way and refused to turn that practical impulse into a verdict about the whole meeting.
“Would you like to try the lights?” he asked.
“Later.”
The disappointment in his face was brief but real. He covered it with a smile too quickly, and Willa grew quieter. Maren recognized that sequence. She had once rushed to reward him for wanting to make her happy.
“We can leave the box closed for now,” she said, more to him than to Willa.
Blake put it on the ground.
“All right. Show me the egg.”
Willa held it toward him. “Don’t squeeze it.”
“I won’t.”
Maren moved to the other side of the low wall, close enough to hear but no longer between them. She sat with her back against the cold stone. Her body didn’t believe this was a small, planned meeting. Her chest felt squeezed, every breath shorter than it ought to be.
She watched a dog inspect a leaf. Watched a boy give up his scooter to a smaller child with agonizing reluctance. Blake asked whether Willa liked school, and got an uninformative yes. He asked about her favorite subject and received a longer account of somebody taking her green pencil.
“Did you get it back?”
“It wasn’t mine after all.”
“Oh.”
“Mine was under my sleeve.”
He laughed. It was a real laugh, and Willa glanced at him to see whether it was safe to share. Then her mouth widened. Maren turned her face away, suddenly unable to watch.
There was a whole possible relationship in that little exchange. Not a good one yet, not a reliable one, simply something neither adult could manufacture by talking about what ought to happen. Maren had withheld the possibility along with everything else.
She pressed her palms against the wall until the roughness steadied her.
After twenty minutes Willa wanted the swings. Blake looked at Maren, who nodded and stood. They walked together. Willa took her mother’s hand. Maren saw Blake notice and had to resist the urge to make that fair.
At the swing Willa said she could start herself, then struggled to get her boot through. Blake reached toward the chain. She jerked back.
“I do it.”
He let go at once.
“Sorry.”
Maren helped only when Willa asked. She could have explained the routine to him in advance. Instead he stood beside the neighboring swing, learning the unremarkable fact that knowing a child’s age did not tell you how she wanted to climb into a seat.
“You don’t look like your picture,” Willa told him once she was moving.
“Which picture?”
“The work one. Your hair’s flatter.”
Blake touched his head. “I think someone put things in it for that photograph.”
“Like glue?”
“Probably.”
She considered this, pumping her legs. “Mummy gets glue on her face.”
“Only on important occasions,” Maren said.
Willa laughed and leaned back to look at the sky. Blake’s gaze met Maren’s, and for a moment something old moved between them: the simple shared pleasure of a child doing something funny.
It wasn’t desire. The distinction came without effort. She could remember being in love with him and still feel no wish to return to the woman who had wanted him to stay.
He looked back at Willa.
At thirty minutes Maren asked whether she wanted to walk home. Willa said two more swings, which meant a number she would invent on arrival. They agreed on ten pushes instead. Blake counted them, cautiously at first, then in a ridiculous official voice when she told him counting was boring.
Willa smiled. At ten she demanded one more. He looked at Maren again. She made no ruling.
“One,” he said. “A very small one.”
“That wasn’t small.”
“Then you’ll have to complain to the management.”
“That’s you.”
“Oh dear.”
Maren smiled despite the ache inside her coat.
He offered to carry the present home. Maren said she’d manage it, and Willa immediately said she was tired. The practical absurdity of the box made all three of them laugh awkwardly. In the end Maren folded the shopping bag around it and used its handles.
At the park gate Blake crouched, leaving space between himself and Willa.
“Thank you for meeting me.”
She studied the top of his head.
“Did you like it?” she asked.
He swallowed. “Very much.”
“Even though we didn’t do the lights?”
“Yes.”
That answer seemed to matter. She leaned against Maren’s leg, thinking.
“Could I show you the dragon when it comes out?”
“I’d like that.”
“It might not be today.”
“That’s all right.”
He stood. Maren told him quietly that they could arrange a short call in the week, after she’d checked with Willa. He didn’t try to turn it into a whole afternoon. She saw how much he wanted to ask for more and was grateful he didn’t make their daughter refuse it.
They said goodbye without a hug. Willa waved the princess instead.
Half a block from the park, she asked, “When can we see him again?”
“We’ll talk about it. He’d like to call you if you want.”
“Today?”
“Another day. We just saw him.”
“I know that.”
Maren adjusted the bag. The box hit her knee.
“How did you feel about it?”
“My foot hurts.”
“Willa.”
“I don’t want to talk about him now.”
“All right.”
They walked another street. Willa stopped to pull a pebble from her shoe, then forgot she was tired and hopped over the joins in the pavement. Maren carried the theater and the princess, whose dragon egg was now wedged inside the scarf.
At home they unpacked the theater, found batteries that didn’t fit, ate toast, and eventually located the right size at the back of the drawer. The lights were impressive. Willa pressed the thunder button six times in succession, then abandoned the stage to put the silver egg inside a mug.
“It needs quiet,” she said.
Maren left it on the counter. She didn’t put the new theater away.
Before the cartoon, Willa fetched the old atlas from the bottom shelf. It was a book Maren had bought secondhand because she liked the colors, long before she needed to explain where a father had been.
“Where’s Singapore?” Willa asked.
Maren opened the right page and showed her. Her daughter put one finger on the small printed name, obscuring the place entirely.
“There?”
“There.”
“That’s very far.”
“It is.”
“Was he by himself?”
“No. He lived with someone called Joanna. They’re still together.”
“Does she have a rabbit?”
“I don’t know.”
Willa looked faintly disappointed by how many important details her mother failed to possess. Maren almost promised to find out, then stopped. There was somebody else Willa could ask now.
“You could ask him when you speak,” she said.
“He might not know if she keeps it somewhere.”
“That’s possible.”
Willa traced a path across the ocean with her nail, stopping at the crease in the page. “Did he come on a boat?”
“A plane.”
“Good. It would take forever.”
She closed the book with a thud and left it facedown on the floor. Maren picked it up, ready to return it to the shelf. Then she put it beside the sofa instead.
She’d thought about the questions Willa would ask concerning the two of them, her mother and her father, and failed to imagine all the questions that concerned him alone. A place he’d lived. A person he knew. Whether there were rabbits.
Her daughter had gone to wash jam from her fingers. Maren sat for a moment beside the atlas, trying to leave those unknown things unknown until Willa could ask for herself.
While Willa watched a cartoon, Maren stood at the sink and read Blake’s message.
Thank you. I don’t mean for the last seven years. For today.
She set the phone down. She could live with a thank-you that didn’t forgive her. She could perhaps learn not to turn every piece of his anger into an instruction to take the whole thing back.
Her gaze landed on the crooked swan from yesterday, standing on the shelf above the table where she’d put it out of Willa’s reach. Its hostile beak pointed at the unopened packet of wheel pasta.
For a second she remembered Simon burning his fingers on a dumpling. The warmth of it surprised her, arriving in a day she had thought entirely occupied.
She took a photograph of the swan and sent it to him.
Still terrible.
His reply came several minutes later.
Mine has developed a superiority problem. Yours may be the better bird.
Maren laughed softly. From the sofa Willa asked what was funny.
“A friend from work.”
“Is it the bird?”
“Yes.”
“It needs a pond.”
Maren put the phone down and went to find a blue plate.