“Oh, I, uh…” What do you say? “I’m sorry to hear that,” I finally eked out.
“Just means I got rid of her early. I told her to stop drinking and getting high, so she got pissed and left. Good riddance.” I nodded. The train rocked back and forth. Then, quietly, he said, “It’s hard being a single father, though.” On cue, the baby woke up and started crying. “But I wouldn’t give her up for nothin.’ She’s my heart,” he said, digging through his bag for a bottle of formula.
Boh took notice. “Where is her mother, man? Her mother should be feeding her,” she said. He told her. She paused, in disbelief, then asked me, or no one in particular, if he was joking. “He’s kidding,” she insisted. I made a face, a sort of shrug. “Oh, he’s got to be joking. No mother can leave her baby like that. He’s kidding. Where is she?”
He said he wasn’t joking. I made another face. The woman next to me started shaking her head. Boh stared at him holding the bottle to the baby’s mouth, then said, “Oh, Lord, you’re not joking. I didn’t think any mother could leave her baby.” She took a breath. “Oh, you’ll be fine. You’ll be good, a good father.” Then she and the woman from Queens started in on a series of platitudes about how he’ll be okay and the baby’ll be okay and everything will be okay. And in that moment, maybe for the first time, I understood the value of this kind of talk between strangers, because underneath the words that sounded like clichés, you could hear two people hoping for this man. It was the sound of their hope for him that those platitudes carried.
The man and I talked some more while he stood up and bounced his baby, kissing her face, keeping her pacifier in his mouth when she didn’t want it.
She was so beautiful, so small, her eyes so bright and focused. I asked if I could take a picture and he offered her to the camera. “But you ain’t getting a picture of me with her binky in my mouth,” he laughed. I looked back at the photo I snapped. The pacifier was gone. I looked up in surprise. He smiled and opened his mouth. It sat on the middle of his tongue. He rolled it back out, clenching it again between his lips. He wiped it off, and gave it to his beautiful daughter.
The server came in and called my name. There was a seat and a steak for me in the dining car. I left, bobbing and weaving for my dinner.
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