“You can hold them.”
He shook his head.
“I’ve been practicing.”
“What?”
“Standing without help. Taking steps between the bars.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“Some days my legs cooperate. Some days they don’t. The therapists told me to slow down, but I kept pushing.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought if I worked hard enough, you’d never have to see me like this.”
I sat beside him.
“You thought I’d stop loving you?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
He stared at the girls.
“I promised myself I’d never become my father.”
Jeremy rarely spoke about his father.
I knew there had been an accident.
I knew he had used a wheelchair afterward.
I knew he’d died when Jeremy was young.
But I didn’t know what Jeremy remembered most.
“I was seven,” he said.
“Before the accident, Dad and I built things every Saturday.”
I remembered the little wooden airplane wrapped in a towel in our bedroom.
