The surgery went well, but recovery was torture. Every single movement felt like my incision was splitting apart. After my mom and I managed to bring the babies home, navigating the house became an absolute struggle. One evening, as I tried to pick up both babies at the same time, a sharp pain hit me right across my abdomen, and my mom rushed over to pull one of them away from me. I shouldn’t have been lifting anything by myself, but Trevor was supposed to come home the very next day. Still, I didn’t call him. Instead, I did something I never thought I would do: I called his father.
Trevor hadn’t seen or spoken to his father in twelve years. The mere mention of Frank always resulted in Trevor snapping that his dad had abandoned them before he was even born. I didn’t expect Frank to answer a call from an unknown number, but he did. I told him everything, about the C-section, the twins, and where Trevor was currently vacationing. After a heavy silence, he only asked for my address.
Forty minutes later, Frank arrived at the porch with an ancient duffel bag. He stood there until I asked him to come in, observing my weary face and two babies sleeping beside me. “You should not even be on your feet,” Frank told me, and it was the first useful thing someone said to me during the whole week. My mother looked at him distrustfully, but Frank only nodded and explained that he understood nobody trusted him. Then he placed his bag near the wall and asked what needed to be done.
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For weeks nobody had been asking me that simple question. I said that we needed to sterilize the bottles, and an hour later he managed to organize the entire kitchen work, learned how to operate the bottle warmer, and finished the second baby bassinet that Trevor left unfinished. Later, when I tried to thank him for all that, he simply shook his head and said that he wasn’t there because he was a good man, but because he knew firsthand what happened when a father walked out, and he wanted to see for himself what kind of man his son had become.
