Part Three: Bowman & Sons

To understand Aaron, you have to understand his father.

Gerald Bowman is sixty-eight years old, and he is the kind of man who fills a room without saying a word. He’s tall and heavy-shouldered, with a gray crew cut and hands like baseball mitts from forty years of roofing. He ran Bowman & Sons for three decades before he retired and handed it to Aaron. He’s not cruel, exactly. He’s just never once in his life said anything he didn’t think was true, and he doesn’t see why he should start now.

The first time I met him was at a Fourth of July barbecue at the cabin. He shook my hand, looked me up and down, and said, “Pharmacist. Good. Steady work.” Then he turned to Aaron and said, “She looks like she’d give you strong boys.”

I laughed, because I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

When Hazel was born, Gerald came to the hospital with a bouquet of carnations from the gift shop. He held her for about thirty seconds, said, “Pretty little thing,” and handed her back. Then he patted Aaron on the shoulder and said, “Next one, son.”

When Iris was born, he didn’t come to the hospital. He sent a card. When Clara was born, he called on the phone, and I heard him through the speaker say, “Three girls. Your grandfather’s turning over in his grave.” Aaron laughed it off, but his ears turned red, the way they always do when something hurts him and he doesn’t want anyone to see.

When Maisie was born, Gerald came to the house a week later. He stood in our living room with four little girls tumbling around his feet, and he looked at Aaron for a long time. “Well,” he said. “Guess the business dies with you.”

Aaron didn’t say anything. He just went out to the garage, and I heard him in there for an hour, banging on something with a hammer.

There’s something in the Bowman family called the watch. It’s a gold pocket watch, a Hamilton railroad model from 1928, with a hunter case engraved with an elaborate letter B on the front. It belonged to Aaron’s great-grandfather, who worked on the Pere Marquette Railway. It passed to his son, then to Gerald, and when Aaron turned twenty-one, Gerald gave it to him in a little ceremony at the cabin. Inside the case, engraved in tiny script, there are four names: Thomas. Walter. Gerald. Aaron.

There’s room under Aaron’s name for one more.

“For your boy,” Gerald said, when he handed it over. “First son of the first son. Since 1928.”

Aaron keeps the watch in a velvet box in the top drawer of his dresser. Sometimes, late at night, I’d find him sitting on the edge of the bed with it open in his palm, running his thumb over the empty space under his name.

Part Four: Number Five

Then I found out I was pregnant again.

It wasn’t planned. Maisie was eighteen months old, and I’d been meaning to make an appointment to talk about birth control and kept putting it off. I took the test in the bathroom at work on my lunch break because I felt sick for three days straight. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet in a staff restroom and stared at those two pink lines and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did a little of both.

Our fifth baby.

I told Aaron that night after the girls were in bed. He was at the kitchen sink washing the dinner dishes, and I came up behind him and put the test on the counter next to the dish rack.

He looked at it. He turned off the water. He turned around, and his face was doing something I hadn’t seen it do in years. It was lit up from the inside, like a jack-o’-lantern.

“Mer,” he said. “Mer, this is it.”

“Aaron,” I said carefully, “we don’t know what it is yet.”

“I can feel it,” he said. He put both hands on my belly, still flat, and he grinned. “This time it’s finally my son.”

He said it every day after that. I can feel it. This time, it’s my son. He said it at breakfast. He said it at his mother’s birthday dinner. He said it to his crews at work, and they started calling the baby “Junior” when they called the house. He went back to the top shelf of the closet and took down the box with the Lions onesie and the foam football and washed the onesie and laid it on the dresser in the spare room again.

I tried to tell him not to get his hopes up. I tried to tell him I loved him, and that I’d love another girl just as much, and that I wanted him to love her too, if it was a her. He nodded and said of course, of course. But he never stopped saying it.

This time, it’s my son.

Our girls heard it too. That was the part I didn’t think about enough, not until later.

One afternoon in my second trimester, I was folding laundry in the living room when Hazel came and sat next to me on the couch. She was seven then, our oldest, serious and quiet like her dad, with dark hair she wanted to grow down to her waist. She picked at a loose thread on the couch cushion for a while. Then she said, “Mama, why does Daddy want a boy so much?”

I stopped folding. “What makes you ask that, sweetheart?”

She shrugged. “He says it all the time. He says, I finally get my son.” She pulled at the thread. “Didn’t he want us?”

I set down the laundry and pulled her into my lap, even though she was getting too big for it. “Of course he did,” I said. “Daddy loves you more than anything. You know that.”

Hazel nodded slowly against my shoulder. But she didn’t look convinced, and I didn’t know how to convince her, because some part of me wasn’t sure I was telling her the whole truth.