Chapter 3

I've had easier weeks. We'd given Hadassah that long to decide how she wanted to tell Joshua Benitez that he was a father, and the strain of the waiting was hard on Gill and me. I didn't sleep well all week, and I knew that Gill tossed and turned next to me. It showed in her face – there was weariness there, and she developed smudges underneath her eyes. And I'm sure it was hard on Hadassah too. She too looked tired, and her shoulders developed a little slump that perhaps others wouldn't have noticed, but I certainly did. She'd found the courage to tell us as soon as she knew she was pregnant, but no doubt it had been all her courage, and finding new strength to tell Joshua must have been a struggle. Gill and I prayed that she would find that courage, that she would have the strength to do it herself rather than abdicating to us.

We really believed that the news would be best coming from her. We would tell Joshua and his parents if we had to, but it wasn't merely Hadassah's obligation to tell him, but in a way her privilege too. We knew Joshua, and we'd seen the two of them together, and we had no doubt that our daughter truly did love him. It wasn't just kisses and holding hands and adoring looks. They cared for each other, and it showed in the things they talked about, even in front of me and Gill; it showed in the way they deferred to each other, in the way they apologized after a disagreement. I'd seen both of them, at different times, in tears because of an unintended hurt one had done the other. And though the timing of it was a sorrow, the coming to life of a new child is a joyous thing and we wanted her to be able to give him that joy herself, even if in the circumstances it brought tears with it. Their love merited that.

Finally Friday came, and when she got home from school that day Hadassah didn't, as her custom usually was, go straight to her room to do her homework. She came into the dining room, across the counter from where I was sitting while Gill fried burgers, and set her books on the counter in front of me. She leaned on the counter, folding her arms and sniffing the scent of the frying meat, while I extracted some Xeroxed sheets from her Latin textbook. I scanned the foreign words, able to somewhat recognize one here and there – it seemed to be copies of the Vulgate. No doubt Roman Catholic commentators and theologians could read it, but as a Protestant my study has always been the original languages, rather than translations – though I am not entirely unfamiliar with the Protestant versions over the centuries, nor with the ancient versions that were in use at various times and places.

I opened the textbook slightly and inserted the Xeroxed sheets, and looked at my daughter. The strain showed. Her eyes were dull, rather than bright as they usually are, and her shoulders slumped a bit as she leaned on the counter. Even her lush, bouncy curls seemed a bit limp, as though she'd been washing her hair only perfunctorily. She watched her mother's activities with the skillet in a listless fashion, so unlike the Hadassah we'd known for 17 years. I reached across the counter and put my hand on her forearm, feeling her firm muscles and the hair that grew there. In the back of my mind I wondered why women shave their legs, but not their arms. "It's been hard, hasn't it?" I asked.

She nodded. "It's been the hardest thinking I've ever done. I've fled to Latin as a relief from the strain – and Latin isn't easy, at least not the Vulgate we're working on, at least not for me."

"You know that your mother and I would have spared you this if we could have."

"I know, Dad. You're making me face the consequences of what I've done; you're not letting me hide. It's hard, Dad, but you're right to make me do that."

Gill turned around from the stove, spatula in hand, brushing hair off her forehead and temple with the back of her other hand. "It's hard on us too, honey. On purely selfish grounds I wish you hadn't ... done this. It's hurt me, and scared me, and I don't want to feel those things." She laid the spatula in the skillet and took two steps to our daughter. Even with the counter between them, even with our daughter slumped in fatigue and shame, I could easily see, now that I knew to look for it, that Hadassah was two or three inches taller than her mother. "But Hadassah, you're the one who's pregnant. You're more frightened than we are, I'm sure, and it seems to me that what you've done is hurting you at least as much as it's hurting us." I knew Gill was still angry, and still hurt, but at the moment all that I heard in her voice was compassion for her daughter.