The Bottom Compartment

My father retired from the pharmacy in June.

Thirty-one years of graveyard shifts, and he celebrated by learning to sleep at night, which he told me took him four months and which he described as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

He comes over on Wednesdays.

He is not a natural with babies — he holds June like a man carrying a full bowl of soup across a moving train — but he is patient in a way that turns out to matter more, and she has decided he belongs to her.

That Wednesday I waited until she went down for her nap, and then I said, “Dad.