One of the children. The phrase that sounds logistical and is actually a severance. A selection. A decision made at a kitchen table by exhausted parents who are determining which of their two children will leave and which will stay.
They chose Sophie.
Nate did not know why they chose Sophie over him. He told me the choosing was never explained. He told me the only explanation his parents ever provided was that the decision was practical, that Helen was better equipped to care for a girl, and that the arrangement was temporary.
Temporary lasted.
Helen took Sophie to Michigan. The temporary arrangement, which was supposed to last until David’s shifts returned, became a year. Then two years. Then the years accumulated the way years accumulate when a decision that was supposed to be reversed becomes harder to reverse with each passing month because the child has been enrolled in school and the child has made friends and the child calls the grandmother’s house home and the reversing would now require a second uprooting, and the parents who performed the first uprooting cannot face the second.
