Yuma, After

         I realized something after I dropped Yuma off at her mother's.

         Yuma. We named her after the town near the border where we had laid unbared on the cool sheets. Where the front desk manager asked us for ID, and then he asked us if we were married. I didn't tell him, but she did.

         Never once did someone care to ask me whether I wanted a boy or a girl better, but if they had I probably would have said a daughter.

         I knew boys, having been one myself - once - and saw the fight straight through. He would be a stranger, first to me, and then to his mother. He would bathe us in the destructive habits he returned to night after night. Mornings, too. After he was done chasing skirts and cash, he would return home and buy his mother something nice. A lot of nice things. His mother would forget her son's vices, the only time a woman does.

        But he would always blame me. Why I couldn't be stronger for him. Why I'd let him down. Why I kept repeating the same damn mistakes my father and his father had. My mistakes, his - the fourth in the reign of the fools.  Welcome home, son, welcome home. He would turn away from me, after giving me the other savings time accumulated for him - the slow-burning malice towards the figure I should have been.

        A daughter, on the other hand, does not know men until later. Preferably much, much later. As she grows independent she screams at her mother 'I hate you!' and slams the door. She only says that to her father when he sees a boy trying something with his princess. She makes up with her mother over sappy movies involving heaps of tissues and words. She only has to sit next to her father, after the boy has fallen in her eyes, and lean into him. His arms are still strong enough for her.

       Her mother and I watched the sunrise, after. We tried going out on the balcony we thought looked nice when we checked in, but the wood crackled under her light toes. We watched from the open window instead. Coolness fled to the hollows of the massive rocks the light reached for with stabbing fingers. We stayed in shadow as the sun lit the sky many shades of one color. The rocks became that same color.
       I wondered out loud if they had always been that color. She said that always is a long time. She also said that nothing lasts forever, like some damn sage.

       When we went downstairs to leave the manager looked at me and said I'd be back. I wasn't, there. But I was at others. Strange places, strange girls, and sometimes when I woke up it was sunrise and I was so angry I shook. The girl woke up sometimes, too, and thought I was cold and tried to cover me.
       She didn't tell me about her until after, from the hospital. Somehow I got there without denting anything.
       She looked larger than she was in those arms. My daughter in her eyes. Her child in the small feet.

       She was the one who bound us together again. Even when my path had frayed ends, her smile warmed those places in the shadows.

       Yuma carried her namesake. It was the reason she existed. She was the reason I still remembered.