He cried when the ultrasound technician said, “girl.”

Just after four that afternoon, I turned onto his gravel driveway.

He was already sitting on the porch, as he had been every afternoon for nearly two weeks, waiting for us.

The moment he saw my car, he stood so quickly that his coffee mug fell from the arm of the rocking chair and shattered against the porch boards.

“There are my girls!” he called, coming down the steps two at a time, surprisingly fast for a seventy-three-year-old man.

I lifted Nora from her car seat.

Grandpa opened his arms as if he had been holding them open since the day we entered the hospital.

“Say hi to your great-grandpa,” I said, carefully settling her into the crook of his arm.

I expected him to cry.

I did not expect him to look terrified.

He stared down at Nora, and at first his whole face softened.

Then he tilted her toward the afternoon light.

His gaze moved from one mismatched eye to the other.

Then to the cleft in her chin.