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The first time Hope Chance takes a step, shes’s in the middle of the Dairy Blitz, and her father’s trying to prove his love to Sabrina by eating an entire five-quart Dairy Dream Sundae. He’d just hit his first banana when grandma turns around and lays eyes on Hope as she makes her treacherous path through abandoned napkins and spilled frozen delight.
“Oh…my God. Baby?” Grandma says, tugging on Grandpa’s short-sleeved tee-shirt.
“Look at him go! That’s a champion ice-cream snarfer…” he trails off and grabbed her daddy’s shoulder. “Oh my God! It’s so beautiful! Like a Hallmark card made out of an angel’s laughter!”
And her daddy? He chokes on that banana. Hope will swear, later on, that her grandmother had the thing bronzed and put over the mantle, but it’s really a tiny walnut she’d slipped on. Baby’s first trip.
***
The first time Hope speaks, she’s waiting for her father to pull a lost toy out from underneath her playpen. They’d been working all day on some silly game (she’ll learn later on that its proper name is ‘where did daddy leave Maw-Maw’s medication?’). He’s talking to her in his typically gentle, not-quite Ron White/not-quite-Jeff Foxworthy way, and she’s sitting with her diapered butt on the ground being not-quite ignored. Well! That was enough for the former Princess Beyonce, the royal consort of the house of Chance, to make her presence known.
“Da,” she tries. “Da da da…”
Daddy flings himself around, his eyes widening, his mouth dropping open. This is apparently even better news than her earlier accidental attempt at choking him to death – he loses his grip and drops the crib right on his hand.
“You broke two of his fingers,” Grandma tells her later, recounting this story for the millionth time over a Thanksgiving brautshlauger mold.
“She surprised me!” daddy would say.
“He thought he broke you,” Grandma declares, rolling her eyes.
“I thought she got stuck! She kept saying it over and over!”
But they both knew it was because he was impressed with her.
***
The first time she goes to school, the entire family comes with her; Grandma brings apple-flavored vodka to butter up the teacher, grandpa gets lost on a misty journey through the desks he has known; and daddy fusses over her with concern.
“Don’t be the weird kid,” he advises, as if that’s somehow, magically, an impossible feat for Hope to achieve. She nods fervently, and he leaves her with a kiss upon her brow.
When she turns around to wave her goodbyes, she sees the four faces she loves most in the world pressed up against the glass.
***
The first time Hope gets arrested, she’s fourteen, driving her father’s truck ten miles over Dead Man’s Plunge in an attempt to get a boy’s attention (It is, she says later, just a very big hill, but sticks by her story of its fearsomeness). She’s put on lockdown. Maw-Maw declares that it’s something Virginia would have done, Grandma asks her if he’s cute, and Grandpa screams in horror at the idea of her having a boyfriend and refuses to so much as use the word ‘man’ in front of her for a week.
Hope sulks in her room for the entirety of her monthlong grounding. Daddy is creepily quiet, and she’s scared he’s going to revert to his much-mocked Goth period somehow. But when her punishment’s over, he meets her over breakfast and gives her a hug.
“I really hope you like the boy a lot,” her father says, his kind tone suddenly shifting to something menacing. “Because he’s not good enough for you, and it takes a lot of work to make a relationship like that work. Look at me and Sabrina!”
He totally isn’t. And she manages to become the first Chance to avoid getting knocked up (or knocking anyone else up) under thirty.
***
The first time Hope tells the entire family that she’s going to be a scientist, she’s picking through a book about zoo animals. It’s the one Daddy got her years ago, the one she would read whenever she felt sick, or a little lost. It’s starting to click in her head that this might be the way out, that she could learn to save the world if she has enough gumption and the will to do it.
One day she’ll work in a zoo and take care of lots of animals. One day she’ll be the leading expert in Bengalese tigers. But right now she’s just telling her father her thoughts, and he’s grinning and nodding his head.
He’s her best listener. And he always was, even when she had nothing to say.
THE END