Chapter 5 #2
“Well, sometimes I get a grilled cheese or a BLT,” I said, and watched for his reaction. He looked over his shoulder, and seeing my expectant face in the reflection, quickly turned back and flushed the urinal.
We kept cleaning. I swept, but Barry insisted that he mop, even though mopping was way harder than sweeping for someone who hadn’t spent most of his life mopping, and Barry had almost certainly never used anything other than a Swiffer.
After watching him struggle with the mop for a few minutes, never ringing it out enough before slopping it on the floor, I shooed him to the hall and told him to clean the windows that looked into the therapy offices. He went with little protest.
When I’d checked off the bathroom from the sheet and made my way into the hall, Barry was muttering something to himself. I stood at the door, watching him rehearse words I couldn’t hear as he paced.
“How’s it going here?” I asked. Barry dropped the glass cleaner, and it rolled toward me.
“Great.” He retrieved the cleaner and sprayed the next window like nothing had happened. When he wiped it, he left streaks on the glass, but I wasn’t going to fix it. They’d suffice.
I was constantly aware of him as we went room to room, moving closer and farther from me as we cleaned. We were almost dancing, a sort of waltz around each other as we worked through the list of tasks.
We checked off the bathroom, steam room, and sauna in this fashion. Barry insisted he vacuum the player dining room, and I didn’t fight it because it did sometimes hurt my back to do the whole area.
Once everything on the clipboard was checked off, I looked longingly at the corner couch in the lounge, the leather one that was better than my mattress.
“Hannah,” Barry said, in a way that made me think he said my name multiple times and I wasn’t listening.
“Hm?”
“Do you want to sit?” He motioned with his head toward the tall counter table. I cut one last look at the couch before agreeing. He sat in the chair across from me, much like in the diner yesterday morning.
This was it. The conversation.
“I’ve been thinking,” Barry began, and what a horrible way to start.
He’d been thinking.
This was the moment I’d been preparing for, the reason I’d been showering him with “don’t worry about it” and “the baby isn’t your problem.
” She wasn’t his problem, really, and I didn’t want to let myself hope that he’d think she was, and now he was going to tell me I was right, and she wasn’t—and that would be fine. It would be. I’d been planning on this—
“You should move in with me,” he said.
I was already nodding in that sort of saintly, don’t worry I understand, way when he said this, but after a moment I halted.
“What?”
“Hear me out,” Barry said, and leaned his elbows on the table. Our knees were almost touching. “This is actually a really good idea.”
“How is that?”
“I can help you,” Barry said. “And I have a cool condo in the city, close to the training facility, lots of amenities. There’s a pool, even. A hot tub.”
I almost, almost got distracted by the pool and hot tub situation, but I would not be swayed. I wasn’t even allowed to use a hot tub while pregnant. “Help me with what?”
“Things, you know?”
I did not know. I had the image of him helping me like a live-in nurse, holding my arm up the stairs and wiping dribble from my chin.
“What things?”
“Like cooking and cleaning and setting up a nursery. Changing lightbulbs, house projects, fixing a flat tire.” Barry presented this list like it was incredibly obvious, all the benefits of moving in with a man I barely knew. I didn’t remind him I still had no car.
“No way,” I said. “No.”
“Why not? Do you have a roommate? Where do you live now?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“Well, you can’t just live alone.”
“Pregnant women frequently live alone,” I said. “Like army wives and single moms, it’s not that uncommon.”
“It’s not safe,” Barry insisted. “What if you fall?”
“Why would I fall? I’m twenty-five.”
He scooted closer, his knees pressing right up against mine.
“You could faint,” he said. “Are you eating more than one meal a day?”
I glared at this. What made him think I was incapable of taking care of myself?
I ate at least two full meals a day, three when Kate brought something, and she often did except on Fridays when we got food with Dad.
I also was a serious snacker, it’s not like I starved myself.
I was nearly seven months pregnant and looked the part.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” Barry said. “It’s just, what if you get sick and nobody’s there? Or what if you get attacked?”
“Who the hell is attacking me in my home, Barry? The killer that lurks in quiet suburbs? Also, I love my place.”
The house was not new by any means, and had many, many quirks, but before it was mine it was my grandma’s, and she was my favorite person on the planet.
My grandpa’s old tools were still in the shed—I used some of them to build things for the house—and my brother’s handprint was still in the concrete slab in the backyard.
Both of my grandparents would love how I’ve been fixing up the house, little space by little space, and sure it wasn’t whatever downtown condo I guessed Barry lived in, but it was mine.
“I didn’t mean anything, I just—” Barry squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I haven’t been here to help you the last few months, and I would’ve been if you’d just fucking told me, but you didn’t. And now I feel like I need to make up for lost time.”
I leaned back in my chair and watched Barry watch me. It was the longest eye contact I’d allowed since running into him yesterday morning.
When I spoke again, my voice felt loud in the dense quiet between us. “How would you have been here when you were a star defenseman in Columbus?”
“I mean. . .” Barry shrugged. “I couldn’t have been physically here much during the season, but I would have been helping. Sending money, or I don’t know, maybe I’d have asked you to come there—”
I couldn’t keep the incredulity off my face.
“Fuck, I don’t know, Hannah, I would have done something.”
“Why?”
Barry let out a big breath. “Well, why do you want to keep her?”
I didn’t know how to answer this in a way that made sense, but a shrug wasn’t going to suffice, so I gave it some thought.
“I think, at first, I wanted to prove to myself and my family that I could do it,” I said. “Not a great reason, but it was what it was.”
Barry didn’t say anything. It was almost infuriating how good a listener he was in all the ways I was too anxious to be; he never filled the silences between thoughts, just let them happen.
“But then I got to thinking about what she would be like, how she would sound, if she would be good at dancing or take after me. I thought about my mom buying her things and my dad taking her to get ice cream when she was mad at me. I don’t know.
” I stared at my hands, which were dry from the cleaning, my cuticles a wreck.
“I don’t think I would have let myself even consider being a mom if it wasn’t by accident. ”
“Is it so hard to believe I would want to be a parent, too?” Barry asked.
It was and it wasn’t. I remembered what he’d told me about his ex, the one who broke up with him when he proposed, and the way he talked about his big family like he loved nothing more than holidays with them.
It wasn’t that it was hard to believe Barry wanted to be a father.
I just couldn’t believe he wanted to parent with me, someone he hardly knew, who had ghosted him for months and didn’t tell him about his forthcoming child.
Especially as a professional athlete, because wasn’t that a thing?
People trying to trap them into fatherhood for money? Or was that just a misogynistic myth?
I was a mess, certifiably, and had convinced myself in the last twenty-four hours that if he wanted anything to do with the baby, it was to take her far away from me.
“I just turned thirty-two,” Barry said. “I know I’m still young, we both are. But I’ve always wanted kids.”
Barry stood up then, and where his knees touched mine went suddenly cold. He pushed the stool beneath the table and stared out the wall-length window where the sun was ghosting behind the mountain.
“I know none of this is ideal, but I think we should do it together.”
I stood and leaned against the edge of the tall table.
“I love my house,” I said. “I’ve been fixing it up. I’m just finishing the baby room.”
It was perfect. Butter yellow and perfect wallpaper with these beautiful little birds printed on it in a pattern.
“Then what if I stay with you for a little while?” Barry asked. That was a presumptuous offer if I’d ever heard one. “I’m quiet as a mouse and super helpful. Roommate of the year material.”
I thought about Stephanie, the last person who wanted to live with me, and how I’d frozen up entirely at the thought of it.
Moving in with someone was big, it was sharing things and running the risk of breaking up and having to decide which one of you got to keep the best fish spatula, the one that was the perfect size for eggs and didn’t have a wobbly handle.
It was horrifying. I wasn’t even dating Barry, much less ready to commit to sharing spatulas.
“Is that wise?” I asked.
“To my mind, I think it would be unwise for you to live alone.”
“I know you weren’t offering, but I need to be clear now that I don’t think we should try anything romantic,” I said.
If he was going to be hanging around a lot more, and it appeared he absolutely would if he had any say about it, then I couldn’t have him getting any ideas.
The heart of Hannah Harvey was closed for business for the foreseeable future.
At least until I could have the baby and figure out a new normal as a mother. And who knew how long that would take?
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” I had a hard time looking at him. “We can’t dive into a relationship. There’s this baby to figure out.”
“Our baby,” he said.
My neck and cheeks went hot.
“Our baby,” I agreed.
Even if my heart was open to visitors and potential suitors, I couldn’t trust his feelings for me now that the baby was involved.
Our baby. If he wanted to be with me, it wasn’t because of my dazzling personality; it was probably because he wanted to do whatever was best for her.
This was nothing to build a relationship on, it was as unsteady a foundation as it got and would surely lead to a horrible end.
Staying together out of duty was no reason to keep trying to make something work—my parents tried that for years before they finally split up, and their so-called sacrifice, trying to stay together for our sake, was not to our benefit.
“Fine. We should live together for co-parenting purposes.”
“The baby won’t be born for another few months,” I said.
“Then I’ll help you get the house ready.
Please. I just feel—” Barry exhaled and stepped closer to me.
Tentatively, he grabbed my hand from where it hung at my side and squeezed it in his warm, large grip.
“I don’t want to miss it. Any of it. Let me show you how good a platonic co-parent and roommate I can be. ”
I looked down at our hands, then back at his eyes, so earnest in their pleading. Maybe he was right, they were a bit hazel.
“We can have a trial run,” I said. “You can stay at my place for a week and then we reassess.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Barry said, sounding relieved, but nothing about any of this sounded reasonable.
“Alright,” I pulled my hand out of his then stuck it out for him to shake, and he did. This would be fine. Right?