Chapter Twenty Four
Ben
I’m standing in my kitchen holding a strip of glossy paper like it’s going to deteriorate if I breathe on it wrong.
It’s warm still, or maybe that’s my hands.
I set the image on the counter and step back.
The laminate looks wrong under it—too ordinary, like a beer can ring might soak into the baby.
I wipe the spot with the heel of my hand even though it’s clean.
Then I wipe it again. My whole body feels like it’s vibrating just under the skin, too much electricity.
I should sit down. I don’t sit down.
Instead, I turn the strip a quarter inch, then another, until the frames are squared to the edge of the counter. I don’t even know why that matters. I just know it does.
The words mid-spring ricochet around my head. Mid-spring. Buds on the maples. The river fat with snowmelt. Right in time for Mother’s Day specials with mimosas on the brunch menu.
Mid-spring, there will be another person here. Not an idea or a concept. A real person.
My knees go weak. I brace both hands on the counter to keep from folding.
I hear the doctor’s voice like she’s still in the room. There we are. Yolk sac. Little fetal pole. About a hundred and fifteen beats per minute. Her tone calm, as if my whole life hadn’t just changed.
The way Paige’s fingers laced through mine, her gazed fixed on the screen in wonder. The way the room narrowed to a screen and a soft, stuttering flicker.
I own a pub in a small town. I run beer and burgers and pay for repairs on a kitchen hood that breaks more often than it should.
I can wrangle a Saturday night rush with an understaffed line and a keg blow in the middle of a four-top order, but this strip of paper knocks me flat.
I drag in air and hit the fridge for a glass of water. I choke down half of it, set the rest next to the paper—then move it away—and finally sit at the table, the chair scraping across the wood floor with a noise that feels too loud.
What now, Hoffman?
Jason’s name pops into my head. He’s my family. Has been since we were in high school—hand-me-down skateboards and split sandwiches and sleeping on the Richards’ couch when my own house was unbearable.
He’s the person who held one end of a sheet of plywood while I swore at a bar top that wouldn’t level. He’s the voice in my head every time I’m about to do the dumb thing that will cost me money and pride.
And he’s Paige’s brother.
How will he look at me? Like I betrayed him? Like I snuck around? How will Gwen look at me? Gwen, who has hugged me like I belonged to her since I was sixteen and bloody-lipped on her kitchen stool.
Don, whose handshake has meant more to me than anything I ever got from my own father. Will he go soft around the mouth and say, “We need a minute, Ben?”
Will the two of them close ranks and stare me down like I’m a problem to solve?
They should defend and protect her. I’d be worried if they didn’t.
I rub the heel of my hand over my chest where it’s tight. It doesn’t matter what they think, I tell myself, and know that’s not true at all.
It matters because I love them. It matters because this is the one circle I’ve ever been let into, and I don’t want to be shoved back out on the lawn like a pariah.
But it doesn’t matter enough to change what I do next. I’m going to be there. For the baby. For appointments. For all the good parts, the dull parts, and the parts that make you weep in the car because you haven’t slept in four days. I’m not going anywhere.
I won’t be my father.
The thought knocks the air out of me so suddenly that I grip the table to keep from flinching.
He’s a ghost at best now, a shadow in a doorway in my head, but today he’s full-color: the back of his jacket as he closed the trailer door; the sour coffee smell that always lingered in the kitchen.
Fighting off tears as I stood at the front door of a house that was no longer mine, to find him gone.
No note. No call. Nothing. Just absence.
I want to be someone who doesn’t disappear. Someone my kid can count on.
But the ugly thoughts invade my mind. What if I can’t help it? What if something in me is wired wrong the same way he was?
What if the first time the baby screams for three hours, I find the handle of my keys in my palm and the door slamming behind me?
What if I’m my father, but it’s just taken me a while to realize it?
“Jesus,” I say out loud, because the thoughts and doubts are starting to eat right through me.
I push back from the table because I need to move or I’ll fall apart. The house is clean enough, but I clean it anyway because I don’t know what else to do with my hands.
The sink, the already-wiped counter. The coffee table ring that’s been there since 2019. The motion helps. So does the burn in my shoulders when I scrub too hard.
When I can’t find another thing to make shine, I pace.
From the front door to the back, through the living room where the leather couch is permanently dented from a thousand Sunday collapses. Up the stairs; down.
I stop at the spare room at the end of the hall, the one with the half-assembled rowing machine and two boxes of winter pub specials I never ran. It smells faintly of dust and cedar.
I lean in the doorway and try to picture a crib. A chair that rocks. A room that doesn’t look like it belongs to a lonely bachelor. The image isn’t yet clear in my mind. It’s too much too early.
You’re not doing this alone, I tell whoever I need to convince. Paige. The baby. Myself.
I go back downstairs and pick up the ultrasound strip again. It’s small enough to fit in my wallet. I slip it behind my license, then pull it out. I don’t want it bent or smudged with tip money fingerprints.
The fridge, then. I start for the magnet that’s also a bottle opener, then stop again. Jason’s in and out of my house enough, and even if we have to announce this news eventually, it is not today.
I slide the photos into the narrow drawer where I keep receipts and the good pen nobody else is allowed to touch. It feels wrong to hide them, but it’s what we decided—wait. Give it time. Six weeks is too soon. We need some time to get used to the idea.
Plans. I need plans. Plans are oxygen.
My heart bangs against my ribs like it’s trying to climb out. I go to the sink, look out the window into the late-afternoon light.
I tell myself I am allowed to keep living the life I built and still build a new one around it. The baby doesn’t take away the bar; the bar doesn’t take away the baby.
It’s not an either-or. It’s yes-and.
If there’s a way through this that doesn’t involve burning any of it down, I’ll find it. If I have to take some of it to the studs and start over, I will.
I think about the town. The way word moves here like wind off the river.
Ben Hoffman knocked up Jason Richards’ sister. I can already hear the voices in town. Gossip is free entertainment in a place where winter lasts six months. I can’t stop it. But I don’t have to feed it.
The image of Paige on that paper table hits me with enough force that I have to press my palm to the counter again. Her mouth tight as she held herself together. The way she didn’t let go of my hand until it was time for her to get dressed.
I didn’t deserve to be there, not after the way I handled things, but she let me come anyway.
Darkness slides in through the windows slowly, like a tide. I click the porch light on and step out onto the front steps. The night smells like cut grass and river and the sweet, warm note of someone grilling.
The maples are black against the last of the blue. I sit on the top step with my elbows on my knees.
I picture mid-spring again, and the picture fills itself with things I didn’t think I’d ever let myself imagine: a sling with a small person asleep against my chest while I unlock the Pint at 8:00 a.m. for a delivery, a car seat secured in the back of my truck.
I see Gwen’s hands holding a baby, cooing and smothering it in kisses. I see Don showing a kid how to put up a swing on the tree, the way he did for Jason and Paige when they were kids. I see Jason teaching the kid how to play touch football.
And then I see the other version. Paige angry with me. Jason looking at me as if I’ve betrayed him. Gwen and Don shaking their heads at me, telling me I’m no longer welcome in their home.
Both pictures exist. Only one of them will be my reality.
The porch boards cool under me as the night finally takes hold. I look at the front yard, at the perfect line in the grass from yesterday’s mow, at the dark curve of the river through the trees, at a moth banging itself against the porch light.
Headlights roll over the porch, blinding me for a moment. The moths scatter, and a car door clicks. Paige.
I’m on my feet before I think about it. She steps into the pool of porch light, hair pulled up, hoodie zipped, hands tucked into the kangaroo pocket like she’s not sure what to do with them.
For a second, we just look at each other. I can still hear the muted sounds of the doctor’s office, see the flicker on the screen, hear the whooshing of the baby’s heartbeat. Now it’s crickets and the hollow thump of my own pulse.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” My voice comes out low. “Want to… sit?” I gesture at the steps, then call myself an idiot. I can’t do better than porch steps?
She glances past me toward the dark trees. “Actually, can we walk?”
“Sure.” I go into the house and shove my keys in my back pocket before locking up and meeting her at the bottom of the steps.
We don’t head toward town. We cut the other way, down the sidewalk that turns to gravel after three houses and then to the footpath that follows the river.
I’m not right on the water, but I’m close, and the closer we get, the louder it sounds—late-summer full, moving quickly over the rocks. Our shoes scuff.
The air shifts cooler as the ground drops, and we fall into step like we’ve done this a thousand times.