11. Isaac
— ? —
Isaac
She doesn’t send me away.
I keep waiting for it. Every morning I show up with coffee, I brace for the gentle rejection - you don’t have to keep doing this, Isaac. I’m fine.
It never comes. So I keep finding things.
The back door sticks. I’ve told her I’m going to fix it four times. I haven’t, because if I fix the back door, I run out of house.
Which is how I end up on the nursery floor at nine at night, losing a war to a crib.
***
The crib is my Everest.
It’s Hazel’s crib. That’s the part I keep having to walk around inside my own head.
Hazel stood in a store and picked this thing out with her, and Chantal loaded it into my truck bed herself and didn’t say a word about it the whole drive, and now it’s in nine hundred pieces on this floor and I’m supposed to have no opinion.
“You can say it,” she says from the doorway. She’s got popcorn. She’s been watching me sort screws into piles for a solid ten minutes.
“Say what.”
“Whatever it is you’ve been not saying since you carried it in.”
I turn a bag of hardware over in my hand, Type A (long) and Type A (medium), which are indistinguishable in every way that a human eye can measure.
“I’d have bought you a new one,” I say. “That’s all. I’d have driven to Millbrook and bought you a crib that never had her hands on it, and I’d have felt good about it for about a day.”
“And then?”
“And then it’d still be the crib I bought because of her.” I look up. “Which makes it hers too. Just more expensive.”
Something moves across her face.
“That’s exactly it,” she says quietly. “That’s exactly the thing I couldn’t explain to my mother for forty minutes on Tuesday.
” She settles against the doorframe, one hand under the belly.
“It’s a good crib. She’s going to sleep in it.
And in ten years nobody’s going to remember who stood in the store, they’re just going to know it’s where the baby slept. Some things are worth taking back.”
“Then we take it back.”
“We,” she repeats.
I don’t touch that. I pick up the Allen wrench instead.
Two hours in, I’ve built either one side of a crib or a medieval restraint device, there are three screws left over that match no diagram in the known world, and I have said things my mother would need to sit down for.
“You can take a break,” Chantal offers.
“I’m fine.”
“You just called that thing a tiny Satan fork.”
“It is a tiny Satan fork.” I jam it into a bolt and twist. “Who designed this? Who looked at a pile of wood and said, yes, a normal human will be able to do this at nine at night.”
“Swedish sadists.”
“Swedish sadists who hate fath-” I stop.
The word’s already out in the room.
I’m not the father. I’m not anything, officially. I’m a guy on the floor with sawdust in his hair, assembling another man’s daughter’s bed.
Chantal is quiet for a moment.
“You’re doing a good job,” she says. “For somebody with no obligation whatsoever.”
I look up at her, backlit in the doorway with her hand on her belly, looking at me like I’m part of this, and five years of discipline goes somewhere very thin.
“I want to be here,” I say. “Even the Swedish torture furniture.”
“Even the tiny Satan fork?”
“Especially the tiny Satan fork.”
She goes quiet for a minute. Then, to the ceiling, apropos of nothing: “There was a honey lavender place near my college. Nearest store that carries it now is off Route 12.”
“Route 12’s forty-five minutes.”
“I know.” She rubs a slow circle on the belly. “Dreams die.”
I file it where I file everything.
Three hours and forty-seven minutes later it’s level and solid, and I shake it as hard as I dare and nothing moves.
I stand back and look at it: the small wooden bed where her daughter is going to sleep, in the house where I’ve done the locks and the banister and spent more hours in two weeks than I’ve spent anywhere else in five years.
“It’s perfect,” she says behind me. And she’s crying - silent, streaming, one hand over her mouth.
“Hey. Hey - is it the crib? I can take it apart, I can-”
“It’s not the crib.” Laughing through it now, which is worse. “It’s you. He never built anything for her. Not one thing. He never fixed anything or showed up at midnight or drove forty-five minutes for ice cream. He just expected it all to have happened by the time he got home.”
“Chantal-”
“I keep waiting for you to leave.” Her voice goes. “I keep waiting for you to look at all this - the mess, the lawyers, the belly - and do the math and go. And you just keep showing up. And I don’t understand why.”
Because I’ve been in love with you for five years. Because I stood up there and clapped. Because I’d assemble a hundred of these and call it a hobby.
I reach out and take the tear off her cheek with my thumb.
“Because you’re worth showing up for,” I say. “Both of you.”
Then she goes up on her toes and kisses my cheek - quick, barely there, and gone before I can do anything but feel it.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
I don’t trust my voice, so I start collecting screws off the floor, and my cheek burns the whole time.
The next night at nine I’m on her porch with a paper bag from a freezer off Route 12, where the last two pints were shoved behind the gelato like an afterthought.
She looks at the bag. Then at me.
“It’s ice cream, Chantal. It’s not a kidney.”
“I know.” Barely audible. “That’s the problem.”
She doesn’t say anything else about it. She just gets two spoons.
But then she’ll look at me, and her gaze will drop to my mouth for half a second, and I’ll think - maybe.
And then I’ll hate myself for thinking it.
***
Tonight she texts in the hollow hours, when the world is too quiet and every notification sounds like a scream.
CHANTAL: Baby’s going crazy. Can’t sleep.
I’m out of bed before I finish reading it.
Twenty minutes later I’m on her porch, knocking softly, telling myself this is just checking on a friend.
She opens the door in a thin cotton nightgown.
Fuck.
The fabric is worn soft, nearly transparent in the porch light. It clings to her, stretches over the swell of her belly, stops mid-thigh.
Her hair is loose. Her feet are bare.
She looks like something out of a dream I’ve had a hundred times and always wake from too soon.
“Thank you for coming.” Her voice is rough with exhaustion. “I just needed-”
“Whatever you need. I’m here.”
She steps aside to let me in.
***
We end up in her bedroom.
She’s propped against the headboard, rubbing slow circles on her belly, grimacing at every kick. I’m in the chair I dragged up from the kitchen, keeping careful distance, trying not to think about the fact that it’s 3 AM and she’s wearing almost nothing and I am a weak, weak man.
“She’s been at it since midnight,” she says. “I think she’s training for something. Kickboxing, maybe.”
“Future MMA champion. Very driven.”
“Very annoying.” She shifts, winces. “I just want to sleep. Is that too much to ask?”
“Apparently. Have you tried negotiating?”
“She doesn’t negotiate. She’s not even born yet and already a tyrant. I blame the paternal DNA.”
“Can I-” I stop. Reconsider. Don’t offer that. That’s too much.
“Can you what?”
You absolute idiot.
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Isaac.” Her voice goes soft. “What were you going to say?”
I look at my hands. The floor. Anywhere but the thin nightgown.
“I was going to ask if I could feel. The kicking. But that’s - you don’t have to-”
“Come here.”
I look up.
She’s patting the space beside her on the bed.
“Chantal-”
“I’m eight months pregnant and exhausted and my baby is doing gymnastics and I want you to feel it. Come here.”
I should stay in the chair. I should maintain distance. I should not climb into bed with a woman I’ve been in love with for five years.
I go to her.
The bed dips under my weight. She takes my hand - warm, certain - and presses it to her belly.
Nothing.
“Wait for it,” she whispers.
I wait.
And then - thump.
A tiny foot, pressing against my palm through layers of skin and muscle.
A small human saying hello.
My throat closes.
This is her daughter. Not mine. Not ours.
But I want it to be ours. I want it so badly I can barely breathe.
“Hi,” I whisper to her stomach, not sure why I’m whispering. “I’m Isaac. I’m going to take really good care of your mom, okay?”
Chantal makes a sound - half laugh, half sob.
I look up. She’s crying, tears sliding silver down her cheeks.
“What’s wrong? Did I say something-”
“No. It’s just-” She wipes at her eyes. “Cedrick never talked to her. Four years I knew him, eight months I carried her, and he never once asked to feel her kick. He acted like my pregnancy was something happening to him. An inconvenience with a due date.”
I’m going to kill him.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She shifts closer - close enough that our shoulders touch, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her through the cotton. “I don’t want to think about him right now.”
“What do you want to think about?”
Her eyes meet mine.
In the dark, they’re almost black. Deep. Wanting.
She’s looking at me the way I’ve been looking at her.
My heart stops.
“Chantal-”
She leans in.
I lean in.
“We shouldn’t,” she whispers, even as she closes the distance.
“I know,” I breathe, not moving away.
Her lips brush mine.
It’s barely a kiss - a breath, a taste, a question.
And it goes through me like a live wire.
My hand slides into her hair without permission from my brain.
Her fingers curl into the front of my shirt and pull, and the sound she makes against my mouth - soft, starved - undoes five years of discipline in half a second.
The baby kicks against my other palm, still spread over her belly.
I’m kissing her. After five years of looking away, I’m actually kissing her, and she’s kissing me back like she’s been thinking about it too, and-
The doorbell rings.
We jerk apart like we’ve been electrocuted.
Through the window, a figure on the porch. Male. Broad-shouldered.
Clutching something.
“Cedrick,” Chantal breathes.
I’m on my feet before she finishes his name, blood pounding, because Cedrick just interrupted the moment I’ve been waiting five years for, and some ugly, honest part of me wants to open that door with my fists.
He starts pounding.
“I know you’re in there!” His voice is slurred, desperate. “I know he’s in there! Open the goddamn door, Chantal!”
She’s beside me, her hand on my arm.
“Isaac, don’t-”
But I’m already moving. I yank open the door.
He’s in rumpled clothes, unshaven, wild-eyed. The flowers in his fist are already wilting.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” His eyes rake over me - no shoes, 3 AM - and go feral. “Three in the morning, Isaac. Three in the morning.”
“Get off my property, Cedrick.” Chantal steps up beside me. Her hand finds mine in the dark, and I watch him watch it happen.
“You don’t get to dismiss me! That’s my baby! You’re my wife!”
“I was your wife. Now I’m the woman who’s going to take everything you have if you don’t get off this porch in the next thirty seconds.”
“I brought-” He looks down at the flowers like he forgot they existed. “I wanted to talk. Just talk. Chantal, please, I’ve been going out of my mind-”
“You should have gone out of your mind eighteen months ago. It would have been better timed.”
He flinches. Then his gaze drops to our interlaced fingers again, and something ugly crawls across his face.
“My mother was right about you two. You planned this whole thing, didn’t you? The dinner party, the recording, all of it. You’ve been screwing him for months-”
“Leave,” I say, stepping forward. “Now.”
For a moment I think he’s going to swing. His hands curl, his jaw sets, his whole body coils with drunken intent.
Then he looks at Chantal’s belly. At the life inside her that’s half his, whether he deserves it or not.
“This isn’t over,” he says. “Not by a long shot.”
He throws the flowers at our feet and stalks back to his car. We watch him peel out, tires screaming, until his taillights disappear around the corner.
Chantal’s hand is shaking in mine.
“Come inside,” I say gently. “I’ll make tea.”
“I don’t want tea.” She turns to face me, fierce despite the tremor in her voice. “I want you to stay. For real this time. Not on the floor.”
“Chantal-”
“I know what I said. I know this is complicated. But I spent four years of my marriage feeling alone, and I’m done with that. I’m done being careful. I’m done waiting for the right time, because there is no right time. There’s just time, and I’ve wasted so much of it.”
She takes my face in her hands, and her thumbs settle along my jaw like they’ve always known the way.
“Kiss me again,” she says. “And this time, don’t stop.”