17. Greer #2
"Whatever the answer is, you are still my best friend.
We are still going to be in this together.
I do not know what this is yet, and I am giving you the time you are asking for, but I am telling you tonight, before I know the answer, that you are not, in any version of the rest of this, going to be alone. "
I close my eyes.
She lets me sit at her table and cry, very quietly, for what is probably a minute.
She does not get up.
She does not say anything.
When I open my eyes, she has the box of tissues from the kitchen counter sitting in front of me on the table.
I take one. I wipe my face.
She says, "Eat. Please. The pasta is cold, but it is still pasta."
I laugh.
She laughs.
We eat the pasta cold.
She tells me about a fundraising fight at Center Ice Boston she has been losing for three weeks.
She tells me about a board member who has been sending her passive-aggressive emails on a Sunday-night schedule.
She tells me about the man she went out with twice in early January and will be going out with again.
I tell her about the road trip to Detroit. I tell her about the bagel place in Cambridge that opened in November that I have been wanting to take her to. I tell her about Lena's daughters and the FaceTime homework supervision.
We do not, in the two hours we are at the table, talk about the father.
At nine-thirty, I get up to leave. She hugs me at the door — long, careful, with one hand flat against the back of my head and the other very lightly against the side of the curve.
She says, into my hair, "Don't forget, you are not alone."
I close my eyes against her shoulder.
She lets me go.
I drive home through Beacon Hill, past the corner of Mount Vernon where the dark blue door three steps up from the sidewalk is still there. The brownstone is dark. The man who lives in it is in another time zone on a Saturday night doing his job for a different team.
I get home.
He texts at one in the morning. Game starts at noon tomorrow. East. Two intermissions. I'll be home Sunday late.
I send back: I'll be watching.
* * *
Sunday, I watch the All-Star Game from my couch with a blanket and a sparkling water.
He is, in his game-night suit with the East patch on the lapel, the man on television I have watched at podiums on Bruins coverage for ten years. He is also, in the long pan-shot the camera does at the start of the first period, the father of my child.
The East wins it in a shootout. Sasha, who got an alternate-captain nod for this year's roster, gets the deciding goal.
The post-game coverage runs until five. Kieran texts during the trophy ceremony. Good game. Two short interviews then the plane. Home by ten.
I send back a single heart.
At nine I shower, put on the soft cotton tee I have been sleeping in since I started showing, and get into bed.
For the next hour I do not sleep — I lie in the dark with the small steady awareness of the thing under the duvet at my middle starting, in the last six days, to do the soft turn I have been waiting for it to do.
I hear the SUV pull up to the curb at nine-fifty.
I hear the front door of my building open and his steps on the stairs. He has his own key now, which I gave him the second week of January, and he lets himself in.
He sets his bag down in the front hall.
He comes into the bedroom.
He does not turn the light on.
He sits on the edge of the bed.
"You're up," he says, quietly.
"I'm up."
"I thought you'd be asleep."
"I have been waiting for you."
He leans down. He kisses me on the forehead. He kisses me on the mouth. He smells like a plane and the cold of late February and the cologne he has been wearing since the morning at the Bellamy.
"Kieran."
"Yes."
"I had dinner at Indie's last night."
He goes very still on the edge of the bed.
"And?"
"She knows about the baby."
He does not, for several seconds, say anything.
He says, low: "And me?"
"Not yet. I told her I would tell her the rest when the team is back from the West Coast trip. I told her I needed a few days."
"Okay."
"She held me at the door, Kieran. She put her hand on the side of my bump."
He closes his eyes for half a second.
He opens them.
"Greer."
"Yes."
"She is going to be okay."
"You don't know that."
"I know my daughter."
"Okay."
He kisses me on the forehead. He kisses me on the mouth.
He gets out of the suit and gets into bed.
His hand goes flat against the front of me, where the curve has been getting harder to ignore by the day, and stays there.
The thing under his palm does the small soft turn it has been doing for the last six days — the first turn small enough to mean what the books say it means.
I press his hand harder against it.
"Did you feel that?" I say.
"I felt it."
"That is what it has been doing all week."
"That is the first one I have been here for."
"I know."
He is quiet for a long beat.
He says: "Goodnight, Greer."
"Goodnight, Kieran."
I close my eyes.
The next four months are going to be hard.
I have, with his hand on my stomach in the dark of my own bedroom, the man I am going to have them with.
That is enough.
That is more than enough.