Chapter 20 Liz #2
“Do you have something to tell me?” Liz thought Preston said, but she couldn’t be sure, because Charlie’s cries were growing even more operatic.
“What?” she said, her voice raised over the baby’s wails.
“Do you have something to tell me?” Preston said, louder. “About your father?”
Liz felt her face drain of color. “Were you eavesdropping?”
“We live in the same house, Liz. I couldn’t help but hear your friends talking about your long-lost father like they knew something that I definitely don’t.” Preston lobbed a hurt look at her.
Charlie let out one last angry scream, his loudest yet, then finally latched.
The silence that followed still seemed to contain his shrieks, and for once, Liz would have welcomed her baby screeching his head off so she and Preston wouldn’t be able to have this conversation.
Preston looked at her, his eyes darkening to a slate gray. Liz swallowed hard.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
“You’ve been meaning to tell me?” Preston repeated. “Then why haven’t you?”
“I’ve been a little busy, if you haven’t noticed.” Liz gestured around the room like Hello, I have a newborn to take care of.
“I’ve been helping and that’s a paper-thin excuse if I’ve ever heard one.”
It was, and Preston had been proving himself to be a hands-on dad—whenever he could be, anyway.
Preston had suggested they alternate the night shifts, but this plan fell through when Preston demonstrated an ungodly ability to sleep through anything, even the primal screams of their child.
But hey, it wasn’t his fault that Liz was a light sleeper and Preston excelled at taking selfies with baby Charlie resting on his chest, so Liz bore the brunt of caregiving while Preston received all the glory of Instagram.
“You told me your dad left when you were young and you never heard from him again,” Preston said.
“When did he come back into the picture? And why—seriously, why—didn’t you tell me?
” He looked at Liz uncomprehendingly, practically begging her to conjure up a legitimate explanation for her wrongdoings.
Liz sighed. She wished she could close her eyes and pretend this wasn’t happening. She wished she could go to sleep and wake up when it was over. She wished she could sleep, period. “At Victoria’s baby shower. He’s her husband.”
Preston’s eyes widened as he dramatically shook his head back and forth. “What?” He spat out the word, incredulous.
“I should’ve told you sooner, and I was going to, but it was a lot for me to process, much less try to explain to someone else.”
Preston took this in. “But I’m not just someone else,” Preston said, his forehead cratering in.
“Okay. But…who are you?” Liz finally said. It was, obviously, the wrong response.
“What the hell, Liz?” Preston said, his face stormy. “Who am I? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Liz said. “Does anyone really know the person they’re with? They only know what the other person shows them. I’m sure there are a lot of things about you that I don’t know.”
“You know my parents!” Preston said. “You know all the major things. And if I had a relative come back into my life out of nowhere, you’d know about it.
” Preston started pacing back and forth.
“We have a baby together! We’re supposed to tell each other things and it’s like, yo, dude, your fucking dad came back into the picture and you, what, forgot to mention it? ”
Liz realized that she and Preston were having their first real fight with their baby attached to her breast. Also, that Preston had just addressed her as dude. Neither was ideal.
Liz cleared her throat. Even though Preston was right—of course he was right—her mood was so foul that this only served to make her more annoyed. “What do you tell me? About work? That LeBron is crushing this season? Not to order the Caesar salad at the club when we visit your parents?”
Liz watched Preston’s face refract with surprise.
She had never talked to him like this before.
He probably didn’t think she was capable of it.
It came as a bit of a shock to Liz too, but the dam had been broken, as if her roiling hormones had attacked the barrier and now all her emotions were spilling forth.
“Instead of salad recommendations, how about telling me how you feel, I don’t know—about anything?
We don’t talk about anything real. Do you even want this—you and me, our baby, us playing house together—or is it just something that happened that you went along with? ”
Preston regarded her nervously, like Liz was a pipe bomb that might detonate at any moment. “Of course I want this. My family just—they’re not the touchy-feely types. I’m sorry if I don’t talk about my feelings more. I can work on that.”
Preston’s acquiescence made Liz feel even worse.
“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I should have told you about my father sooner.”
“Do you really think we don’t talk about important things?” Preston asked.
“Well…yeah. We’ve never talked about how you feel about us.
We’ve never talked about if you want to get married someday or if becoming a dad was something you wanted.
We’ve never talked about how bad it made me feel that you didn’t want to have sex when I was pregnant.
We’ve never talked about how annoying it is that you adore Angela and you don’t see how she drives me crazy. ”
“Okay,” Preston said, shifting on his feet. “But how could I know you wanted to talk about that stuff if you didn’t say anything? Why didn’t you bring up any of that until right now?”
It was a good question, and one that Liz wasn’t prepared to answer. “I guess I was scared,” she said finally.
“That’s why you didn’t tell me about your dad? You were scared?”
“No!” Liz looked at Preston. How was he still stuck on that when this had become a much bigger conversation? “I didn’t tell you because it was easier not to have to think and talk about it. And because, like we’ve just established, that’s how you and I are with each other.”
Charlie spit out her nipple and started wailing again.
Liz tried to switch the baby to the other side, wondering how long Charlie would reject her left breast, like a hotel guest objecting to the location and layout of his room and harassing the manager for an upgrade before finally accepting defeat and surrendering to the only accommodations that were available.
Preston watched her try to tend to their child, the wheels turning.
“Wait…You told me that Angela is at a silent retreat in upstate New York and that’s why she hasn’t texted or been here. She’s not really at a silent retreat, is she?”
“No,” Liz said. “For all I know, she’s still doing fire-spinning workshops in Topanga.”
“She’s in Topanga?” Preston looked as crestfallen as a six-year-old learning that parents were the ones who snuck dollars under pillows rather than a small roving fairy who traveled the world collecting baby teeth.
“After I found out that she kept my dad from me, I said I didn’t want anything to do with her and told her not to contact either one of us. That’s why she hasn’t been here. That’s why she hasn’t met the baby.”
“You lied?” The disappointment on Preston’s face made Liz’s stomach turn.
“I guess we’re even now,” Liz said.
Preston’s face hardened. “What are you talking about?”
“You weren’t there when our son was born! I called you over and over again and you didn’t pick up!”
“I was with clients so I wasn’t looking at my phone. I’ve apologized a million times!” Preston said. “Don’t you think I’ll regret missing the birth of my son forever? And why are you throwing it in my face when you said you forgave me?”
“Maybe that was another lie. Maybe I was lying to myself,” Liz said.
“Because I don’t really understand how someone who’s permanently attached to his phone like it’s superglued to his hands, who knows his girlfriend is eight months pregnant and could go into labor at any second, how does that guy not check his phone for three hours? ”
“I was working,” Preston boomed. “I was entertaining clients and it would have been rude for me to be on my phone and I’m sorry, but it wasn’t intentional. You choosing to keep something from me and lying to me for weeks? That’s not the same thing.”
Liz mulled this over silently.
“Do you not believe me that I was working?” Preston asked.
Liz met his eye. “I believe you.” And she did.
Liz didn’t think Preston was off at a hotel cheating on her with some young, thirsty assistant while she had been frantically trying to reach him.
She trusted that he was where he said he was, doing exactly what he claimed.
Preston had been doing his thing. But his thing didn’t include thinking about his pregnant girlfriend, and wasn’t that a problem? They looked at each other unhappily.
“Maybe we both need to cool off,” Preston said. “We’ll circle back to this,” he added, like it was a deal point that needed adjusting, and walked out of the room. Liz soon heard the robust sound of Preston’s Zoom voice echoing through the house.
Grim, she looked down at baby Charlie. “That didn’t go well,” she said.
Charlie sucked harder and Liz’s nipple twinged with pain, then he released it with a sour look on his little face, as if he had lofty expectations and Liz had come up short.
“Join the club,” she told her son. Liz picked up Charlie from the My Brest Friend nursing pillow and tried to adjust a burp cloth over her shoulder.
But Charlie didn’t wait until he was in position to spit up all over her.
The chalky white liquid dribbled down Liz’s chest and soaked her shirt.
Liz looked at Charlie and she could’ve sworn he looked pleased with himself.