32. Levi
LEVI
The room’s dim and small and smells like hand sanitizer, and they’ve got Josie up on the table with her shirt folded back and this gray wand thing pressed low on her belly, and I’m in a plastic chair by her elbow trying to remember how breathing’s supposed to go.
The screen’s just static. Gray weather, a cone of it, shifting.
The tech—young, chatty, moving the wand in little presses like she’s tuning something in—is saying words at us, measuring words, everything looks lovely words, and I’m nodding along understanding absolutely nothing, eyes pinned on that gray cone like it owes me money?—
“There we go,” the tech says. “Say hi.”
And the weather clears.
And there—in the middle of all that gray, small as a thumbprint—something.
A curl of something. A little bean-shaped, curled-up, actual something, and it moves.
It moves. On its own, this tiny stubborn flicker of a jump, and I hear the tech saying good movement and I’m out of the chair without deciding to be, halfway to standing, hand on the edge of the table, and my chest is doing something that’s got no name, some giant slow crush like the whole bay settling on me except it’s not weight, it’s not weight, I don’t know what it is, and then the tech turns a dial?—
Sound.
Fast. Way too fast—that’s the first thing I know, panic getting up before anything else, that’s too fast, something’s wrong—and I’ve got my mouth open to say it when the tech goes, “And that’s the heartbeat, nice and strong, one-sixty-two,” easy as reading a gauge?—
Heartbeat.
That sound is a heartbeat. That galloping little hammering thing filling up the whole dim room like a two-stroke at redline, that thundering, that’s—ours.
Made out of me and her and going that hard already, small as it is, working like that.
Like the biggest thing in the world is getting itself built in there and it is not wasting one single minute.
And I come apart.
No warning and nothing dignified about it.
My eyes just go, hot and instant—me, a man who didn’t cry at his own father leaving, who took a broken collarbone at twenty-two with a shrug and a beer, sitting in a dim room crying at a dial tone doing one-sixty-two—and my legs sit me back down in the plastic chair because they’ve unilaterally resigned, and the tech keeps her eyes politely on the screen because she’s watched a hundred big men do exactly this and has the professional grace to let it happen unwitnessed.
And my hand—I don’t move my hand. My hand moves.
It finds Josie’s on the table, or hers finds mine, I honest to God don’t know, neither of us decides it—three weeks of fences and terms and hands in my pockets, and the second that sound hit the room our hands closed on each other like two halves of something snapping back, her fingers cold in mine and gripping, gripping hard, and I look up at her face and she’s already crying, quiet, watching the screen, and she doesn’t take her hand back.
The whole time. She doesn’t take it back the whole time.
Forever. Standing in that dim room listening to one-sixty-two a minute, I finally get it—the word I’ve flinched from my whole stupid life, the thing I watched rust out down the hall as a kid and swore off before I could shave.
I had it all wrong. I had it filed as a promise about time, this huge unkeepable thing, decades stacked up in the dark ready to fall on you.
It was never that. Forever’s just this—thumbprint-sized, drumming away at one-sixty-two.
My hands are already shaking worse than they were a minute ago and I don’t even try to stop them.
“You want to know the due date?” the tech asks, wiping the wand, all routine, like she didn’t just rewire a man’s entire chest cavity with a dial.
“February,” Josie says, and looks at me for the first time since the sound started, eyes all wet and shining and ruined. “February twelfth, Nell figured.”
February. There’s going to be snow on the ground.
The pass’ll be closed half the month, and I’m already doing it, standing right there in a paper-towel-smelling exam room—snow tires on her car by November, the good ones, and the truck runs better in ice anyway, and we’re not living twenty-five minutes from this clinic in February, we’re—I’ve got a whole department of my head suddenly running winter logistics for two people I’d die for, one of whom is the size of a raspberry.
They print pictures. Actual little pictures, glossy, and the tech hands them to Josie and Josie looks at them a long second and then hands one to me.
Mine. To keep. I hold it like it’s made of glass, and I already know exactly where it’s going—my wallet, behind the shop card, where a man keeps the things he’d go back into a burning building for—and then I think about the wallet riding around in my back pocket through a workday of grease and gravel and think, no.
Better. I’ll build something. A frame. Something with good corners.
My hands are already designing it before we’re out of the exam room, which is the first useful thing they’ve done in a month.
Nell catches us on the way out, at the desk, and she doesn’t say one word about the obvious—that the secret she’s been keeping in two halves just walked past her put back together—she just looks at the two of us standing there side by side, ultrasound printouts in four hands, and something in her steady nurse face goes warm and satisfied, like a woman watching sutures hold.
“February’s a good month for it,” is all she says. “Slow at the clinic. Eat more iron, Josie. Levi—“ she looks up at me, and there’s ten years of patching this club up off the books in it—“congratulations, honey.”
Honey. Nell’s called me exactly two things in ten years: Levi, and—when I’ve done something stupid enough to need stitches—sweetheart, in a tone that could strip paint. Honey’s new. I about shake her hand off her arm.
In the truck after, neither of us talks for a minute. Lot’s hot. Engine’s off. She’s looking at her pictures and I’m looking through the windshield at nothing, thumb moving over the corner of mine, and my heart’s still going like the machine had it wrong and one-sixty-two was mine.
“Marry me.”
It comes out exactly like that. No windup, no speech, rough as a tailgate dropping, and I hear it land in the cab and I don’t take it back, I turn and look at her and say the rest as plain as I’ve got: “Not because of that.” The picture, her belly, all of it.
“Not to fix anything either, I know I can’t propose my way out of the hole I dug, that’s not—I’m not doing that.
I just want you. I’ve wanted you since before I knew what was on that screen, you can check with Tucker’s couch.
I want the whole rest of it, you and that heartbeat and this valley and getting old, all of it, and I’m done being scared of wanting it. So. Marry me.”
She doesn’t answer right away.
She looks at me a long, long moment—not cold, not cruel, just looking, deep and level and all the way in, the way you’d check a weld you need to trust your life to. Looking for something behind the want. Checking whether it’s real, or whether it’s just fear wearing its good shirt.
“Not yet,” she says. Quiet.
Not yet. Not no. I hold onto that with everything I got—it’s not a no—and she watches me not argue, not push, take it and hold it, and something in her face says that mattered.
And then she does the thing that matters more than the words: she leaves her car in the clinic lot and lets me drive her home.
Doesn’t announce it. Just clicks her seatbelt like it’s nothing, like it’s any Thursday, “you can bring me back for it tomorrow”—which is a tomorrow, handed over in a parking lot, casual as change—and we drive home through the valley with the little glossy picture on the dash between us like a first brick.