Chapter 20
twenty
LYDIA
The test was in my coat pocket at that dinner.
It had been in there since the morning, wrapped in a tissue like a tooth, and I stood in my grandmother-in-law’s great room with a glass of wine somebody had put in my hand and let my husband tell a house full of people what I was worth.
I didn’t tell him in the car. I could have. He was right there with his hand on my knee and the heater going.
I wanted one night that was only about the other thing. He had stood up in front of every person who has ever made me feel like the help and said my name out loud, and I was not going to let that be the night he found out he was going to be a father. He’d have remembered the wrong one.
I told him in the morning, in the kitchen, while he was doing something unspeakable to an egg.
“Zach.”
“Mm?”
“Sit down.”
He turned around with the pan still in his hand and went completely still, because I have never told that man to sit down without a perfectly acceptable reason.
“Baby.”
“Sit down, Zach.”
He sat down on the floor.
Not in a chair. There are four chairs in that room. My husband sat down on the kitchen tile with his back against the dishwasher, the pan neglected on the stove, and looked up at me.
So I got down on the floor with him and put the test in his hand.
He looked at it for a long time. Longer than it takes.
“That’s two lines.”
“It’s two lines.”
“Lydia. That’s two lines.”
“I heard you the first time,” I said through a half-laugh, trying to calm the rising sob in my throat.
And then my husband, who did not cry when he signed his grandfather’s company over, who did not cry when I drove down that mountain without him, put the pan down on the tile. He put his face against my knee and came completely apart.
I sat on my own kitchen floor with both hands in his hair and let him. It took a while.
Then he said, into my leg, “Since when?”
“Since before the dinner.”
He lifted his head.
“You knew at the dinner.”
“I did.”
“You let me talk about the stupid pigeons.”
“And it was a beautiful, pigeon-filled speech.”
He sat back against the dishwasher and looked at the ceiling for a while.
“There was this list of paint colors in Gran’s box,” he said. “In my dad’s handwriting. For a room in a motel in Grand Junction.”
“I know. You showed me.”
“He was about my age.” He had hold of my hand and he was turning my ring around with his thumb. “I don’t remember one single thing about him. Not one thing, Lyd.”
“Zach.”
“They’re going to remember me,” he said, gazing down at the swell of my belly that wasn’t quite there yet.
He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and laughed at nothing, wetly. Then he stopped laughing.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Because I wanted to tell you here. Now.”
He got hold of my ankle and tugged. “I’m going to be loud about this for the rest of my life. You may as well get used to it now.”
Then he got me up off that floor, and he never did finish the eggs.
There was nothing riding on it. That is the part nobody warns you about beforehand and nobody tells you about afterward. Two years of the app, of the window, of the polite way we stopped saying certain things to one another. I had forgotten entirely that it used to be ours.
He remembered.
He got me as far as the bottom of the stairs and stopped bothering.
My back went against the wall by the coats. He had both hands up under my shirt before I got a word out, and when I got a fistful of his hair and pulled he made a noise into my mouth I had not heard out of him in two years.
“Upstairs.”
“In a minute.”
“Zach.”
“In a minute, Lyd.”
He was not in any hurry, and he was not gentle about not being in a hurry. We got up there eventually, with most of my clothes on the stairs.
He put me down on the bed and took the rest of it off me. Then he did what he always does, which is stop and look at me. This time I didn’t put my hand over my face. I let him.
“God,” he said.
“Don’t start.”
“I’m going to start.”
He started at my mouth and didn’t hurry anywhere after it.
My jaw. My throat. The place under my ear that takes my whole spine out from under me.
He got his teeth into my shoulder and I said something that wasn’t a word.
He laughed against my skin, low and pleased with himself, and did it again on purpose.
He took his time over my breasts until I had a fistful of sheet in each hand and my heels dug into the mattress. He knows exactly how long that takes. He has always known and he has never once been merciful about it.
Then he went lower.
He put both hands flat on the insides of my thighs and pushed them open, and he looked up the whole length of me with my hands already in his hair.
“Loud, please,” my husband said. “There’s nobody in this house.”
And I was.
I said his name, and then I stopped saying anything with letters in it.
He got one arm across my hips to hold me down, which I needed, because I had no intention of staying still for it.
He went slow and then he stopped going slow.
He stayed exactly where I needed him even when I had both hands in his hair, pulling hard enough to hurt him.
I came with my back off the bed and my husband’s name loose in the room, and he did not stop when I did. He stayed through the whole of it and a long way past, until I was making a sound I have never made in my life and had to push at his shoulder.
“Zach—”
“Mm.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
And I did. Again, faster than the first one, so hard my ears rang with it.
He came up over me while I was still shaking. His mouth was wet and his eyes had gone black. He took my face in one hand and kissed me with all of it, which he knows perfectly well I like and pretends he doesn’t.
I got my legs around him and my hands on his face, and he stopped. Right there, right at the edge of it, and looked at me.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Looking.”
And I laughed, and he pushed in on the laugh, and I stopped laughing.
He did it slow. All the way, slow, watching my face the entire time, and whatever noise came out of me when he got there made him swear into my hair.
“Say it again.”
“Say what?”
“Anything. Just don’t stop.”
So I didn’t. I have never been quiet with that man and I was not quiet then, and I have never once been sorry about it.
He got an arm under my back partway through and rolled us over. I sat up in all that light with my hands flat on his chest and took it at my own speed. He let me. He didn’t take his eyes off my face once.
And he talked the whole way through it. Everything, out loud, in that low wrecked voice, telling me what I am and what I have made and what I do to him. His hands came up my ribs and stayed there. I have never in my life felt less alone in a room.
I finished with my forehead down on his and both his hands on my hips, holding me exactly where he wanted me. I felt it go through him a second later, my name coming apart against my mouth.
We stayed like that a long time. His heart was still going against my ribs and neither of us said one word.
Then he put his hand flat and low on my stomach, which he has never done in his life, and left it there.
“Too soon?”
“A little bit.”
He didn’t move it. I didn’t make him.
The hall is finished.
There’s a table in it now that I found in the back of a bank in Trinidad, and my husband sanded that banister most of the winter, and it is, I will admit, very good.
Funny enough, I also did not take the job.
Instead, I send invoices. There’s a company with my own name on it, and Wright & Now is a client of mine now, rather than the other way around.
When Romina wants something sourced she calls and books me, and she pays what I ask.
She tried not to, once. I said no, and she obliged.
Simon does the fabrics. He gave up a very good job to come and do it and has mentioned this to me roughly once a day since.
Magda has taken to introducing me as the one who did all this. She does it to people who already know. She did it to a plumber.
When we told her about the baby, she cried into a tea towel for a solid minute and then asked whether I had given any thought to the small room at the end of our landing, because that woman has never in her life been able to leave a room alone.
Neither have I. It’s why we get on.
Dan Lemont came back in the spring, the way she said he would. At that first meeting he shook my hand before he shook my husband’s. It was not an accident and nobody said a word about it.
Shayna is in Mexico City doing a hotel with a courtyard. Simon sends me photographs of it. I look at every single one.
I. Am. Enormous.
She’s a girl and her father has told the following people: everybody.
He took me out to dinner last week, and a woman at the next table asked me what I do, and my husband put his fork down.
“Oh, God,” I said.
“She asked.”
“She was being polite.”
“Then she shouldn’t have been.”
And he told her. All of it. The gymnasium floor out of Pueblo, the pigeons in the barn outside Craig, the drive to Cheyenne in February on my own because he was busy. He got hold of a napkin. There was a diagram drawn on a different napkin.
The woman was, to her very great credit, still listening when the food came.
He was loud about it. He was so unbelievably loud about it and I wanted to smack him.
But I sat there with my hand on my enormous stomach and my ears going pink and let my husband embarrass me completely, in public, for a very long time.
He told me once that he’d overcorrect and embarrass me in a restaurant inside a month. He was four months late and he has never been more right about anything.
I let him.
I am going to let him every single time.