3. Margot
Margot
The test is scheduled for Thursday.
On Wednesday night Becca texts that Milo has a cold. She doesn't want to bring him into a clinic with a fever. Anders says of course, of course, they'll reschedule, and he says it to me like I'm going to argue, and I don't.
The lab has a Monday appointment available.
Becca can't get Monday off. She works part time at a dry cleaner's and the owner is strict about schedules.
She could do Friday. The lab doesn't do Fridays.
Anders finds another lab. That one needs a form she has to get from Milo's pediatrician, and the pediatrician's office is closed for a training day, and then it's the following week, and then her car is in the shop.
I develop commercial property for a living. I have sat across from men who owned half a county and watched them not sign a document for eight months. I know what a delay looks like when it somebody is dragging their feet, and this delay has foot dragging all over it.
I don't say so. It's been two weeks, one excuse after another, so I make mental notes of it and I wait.
Meanwhile, Anders wants to see him.
"Just to see him," he says. "I'm not going to do anything. I just want to be in the same room as him."
"Okay."
"You're sure?"
"Anders. I said okay. Go see him."
He goes on a Saturday morning. He's gone three hours.
When he gets back he has a car seat, a case of diapers in the wrong size and a ride-on excavator, yellow, with a working scoop and a seat and a little steering wheel, and he carries all of it in through the kitchen and sets it down like a man bringing home a trophy.
"He's too small for it," he says. "But in six months."
"Where's it going to live?"
"Garage for now."
I look at the excavator. I know what it costs because I saw one at the toy store on Fifth when I was buying a lamp for the nursery, and I put it back because it was more than the stroller I've been meaning to order for three weeks and still haven't.
It's not a big thing. I tell myself that twice, standing in the kitchen. It's a toy. He was excited.
I just notice it. I'm noticing everything now, and I can't stop.
***
The texts start that week.
He doesn't hide them. He shows me most of them, holds the phone across the table so I can see. Milo in a highchair with oatmeal on his face. Milo asleep on his back with his arms flung up. Milo holding a plastic dump truck, and the caption underneath it:
Just like Daddy.
I hand the phone back.
Of course there’s a part of me that sees this as acceptable, it has to be.
A scenario where a woman with a baby and nobody to help her is just sending the prospective father photos of the baby clutching a truck because she’s trying to make up for lost time.
She’s just clumsy about it. I can almost understand this.
But then there’s this other part of me that sees what’s happening where Becca sends a text every night at 9 when she knows he’ll be on the couch. His hand is usually resting on my ankle while we watch TV, and I always notice how he pulls his hand away to respond to her.
Both sides can exist, both sides are equally true.
But only one side of them makes me feel like my marriage might be built on quicksand instead of bedrock.
One night he comes to bed late and filled with flirtatious affection. I can tell he's not thinking about the texts, he's thinking about me. His hand goes under my shirt and finds the place above my hip where it aches and presses there, and I make a sound, and he laughs into my neck.
“I should leave you alone. You're supposed to be resting."
"I'm resting just fine,” I reply, keeping his hand on my hip. His warm touch feels good, and I want him to touch me more.
"You're not,” he says, but he doesn’t pull away.
I'm not resting with him this close to me.
I'm eight months pregnant and I want my husband with a specific, stupid hunger that has nothing to do with anything. It’s just my body and his hands and the fact that he still, after everything, comes to bed looking for me.
He's careful. He's always careful now. I put my hand over his and hold it against my skin and think, this is mine. This part is still mine.
His phone lights up on the nightstand. He doesn't look. I do. I see the little truck icon in the preview before it goes dark.
He doesn't look. That means something. That pushes us back towards the bedrock.
***
"She's just trying to help me get to know him," Anders says the next morning, when I bring up the quicksand feeling I’ve been having. We’re eating breakfast and after a wonderful night together, I can’t get rid of the nagging sensation that’s been digging away at me since I woke up.
“You haven’t even had the DNA test.”
"I know."
"Then she shouldn't be calling you Daddy. Not to him. Not to you. She shouldn’t be texting you every day, it’s setting you up to commit to a baby that might not be yours.”
"It's just a text, Mar. She’s lonely and scared.”
"It's more than that, it’s manipulation. She’s manipulating you with that word.” I stand up to take my plate to the sink because I need to be doing something with my hands. "She's using it before it's true. That's not nothing."
He doesn't answer. Later I hear him in the den, laughing quietly at his phone, and I stand outside the door and listen and then I go upstairs.
I find the transfer on a couple of days later.
I'm not looking for it. I'm on the joint account app because the landscaping people finally invoiced. I need to make sure it went through, so I'm scrolling to check the recent transactions, and there it is… three lines down, dated Monday.
Transfer to R. Lindqvist. $4,000.00.
I read it four times. Then I go find him.
He's in the garage, looking at the excavator like it might have grown.
"Four thousand dollars?” I ask.
He turns. He knows immediately. I watch him try to decide if he should lie or confess to it right away.
"She's behind on rent. She's got a baby and a part-time job and the guy she thought was the father took off. I wasn't going to let them get evicted."
"I didn't say you should."
"Then what are you asking?”
“I’m asking about this four thousand dollars. From our account that I found by accident, and you're standing here acting like the problem is that I don't want to help her."
"That's not what I'm doing."
"If he's your son, we'll support him. I said that in your office in front of her. I meant it. We'll set something up, we'll do it properly, we'll do it through a lawyer if we have to."
"Then what's the problem?"
"The word we, Anders."
He opens his mouth and closes it.
"You did this alone. You didn't ask me. You didn't tell me.
You moved money out of an account that has my name on it to a woman I met once, for a child we haven't confirmed is yours. Do you not see anything wrong with that?” I hear my own voice and it's very even, which is how I sound when I've stopped being angry and started being focused and pissed off.
"You told me about her being the fling. That's why I married you.
You told me the ugly thing when you didn't have to.
So I don't understand why this was the thing you decided I didn't need to know. "
He rubs his face with both hands.
"You're right," he says. "I'm sorry. I should have talked to you."
"Yes."
"I just." He looks at the excavator. "I've already missed eleven months, Mar. I keep doing the math. Eleven months of him already changing. If he's mine, I wasn't there for any of it, and every day I wait to help is one more day."
Anders was nine when his father left. He was eighteen when he learned the man had spent those missing years raising another boy three towns over. He does not talk about it often, but I know the promise he built out of it. No child of his would ever have to wonder why his father did not come.
Becca has put a possible son in front of him and handed him the one accusation he does not know how to survive.
I stand in the garage doorway with my hand on the frame.
I hear it. I hear exactly what it is. It's a leash, and someone has already found the end of it, and I'm watching my husband put the collar around his own neck.
“He's not going to remember whether the rent was paid by you or the both of us,” I say. "But I'm going to remember that you didn't tell me."
I go inside.
He comes to bed late. He lies on his side facing me and doesn't touch me and says, into the dark, "I'm going to do this right. I promise."
I believe he means it. That's what I can't get past. He means it.
I put my hand on his chest anyway, because I'm his wife and I'm tired and I don't know yet how many nights I have left when doing that is easy.