4. Margot
Margot
Anders decides on Sunday morning, over pancakes, that he's going to be Milo's father until someone proves he isn't.
He says it like that. He's got syrup on his thumb and he's looking at me with the face he uses when he's already decided and would like me to agree so he doesn't have to feel bad about it.
"I can't sit around for another month waiting for lab results. If he's mine, I've lost almost a year. I'm not losing more."
"And if he's not?"
"Then I was good to a baby for a few weeks. That's not the worst thing I've ever done."
I understand it. I do. If he had walked away from a possible son because the results weren’t in, I wouldn't have want to be married to that one either. So I nod, and I accept that it’s going to happen.
For three or four days I watch him with Milo and something in my chest goes warm and loose in a way I didn't expect.
He's good with him. He's patient in a way he isn't with his employees. He carries Milo on his forearm like a football and Milo screams with joy, and Anders looks up at me over the baby's head with an expression that says look, look what I can do, and I think, he's going to be so good with her.
Then Becca comes to the park.
Not that time. The time after. Anders takes Milo to the playground by the reservoir one afternoon, and I meet them there after a site visit. Becca is sitting on the bench in her gray cardigan holding a coffee. She waves at me. She waves like we're friends.
"I hope you don't mind. I had the afternoon and I couldn't stand being at home."
I don't mind. Or I do, but I can't figure out just then, so I say nothing.
I sit next to her on the bench because there's nowhere else to sit. Anders is at the top of the slide with his arms around Milo. They slide down together and Milo’s legs and arms shoot out in excitement as he shrieks with giggles.
"He's so good with him," Becca says. "I knew he would be.
That's the thing I couldn't stop thinking about, all those months.
That Milo could have this and I was keeping it from him.
" She wraps both hands around her coffee.
"I know you probably think I should have come sooner. You’re right.
I was scared. I didn't have anybody telling me what to do and I kept thinking, what if I'm wrong, what if I blow up his life for nothing. "
"You could have called."
"I know."
"A phone call. He would have taken the test in a week."
"I know that now." She looks at me sideways. "You're very sure about things. I'm not. I never have been. I just wanted to say I'm grateful. To both of you. I know this is weird for you and you're being so gracious about it."
Gracious. I sit on the bench with my hands on my stomach and let her call me gracious, and I watch my husband carry her son around, and I can't tell if she means a word of it. That's the worst of it. It sounds true. It sounds exactly like what a frightened woman would say.
But I still don’t trust her. My gut is telling me something different, but how can I explain that to Anders?
He and Milo come down the slide again. Anders looks up at us and grins, and Becca lifts her hand and waves, and he waves back.
I don't wave.
A few days later he takes Milo to buy shoes.
Becca comes along with us. Another few days, he wants to take Milo for a haircut.
Becca joins, and she stands next to Anders with her hand on Milo's back while the barber trims, and the barber says, "First haircut?
Mom and Dad both here, that's nice," and neither of them corrects him.
I was unfortunately there for that one, sitting on a chair waiting for it to be over.
Dinner with Milo becomes dinner with Becca. A booth at the Italian place on Main, Milo in a wooden highchair at the end of the table eating breadsticks, Anders across from Becca because that's how the booth works, and me at the end near the baby because that's where the room is.
"Look at us," Becca says, tearing a breadstick for Milo. "A family."
She says it lightly. She says it like a joke that's also a wish. Anders laughs a little. I don't.
I set boundaries. I do it on a Sunday night, calmly, with a list, the way I'd walk a new client through a scope of work.
Tuesday and Thursday evenings, Milo comes to us.
Anders picks him up and drops him off. Becca doesn't come inside.
Weekends are for us and for finishing the nursery, which has a crib and a dresser and a glider rocking chair and no curtains and no changing pad and no stroller.
Money goes through me. Not because it's mine, though most of it is. Because that's what married people do.
I say all of this in our kitchen with Anders and Becca both present, because I've learned in fourteen years of business that a boundary said to one party and relayed to the other is not an effective boundary.
Becca nods. Her eyes are wet. "Whatever you need. I know I've been leaning on you guys a lot. I just don't have anyone else."
Thursday she comes inside because Milo's dropped his pacifier somewhere in the car seat and she needs to find it.
She stays forty minutes. Saturday she texts that Milo has a rash and she's frightened, and Anders goes over, and because it's a Saturday, and he takes the paint samples with him and forgets to bring them back.
The following Tuesday she asks Anders for two hundred dollars for a co-pay, and he Venmos it from his phone while she's standing in our driveway, and when I ask him about it he says it was just two hundred dollars.
"It's temporary," he says. “Once the test results are back, we can set something up through a formal agreement.”
He says this or some variation of it every time she tries to cross a line. He even says it about the fact that Becca has started calling him from unknown numbers when he doesn't answer hers. I start counting. By the end of the second week I'm at seven.
And then comes the night he returns home smelling like her perfume, something sweet and cheap, and I don't say anything because there's nothing to say. He held her kid. She hugged him. That's what perfume does.
I lie in bed that night and I want him. That's the humiliating part. I'm eight months pregnant and my back is wrecked and I lie there and I want my husband, and he's asleep with his back to me, and I put my hand on his shoulder blade and feel him breathe and don't wake him.
I’m too tired to be angry. Maybe that’s Becca’s secret power, she knows I’m too tired to fight back.
The site visit runs late on Friday. A retaining wall issue on the Harbor Street lot, the kind of thing I'd usually delegate and can't right now because the engineer is new. I get home at six-forty with my shoes in my hand, my feet and ankles are so swollen..
The kitchen light is on.
Becca is standing at my island. She's barefoot. Her shoes, a pair of scuffed white sneakers, are by the mudroom door where Anders leaves his work boots. She's got a jar of the sweet potato purée I bought for Nora's freezer stash, and a spoon, and she's feeding Milo.
Milo is sitting in a highchair.
It's a nice one. Wood, with a green cushion. It's pulled up to the end of my island where I usually sit to drink coffee, and I realize it’s the very expensive one I had chosen at the baby boutique but hadn’t fully decided on yet.
"Oh, hi," Becca says. "Anders ran to get diapers. We ran out. Milo got hungry."
I stand in my own doorway with my shoes in my hand.
"Where'd the highchair come from?"
"Anders got it. Isn't it nice? He said it'd be easier than the portable one." She scrapes the spoon around the jar. "He said this was for the baby, I hope that's okay. Milo loves sweet potato."
My baby. My freezer. My spoon.
The garage door goes up. Anders comes in with a case of diapers under his arm and sees me and stops.
"Hey. You're home."
"I am."
He looks at the highchair. He looks at me. I watch him understand that he installed it in my kitchen without telling me, and I watch him decide, in the same second, that it's not a big deal.
"I was going to mention it," he says.
Becca wipes Milo's mouth with a cloth from my drawer.
"It's temporary," Anders says.
I feel like I should fight this. Fight for my marriage before Becca drags it onto the quicksand.
But I’m exhausted.