20. Anders
Anders
I'm dating my wife.
That's the only way I know how to put it.
I have a one-bedroom on Alder with a window that looks at a dumpster and a mattress on the floor I keep meaning to put a frame under.
Tuesdays and Thursdays I have my daughter.
Saturday nights, for the last five weeks, I've had dinner with a woman I've been married to for eight months, at restaurants where I pull her chair out and she lets me and neither of us says anything about how strange it is.
She moved back into the house three weeks ago.
Not with me. Into the house. She said she wasn't going to raise her daughter in her mother's spare room because our marriage had cracked apart.
She was right, so I helped her carry the bassinet in and then I went back to Alder.
I've been inside that house twice since.
Once to fix the garbage disposal. Once because Nora had a diaper explosion on everything at the same time and I had to help with laundry.
I've never once asked to stay. She's never once asked me to.
Last Saturday she kissed me in the driveway for a long time and then went inside and shut the door, and I sat in the truck for ten minutes before I could drive, and I'm thirty-eight years old.
I'm taking it seriously. That's what I'd tell anyone who asked. I've never taken anything more seriously in my life. Not the company. Not the annex. Dev thinks I've lost my mind in a good way, and Lorraine treats me like I’m a special case that needs special treatment.
I'm courting my own wife. If it takes a year I'll take a year. If it takes ten, I’ll still be waiting for her. Even if it takes a lifetime.
Saturday morning I'm there at nine to get Nora for the day.
I come up the walk with the diaper bag over my shoulder, the good one, and I knock, because I've still got a key and I don't use it. She opens the door already talking.
"She's had four ounces, she'll want another at eleven, I put the warmer in the bag but it's the new one so you have to hold the button for."
I stop hearing her.
It's the bracelet first. It's on her wrist, where it's been since the porch. I look at that because I always look at it.
Then above it.
Her hand's on the door frame. Left hand. Third finger.
It's a plain band. I wanted to get her something with a stone and she said she worked with her hands.
I've been carrying it for three weeks in my pocket and then in a dish on my dresser on Alder, and then it wasn't in the dish, and I'd assumed I'd lost it and hadn't been able to bring myself to say so.
I hadn't lost it.
"Anders."
I look at her.
"Don't," she says.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're crying."
"Internally."
"Anders."
"Mostly internally."
She smiles. It's small. It gets bigger while I watch, and I've seen that smile maybe three times since September and I would trade the company for it.
Then she steps back from the door.
I think she's letting me in for Nora. I've got the bag on my shoulder, I've got the day planned, I step over the threshold and I'm already turning toward the stairs.
"I think you should come home," she says.
I stop.
I can't say anything. I stand in the hall with the diaper bag and my mouth open, and she watches me try, and she waits.
"Sit down," she says. "I've got terms."
She sits me at the island. My old stool. Her feet go up on the rung of the next one, and I look at that, at her feet on the rung, and I have to look away for a second.
She doesn't have paper. She doesn't need it. She's had this ready for a while.
"One. Becca and Milo? Never. Not a call, not a text, not a how's he doing? No closure. No checking in. If she reaches out to you, for anything, I know about it within the hour. Not the next day. The hour. I know it sounds harsh because he’s just a little boy, but you need to respect this boundary. I need this boundary.”
"Yes, I know. I agree.”
"Two. Money. Nothing leaves this household without both our names on it.
Not four thousand, not two hundred, not forty for the kid who mows the strip.
The joint account's closed. Vanessa already did it.
There's a new one with me as primary and you as signatory and it works the way it should have in September. "
“Okay.”
"Three. No private rescues. If anyone asks you for money, time, access to this house or secrecy, you tell me before you answer. You do not make a finished decision and bring it home to me. Not ever."
“Okay.”
"Four." She stops. She looks at me, and it's the coffee-shop look, level and dry, and then it isn't. "You don't get to decide for both of us that we're healed.
If I bring up that photograph in a year, or five, or on Nora's wedding day, you listen.
You answer. You don't flinch, sigh or punish me for remembering what you did.
You don't hurry me past it because you're tired of feeling guilty. "
I don't answer right away. Not because I'm thinking about it. Because I'm memorizing it. She can see me doing it. She waits.
“Okay,” I say. "All of it makes sense. Yes to all of it.”
"You're not going to negotiate?”
"No."
"Not even the forty bucks for the strip along the fence?”
"Not even that."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she nods, once, the way she does at the end of a meeting. I’m amazed again that my wife is such a boss, even if it’s the boss of me. I want her to be.
"Okay."
I sit there. My hands are flat on the island because I don't trust them anywhere else.
“So, can I kiss my wife?" I ask, a grin tugging at the corner of my mouth. The mood in the room already feels lighter, and it feels like we just started something brand new.
She makes me wait, though.
She does it on purpose. She sits there with her feet on the rung and her coffee in her hand. She looks at me and lets it run, one second, two, three, exactly long enough to be a torture and not one second longer, and I'd take a lifetime of it because I finally know how this ends.
"You can," she says. “Yes, please, kiss your wife.”
I get up. I come around the island. I put my hand on her jaw, and she tips her face up, and I kiss my wife in our kitchen, and she kisses me back with her whole self. Her hand comes up and takes a fistful of my shirt like it did in the chair.
Nora starts crying through the monitor.
Halfway through. Of course. We break apart and Margot laughs against my mouth and I laugh against hers, and I'm still holding her face.
"I've got her," I say.
I start to go. She catches my hand.
"We've got her."
I stop.
She slides off the stool. She doesn't let go of my hand. And we go up the stairs together, past the wedding photograph, which she hung in the hall last week without telling me, at the exact height where you'd see it every time you came in.
The nursery door's open. Nora's in the crib I built, crying, both fists up.
Margot goes in first. I'm right behind her.
I remember when we stood in this room and tightened bolts and thought love had already made us a family. That it was done, that it was a thing you had. I had a wife and a baby coming and a crib I'd built with my own hands, and I thought that was the whole job.
It isn't. Family's the thing you choose. Every single day. You choose it in the moments it costs you something. That's when it counts. That's the only time it counts.
I chose wrong once, for two months, over and over.
I’m going to choose right for the rest of my life, with her watching.
Margot picks up our daughter. Nora stops crying. Her mother looks at me over her head.
"Well?" she says.
I go in, to the only place in the world I want to be.
THE END