34. Dulcie
DULCIE
Kit tries to take the candle before we have finished singing.
Magnus moves it beyond his reach, and our son objects, loudly, both hands out.
“I know,” Dad tells him. “Nobody asked you.”
Across the cake, Mom laughs. The icing is yellow because that was the color which made Kit stare longest when I showed him two sample pictures, although Magnus maintains that our son was looking at the spoon in my other hand.
We chose yellow anyway.
KIT is written across the top in blue. Three letters, with a small duck beside them and a candle waiting safely in Magnus’s hand until we can finish the song.
One year old.
My son pats the tray of his chair.
The house is full of people we invited. My parents, Arthur, two relatives who have kept coming without bringing instructions from anyone else.
There is room around the table, which we finally replaced with one Magnus can sit at without arranging himself diagonally.
The old one is in the room where I prepare things for school.
I used it last night to cut shapes for a project which will almost certainly require more glue than I have bought. Magnus found me there and asked whether I needed help. I gave him the scissors. Half his circles came out as ovals. The children will find uses for them.
This morning, he took Kit out while I finished the cake. He came back with the things on the list and a story about our son’s determination to speak to every dog they passed from his stroller.
Now he replaces the candle, we sing the last line very quickly, and I help Kit blow it out before he can get his hands into it.
“Cake?” Magnus asks him.
Kit reaches both hands forward.
“A clear answer,” Arthur says.
We serve small pieces and sit where we can. I lift Kit onto my lap for a moment while Magnus wipes his tray. There is icing on my sleeve almost immediately.
“Of course,” I tell my son.
He smiles at me with the few teeth he owns.
Arthur watches from beside the window. We have been to his house often since his birthday, sometimes all three of us, sometimes Kit and me with Dad. His television is now at a height he can see. Giles moved it.
“Cressida is seeing a widower with grown daughters now,” Arthur tells me in passing, while I reach for a napkin. “A man who doesn’t need anyone to have a baby for him.”
I nod and wipe icing from Kit’s chin.
Then Mom asks who wants coffee, and we talk about that instead.
Dorothea isn’t here. She still wants an invitation to mean the old authority comes with it. Magnus has told her it doesn’t. The absence has become part of the family he accepts, not a subject he brings to me until I offer to fix it.
Today, he carries coffee to my mother and argues with my father about whether the cake has been cut evenly.
Dad takes the larger piece before the question can be resolved.
The photographs happen after Kit has been cleaned up enough that his shirt looks deliberately patterned.
“By the window?” Magnus asks me.
I look at the light. “Yes. But bring the chair over for Arthur.”
“Dad can take the first one,” I add. “Then we’ll put him in it.”
Magnus moves the chair and asks Arthur whether it is comfortable. Mom comes to stand beside him. Dad holds my phone, complaining that it insists on recognizing faces he hasn’t pointed it at yet.
Kit sits in Magnus’s arms, watching his grandfather with hope. Dad has been making a noise with his tongue that is far more interesting than anything the rest of us can do.
I stand beside my husband.
“Closer?” he asks.
I move under his arm.
Dad takes the picture while Kit laughs. I know because I feel the little movement through Magnus before I hear it.
Then we change places. One of the relatives takes the phone, and my parents stand beside us. Mom puts her hand lightly on my back, just as she did when I needed her close enough to know where she was without turning.
I turn now and smile at her.
“Look at the camera,” Dad says.
“You’re supposed to be in this one.”
“I can still supervise.”
The picture catches us laughing at him.
When I look at it afterward, I save that one first.
By evening, the wrapping paper is in a bag and Kit is asleep.
Magnus comes downstairs carrying the green duck book. He puts it on the bottom step to take back up after we have finished clearing away.
“He made me read the middle twice.”
“He always does. The boots.”
“I know which page.”
We stack plates, move chairs, find a spoon beneath the table. Magnus puts the chairs back while I collect the cards. One has a crooked drawing from my class tucked inside it, signed with a collection of letters which required considerable help.
I prop it by the photograph. Tomorrow I will tell the children Kit liked it. They will want evidence, and I have a picture of him trying to turn it upside down.
Magnus asks whether I want that printed too. I say yes, for school. He adds it to the ones we have chosen. I put the last piece of cake in a container. The blue K has survived at one edge; the rest of Kit’s name has been eaten by people who know what to call him.
Magnus reaches for the light above the sink, then stops when he sees me looking at the photograph on my phone.
“Which one?”
I show him.
He comes closer. We study our son’s delighted face, my father’s crooked smile, Mom looking at me instead of the camera.
“Print that one,” he says.
“Here?” I point toward the wall beside the table.
“Yes.”
“I want the other one too. Just us.”
“We can have both.”
I set the phone down.
The house is quiet enough that I can hear Kit shift through the monitor. I wait. He settles. Magnus waits with me, one hand resting on the counter beside mine.
Then he turns his palm up.
I put my hand in it.
I lean into my husband. His arm comes around me, warm and familiar, and I lift my face for the kiss I want.