Chapter 4
My mother-in-law and I have always gotten along, which is its own complication now, but I’ve been avoiding her, so when the phone rings, I don’t answer. When it rings again straight away I pick up, because twice means something’s happened.
“Natalie.” Her voice is wrong. Thin, and very careful, like she’s carrying something full to the top. “Sweetheart. Are you sitting down?”
“Diane, what is it?”
“I want you to hear it from me and not from anybody else.” She takes a deep breath, and then says, “Mallory’s pregnant. Mason told us this morning.”
I’m at Josh’s kitchen window with a dish towel in my hand. The yard is doing nothing. There’s a bird on the fence. An ordinary morning, though it doesn’t feel like it right now.
“Okay,” I say.
“He came here and he sat in my kitchen, and he announced it like it was good news.” Her voice cracks, comes back harder. “Like it was news anyone in this family was going to be pleased about. His father hasn’t spoken a word since. I’ve been sick all morning, Natalie. Actually sick.”
“How far along is she?”
“He says it happened early on. Right at the start of…” She stops. She can’t say it. “Right at the start.”
My house. My guest room. My guest bed. My husband. Right at the start. Pregnant at the same time without ever realizing it.
“He’s happy,” I say. It isn’t a question.
Diane is quiet a second too long.
“He’s lit up,” she says, and I can hear what it costs her.
“That’s what I can’t get past. He sat at my table and told me he thinks this is proof.
He used that word. That it’s proof this was always supposed to happen, that it was always going to be her, that everything before was…
” She stops again. “I’m not going to say the rest.”
“You can say it.”
“No. I’m not putting that in your head. I love you and I won’t do that.”
I look at the bird on the fence. It looks at nothing, then flies off.
There’s a wave of something hot up the back of my neck.
Everything I’ve been bracing for since I walked out of that building, the long campaign, the counseling he’d propose, the version of this where he wears me down over the weeks and months with flowers and self-improvement, all of it just went in the bin.
He isn’t fighting for our marriage. He’s building a new life and a new family.
“Natalie? Are you there? Say something.”
“I’m here.”
“I am so angry I can’t see straight,” Diane says. “And I want you to know that you’re my daughter. You always will be. That doesn’t stop because my son is a fool.”
My throat closes. Of all the things this month, that’s the one that nearly does it.
“I have to go.”
I hang up and stand here with the dish towel still in my hand. Then, I fold it in half. In half again. I line the edge up with the edge of the counter.
Josh is in the doorway. I don’t know how long he’s been there.
“Was that Diane?” he asks.
I nod, and say, “Mallory’s pregnant.”
He says a string of words I won’t repeat. Then, he crosses the kitchen and puts his hands on the counter across from me. I watch him try to find something to do with his face.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m pregnant, too.”
It comes out flat. No lead-up, no softening, nothing like the way I practiced it in the car for a man who doesn’t get to hear it now.
Josh doesn’t move. “What?”
“I found out the day I went to his office. That’s why I went. That’s what I was there to tell him.”
I watch it land on my brother in stages.
Confusion first. Then the arithmetic. Then something opening in his face that I have to look away from, because he knows what this is.
He was there for the diagnosis, the years of infertility, the smiling I forced myself to do when people asked when I was going to have a baby.
“Natalie.” He comes around the counter.
“Don’t be nice to me right now, I’ll come apart.”
He’s nice to me anyway. He puts his arms around me the way he did in the doorway, and this time I do come apart. It lasts about ninety seconds, and then I’m done and wiping my face with the heel of my hand and he’s handing me a paper towel.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. So we’re doing this. The room’s yours as long as you want it. I’ll move the bike to the garage.”
“You already moved the bike.”
“I’ll move it further.”
I laugh.
Then his face changes, and I know exactly what’s coming before he opens his mouth.
“As much as I hate to say this, I’m going to… You have to tell him.”
“Josh.”
“Natalie, he has a right.”
“He has a right to know he’s going to be a father.
He does. I’m not arguing that.” I toss the paper towel into the trash.
“But if I tell him today, while she’s still in my house, newly pregnant with their baby, then what am I doing?
I look like a woman using her baby to win her husband back from his best friend.
Even if that isn’t my intention at all, it’ll look that way. I’ll look desperate.”
Josh opens his mouth, and then closes it.
“And worse than looking desperate, what if it works? What if he has a come to Jesus moment and realizes that he made a mistake and he sends her packing and in a moment of weakness I take him back?” I ask.
“And she is the thing that fixed our marriage. She is not going to be that. I won’t have it, so I need time before I tell him. ”
He looks at me for a long moment.
“So… She’s a she, huh?”
“I don’t know. I just say it because it feels right.”
“Okay,” he says. “Then we don’t tell him yet.”
My brother is a good man. There must have been a whole warehouse of them somewhere that I walked past when I went looking for a husband.
Nine days later, I come out of the elevator at work and head to the parking garage with a folder under my arm. Mason is standing between me and my car, in the good coat, unshaven, and my whole body goes rigid before my brain catches up.
“You filed?” he says.
“Yes, that is the thing you do when you want to divorce someone.”
“You filed and I found out from a courier.” His voice goes up and bounces off concrete. He hears it. He pulls it back down. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Can you give me five minutes? Five minutes, and then I’ll go.”
I don’t answer, which he takes as yes, because he has always taken it as yes.
He steps closer, stops when I don’t step back. Up close, I can see what the last few weeks have done to him. He hasn’t been sleeping. The skin around his nails is picked raw, a thing he does when he’s stressed that I have watched him do more times than I can count over the years.
“It doesn’t change anything,” he says.
“What doesn’t?”
“What happened. Her. It doesn’t change how I feel about you.
I need you to hear that. People make a mistake, and a mistake is a mistake, it isn’t the whole…
” He presses the heel of his hand against his eye.
“I know how it sounds. But you and me, that’s a whole life.
You don’t throw away a life over a mistake. ”
“Oh, so I’m the bad guy here for catching you cheating on me with our best friend? I’m the bad guy for choosing to leave this mess behind?”
“No, of course not… But I don’t understand why we can’t go to counseling or something.”
I listen to him say this as if there’s still a chance when I know he’s moved on. I really don’t understand the end game here. He’s moved on, but I’m not supposed to?
“Is Mallory pregnant?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
He goes absolutely still, and finally says, “Yes.”
“Is that a mistake, too?”
“That’s…”
He can’t finish it. I watch him look for a road where the baby he announced to his mother is a mistake, and the marriage he’s begging for is the real thing. There isn’t one. There is no such road. He stands in the middle of it with his mouth open.
“Mason,” I say. And it comes out gently, which surprises us both. “You keep telling me it doesn’t change how you feel. I believe you. I actually do.” I shift the folder to my other arm. “That was never what happened here.”
“Then tell me what happened. Tell me, and I’ll fix it.”
“You didn’t lose me when I found you with her.”
He looks up.
“You lost me when you decided you wanted her,” I say.
“And you decided that long before she ever moved in. You decided it a long time ago, and you let her come and live down the hall, and you told your family about her and the baby as if it were a sign that you’d done the right thing.
So… I’m not interested in hearing that it was all a mistake, and you’d take it all back if you could. ”
He reaches for my hand, but I move it. Not fast, not dramatic, just out of the path, and he’s left holding air. My car chirps somewhere behind him.
“I’m going to be a father,” he says.
It comes out of him ragged, and I understand he’s offering it as a plea. The worst card in his hand, because it’s the only one he has left.
“Natalie. I’m going to have a child with someone who isn’t you. Do you know what that does to me? It should be you.”
Under my coat, under the folder, under both arms full of somebody else’s paperwork, my whole body goes hot and still.
It should be you.
It sits right there. I could tell him the truth now and watch the rest of his life change shape, and part of me wants it so badly my jaw aches. The part that said it was okay for her to move into our home. The part that laughed at the toast she made.
Then, I think about a teal vinyl chair and the promise I made my baby.
You will not be the reason he came back.
“Goodbye,” I say.
I walk around him to my car. He says my name twice more, then a third time, further away.
I get in and shut the door. I put both hands on the wheel. They’re perfectly steady. I sit for a second in the dark before cranking up the radio and driving home to my brother’s house.