Chapter 5
The apartment is on the second floor of a building with no elevator, and I’ve been standing at the bottom of the stairs for a full minute doing something I never used to have to do.
Counting them.
Sixteen steps. There’s a landing halfway with a window that doesn’t open.
The bannister is loose in one spot near the top, which the property manager mentioned like it wasn’t a big deal.
It’s four hundred less a month than I’d budgeted.
It has a second bedroom the size of a good closet.
I signed the lease without looking at anything else.
Josh is behind me with a box against his hip.
“You want me to go first, or you want to go first?”
“I want you to stop asking me if I want you to go first.”
“That’s fair.” He goes first.
It takes hardly any time at all. My things are so few it’s embarrassing.
Everything I own came out of that house in a duffel bag, and the rest of it is what I’ve bought in the weeks since, which is a mattress, a lamp, a card table, four plates.
There’s an echo in here. When I set a glass down on the counter, the whole apartment hears about it.
By two o’clock, my back is screaming. I’m sitting on the mattress on the floor because there’s nowhere else when someone knocks twice on the open door.
Danny has a drill in one hand and a paper sack in the other.
“Josh said second floor. Josh did not say there was no elevator.”
“Welcome to my new place,” I say with a chuckle.
He sets the sack on the card table. “That’s a sandwich. You don’t have to eat it now, but you do have to eat it at some point.”
Here’s the thing I’ve started noticing about myself, which I do not enjoy.
Somebody does something kind and my mouth opens to pay for it.
You didn’t have to. I’m fine, honestly. I’ll get out of your hair.
It comes up automatically, like a hand going out to catch something falling.
I have been doing it my whole adult life without ever once deciding to.
I get as far as, “You didn’t have to?—”
“I know,” he says.
And that’s all. He doesn’t wave it off. He doesn’t tell me it’s no trouble. He just agrees with me. Then, he crouches down and starts unpacking a box of kitchen things onto the counter like he lives here.
Josh comes out of the bathroom with a wrench. “The sink’s fine, before you ask, but I do have a bucket we can stick under there if need be.”
Danny rolls his eyes, and says, “You should patent that amazing system of yours.”
“Nah, I don’t need to profit off of my genius.”
I sit on my mattress on the floor of my empty apartment and let two men who have known each other since they were nine argue about plumbing. Something in my chest that has been standing at attention for a month finally sits down.
Around four, Danny puts up the curtain rod I couldn’t reach, then the bracket in the closet that came in the box. Then he’s at the door with the drill in his hand, and I’m braced without knowing I’m braced.
Because this is where it comes. The look. The head tilt. How are you holding up, Natalie? And I’ll have to arrange my face and produce something.
“Hinge on that bathroom door’s dropped,” he says. “Half a turn, thirty seconds. You want me to do it now or you want your place to yourself?”
I blink at him.
“My place to myself,” I say.
“Yeah.” He nods like I’ve picked the right one. “Tuesday, then. If that’s okay.”
“Tuesday’s okay.”
He goes. Josh leaves twenty minutes later with the empty boxes flattened under his arm. Then it’s just me, the echo, and a sandwich I didn’t have to eat yet.
I eat it standing at the counter. It’s turkey with extra mustard, exactly the way I’ve eaten it since I was fifteen.
I don’t put much thought into that. I have too much else to think about, and I’m carrying it in the front of my body now.
Almost fifteen weeks. There’s a curve under my shirt that a stranger would read as a big lunch, but I know it as a whole person.
I wear things that are too loose. I stand behind my desk at work.
All in an effort to keep her to myself and the few people I’ve told just a little bit longer.
I lie down on the mattress in the dark at nine o’clock and put my hand flat under my ribs and feel absolutely nothing, because it’s too early for that.
But I keep doing it anyway.
Diane calls on Thursdays now.
We didn’t discuss it. The first Thursday she called to ask if I’d eaten. The second Thursday she called about a coat she’d seen that she thought I might like. The third Thursday I started keeping the phone near me after seven.
“I’m not going to ask how you are,” she says. “Everyone asks, and it’s a stupid question.”
“It really is.”
“So I’ll tell you about my week instead, and you can say mm… At the appropriate times.”
She talks about her knee, the neighbor’s dog, a book she’s given up on at page ninety. Then there’s silence and I know it’s because something is coming that she’s struggling to tell me.
“Just say it,” I say. “It’s okay.”
“They’ve rented a house in Oakmont.” Her voice has gone flat and careful.
“Four bedrooms. He still has the mortgage and bills at your house, so I don’t know what he thinks he’s paying for both with.
When I said as much, he told me Mallory doesn’t want to raise a child somewhere that has, and I am quoting him, history in the walls. ”
I put my hand on the counter.
“That’s not the part,” Diane says. “The part is she called me. To tell me she’d like to be included in the family calendar going forward.
That was the phrase. The family calendar.
She asked, in the same breath, whether I’d be willing to move the Sunday get-together to Saturdays because Sundays are difficult for her. ”
“What did you say?”
“I said the Sunday get-together has been on Sundays since before she was born.” A pause. “Then she said something about wanting to start fresh. I said fresh from what, exactly. She went very quiet and got off the phone right after that.”
I stand in my kitchen and find that I’m smiling, which I don’t entirely like about myself.
“She wants him to hurry the divorce,” Diane goes on. “He’s said as much to his father. Wants it done before the baby comes, wants it clean, and every time he says the word clean I want to throw something. And she’s asked him not to speak to you except through the lawyers.”
“I’d prefer that myself.”
There’s a longer pause here. I can hear her deciding whether to say the next thing.
“He’s not happy… I’m not telling you, so you’ll do anything.
I’m telling you because you’ve earned the information.
” She sighs. “He came for lunch the other day, alone, and he sat in my kitchen for almost two hours. He got exactly what he wanted. He arranged his whole life to get it. And now he’s seeing that what he wanted maybe wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. ”
I don’t say anything.
“That’s all,” she says. “That’s my week. Your turn to say mm...”
“Mm,” I say.
She laughs, and we say our goodbyes and we eventually get off the phone. I stand in my kitchen a while with my hand resting on my belly, pondering everything she told me.
I never expected it, but I run into her at the pharmacy a couple days later, in the aisle with the vitamins, because of course it’s the aisle with the vitamins.
I have the prenatal ones in my hand. The big bottle, the one with the pregnant silhouette on the label. Impossible not to notice exactly what it is. I’ve been comparing it to the store brand for probably ninety seconds when I hear my name, and there’s no time to put anything anywhere.
“Natalie?”
Diane is at the end of the aisle in her raincoat with a basket over her arm.
Her face does the thing his mother’s face does, which is that everything happens on it and nothing is hidden, ever, not once in the time I have known her. Delight first. She takes two steps toward me with her free hand already out.
Then, she stops.
I watch her eyes go down to the bottle in my hand. Then to my coat, which is open. Then to the shirt under the coat.
Fifteen weeks and four days, in a fitted shirt, under fluorescent light. There’s no hiding it now.
Diane’s hand comes up over her mouth.
Neither of us says anything for what feels like a long time. Somewhere behind me a machine beeps and a voice says something about register four.
“Oh,” Diane says, into her palm. “Oh, sweetheart.”
“Diane.”
“How far?”
“Almost sixteen weeks.”
I watch her do it. I watch her put almost sixteen weeks next to the morning I walked into her son’s office. I watch it come out the only way it can. Her eyes fill so fast it’s like something spilling.
“You were already…” She stops. She can’t get it out. “When you found them. You were already.”
“Yes.”
“Does he know?”
“No.”
She takes the bottle out of my hand, which is such a strange thing to do that I let her. She looks at the label. She puts it back on the shelf, picks up the one beside it, and puts that in my hand instead.
“That one’s got the iron and folate you need,” she says, and her voice is completely wrecked. “The other one is trash.”
“I’m sorry I hadn’t told you yet.”
“No… Don’t be sorry.” She’s crying openly now, in the vitamin aisle, an elegant woman in a good raincoat with a basket on her arm.
“I want you to know that. I’m not going to ask you a single question about why you haven’t told him because I already know.
I have watched my son this whole time acting like Mallory is the best thing to happen to him one second and the worst the next.
I am so ashamed of that he did to you that I can hardly look at you. ”
“Please don’t be ashamed. You didn’t do anything.”
“I raised him.”
“He’s grown. You aren’t responsible for the choices he makes.”
“No,” she agrees. “But it’s how it feels.”
She wipes under both eyes with her thumb. A woman who has cried in public before and knows how to do it efficiently. Then she looks at me. I see her arrive at the question. I feel my whole body go still around it.
“Natalie. I’m going to ask you for something, and you can tell me no, and you probably will tell me no, but I have to ask it anyway.”
“I need you to not tell him.”
“That’s what I was going to ask you for.”
“I know.”
“He is my son.” Her chin is going. “He has done a terrible thing, and he is still my son. There is a piece of information standing in this pharmacy that will change the whole direction of his life, and I’m the one holding it.”
“I know.”
“Do you understand what you’re asking me to carry?”
I have been holding it myself for weeks and it has felt, most days, like the only power I have. Nobody could take it. Nobody could use it. It was mine the way nothing else in my life used to be mine.
And now it’s in someone else’s hands, and she’s asking me what it’s going to do to her.
“Yes,” I say. “I do understand. And I’m asking anyway.”
Diane closes her eyes.
“Why?” she asks. “Not why won’t you tell him? Why won’t you let me?”
“Because the second he knows…” My voice doesn’t shake, which surprises me.
“He’ll come. You know he will. He’ll come with everything he’s got, and he’ll be sincere, and he will mean every word, and it will all be aimed at getting me back.
And this baby will spend her whole life being the reason her parents are together. I won’t put that on her.”
“You keep saying she and her.”
“I don’t know it for certain. She just feels like a she to me.”
“All right,” she says.
“All right?”
“I’m not going to tell him.” She picks up her basket, which she’d set down at some point without me noticing. “But I want you to know that I won’t lie to him.. If he asks me a direct question, I’m not going to look at my son and lie.”
“That’s fair.”
“And you won’t be able to keep it quiet much longer.
” She says it gently, which makes it worse.
“You’re almost sixteen weeks. You’re going to be at the market, the bank, the gas station…
This is a small enough town that somebody will see you and think they’re being kind by mentioning it to him.
It’s going to come out. Soon. And I’d rather it came out from you or me than from a woman at a checkout who thinks she’s making conversation. ”
She’s right. “I’ll think about it,” I say.
“That’s not a yes.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
She looks at me a moment longer, and then she does something I’m not braced for at all. She steps in and puts her arms around me, carefully, one hand flat between my shoulder blades. She holds onto me tight.
“I can’t wait to meet my granddaughter,” she says, very quietly, into my hair.
Then she lets go and walks up the aisle toward the registers without looking back.
I stand there with the prenatal still in my hand until a kid in a red vest asks if I need help finding anything.