Chapter 6
Ishouldn’t be surprised that it happens sooner rather than later. Diane calls me, and I can tell by her tone that my secret isn’t going to be a secret much longer.
“He asked me,” she says.
I put down the box cutter. I’m in the second bedroom with a flat-pack dresser in forty pieces around me, and the light through the window is the flat gray of four in the afternoon.
“Okay.”
“He came by about the storage unit. He was in the doorway with his keys still in his hand.” She’s speaking carefully, the way you speak when you’ve been rehearsing on the drive.
“And he said, “Mom, is there something going on with Natalie?” And I asked what he meant. And he said, “Reese’s wife saw her at the pharmacy and said something to Reese.”
The dresser instructions are on the floor by my knee. Step four. Attach the left runner using the short screws.
“What did you say?”
“I said, ask her.” A breath that comes apart in the middle. “He said mom. And I said Mason, I am not going to lie to you, and I am not going to do this for you. Go and ask your wife.”
“Diane.”
“I know.”
“No, I—” I sit back on my heels. “You told me you wouldn’t lie to him. I said that was fair, and I meant it.”
“That doesn’t make it feel like anything other than what it was.”
“You kept your word to me and to him at the same time. Most people can’t do that.”
She’s quiet.
“He’s coming,” she says. “I don’t know when. He left my house at two, and he didn’t go back to work, I called.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want me there?”
And this is the thing about Diane. She’d come. She would stand in my apartment between her son and me without a second’s hesitation. For everything that has happened and all the things I’d like to change, I’m happy my child gets to have her as a grandma.
“No,” I say. “But thank you.”
I put the phone down on the carpet and look at forty pieces of a dresser I can’t build by myself.
Then, I get up and put on a shirt that doesn’t hang too loose.
Because I’m not doing this in one that hides the life growing inside me.
I’ve had two hours and forty minutes before he knocks. That turns out to be exactly enough time to clean an apartment with almost nothing in it, then to sit on the mattress and do nothing at all.
I open the door.
Mason looks at my face first. Then down. And I watch it happen to him, all of it, in about a second and a half. The tightening around his eyes. The way his mouth opens with nothing behind it. He puts one hand on the doorframe like the hallway has shifted.
“Come in.”
He doesn’t move. He’s still looking.
“Mason. Come in or don’t, but I’m not doing this in a hallway.”
He comes in. He stands in the middle of my empty living room with his coat still on and turns a slow half circle. The card table. The four plates. The mattress on the floor through the open bedroom door.
Then, he looks at me again.
“How long have you known?”
“Since the day I found the two of you together.”
He makes a sound. It isn’t a word.
“I found out that morning when I went in for the results of my bloodwork,” I say.
“I went to the baby boutique on Fourth right after I left there, bought a pair of tiny socks, and drove over to tell you. I didn’t want to do it on the phone.
I wanted to see your face… I had them in my hand,” I say.
“In the doorway. That’s what was in the bag. ”
He sits down. Not on anything. There isn’t anything. He goes down onto the floor in the middle of my living room with his back against the wall, and he puts both hands over his face.
I let him.
I stand at the counter with my hands behind me on the edge of it.
I let a grown man cry on my floor for a while.
I don’t feel triumphant, which I expected to.
I don’t feel much of anything except very tired and strangely calm, the way you feel at the end of something you’ve been walking toward for a long time.
“Is it mine?”
It comes out muffled through his hands. Then he hears it, and his head comes up fast.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. That’s not—I know it is. I know that. I don’t know why I?—”
“Whose else would it be?” I ask, anger bubbling through me as I cut him off. How dare he ask me that.
He wipes his face with the flat of his hand, twice, and he doesn’t get all of it.
“You were pregnant,” he says. “You were standing in my doorway pregnant.”
“Yes.”
“And I said…” His face changes as it arrives. “I said this isn’t what it looks like. That’s what I said to you. That’s the first thing I said to my pregnant wife.”
“Yes.”
“Natalie.” He gets up. He gets halfway across the room before he registers that I haven’t moved, and he stops. “Why didn’t you tell me? In the garage. When I was standing there telling you I’d fix it, you knew, and you—” He stops again. “You’ve known for weeks. How far along are you?”
“Sixteen now.”
“Sixteen.” He says it like the number is a physical object. “You went to appointments.”
“Four.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
He turns away. He goes to my window and stands with his hands on his head. Out on the street somebody’s car alarm goes off, then stops.
“I want to be there,” he says to the glass.
“For the rest of it. All of it. The appointments, the classes, whatever there is, I want… I want to be there for the birth. I want to see our child come into the world. I’ll be whatever you need me to be.
I’ll sleep in my car outside the hospital if that’s what?—”
“You can be a father.”
He turns around so fast.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Natalie?—”
“I’m not finished.”
And he stops, because something in my voice has changed, and he hears it.
I’ve thought about this for weeks. I’ve said it into the dark on a mattress on the floor. I’ve said it to a water stain on my brother’s ceiling. I know the shape of every word.
“You can be a father,” I say. “You will be. I’m not going to take that from either of you, and I’m not going to poison her about you, and when she’s old enough to ask questions I’ll answer them without making you a villain, because she’ll need you and I won’t let what you did to me become what she inherits. ”
His face is doing something terrible and hopeful at once.
“But you don’t get to use our child to become my husband again.”
The hope goes out of him the way water goes out of a sink.
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“It’s exactly what you’re doing.” Still level.
That’s what frightens him, I think, that none of this is loud.
“You’ve been in this apartment for ten minutes and you’ve said I want a half a dozen times.
You want to be there. You want to be whatever I need.
Mason, you haven’t asked me one question about how I am. ”
“I’m asking now.”
“You’re asking now because I pointed at it.”
He opens his mouth. Closes it.
“I know what happens next,” I say. “You go home tonight and you can’t sleep.
By Thursday you’ve built the whole thing.
That this is a sign. That it’s proof.” I watch him flinch on the word, which is how I know Diane told me the truth about what he said when he told them Mallory was pregnant.
“That everything since spring was a terrible detour and here’s the thing that puts it right.
Then, you’ll come back with a speech about second chances and a family.
You’ll mean it. It will be the most sincere thing you’ve ever said in your life. ”
“Would that be so bad?” His voice cracks. “Natalie, would that be the worst thing? A family?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I’d spend the rest of my life knowing what brought you back. And let’s not forget that you are the one who has started a whole new family with your best friend.”
He stares at me.
“You didn’t come to my door tonight because you missed me,” I say. “You came because Reese’s wife saw me in a pharmacy, and from whatever she said, you thought something was wrong with me. If she hadn’t, you’d be in Oakmont picking a paint color.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s completely fair. It’s just not kind.”
He turns back toward the window. When he speaks again his voice has gone flat and small. It’s the closest thing to honest I’ve heard from him since the door swung open in his office.
“I knew,” he says.
“Knew what.”
“That she wanted me. I’ve known since college.
” He’s still facing the glass. “I knew when she called at night. I knew when I took it in the hall instead of in the room with you, and I knew why I was taking it in the hall. I told myself it was so I wouldn’t disturb you while you were trying to go to sleep. ”
I don’t say anything.
“I liked it,” he says. “That’s the thing I can’t… I liked being wanted like that. Not her, particularly. I want that to be true, that it wasn’t particularly her. It was being the person somebody had waited for. And you’d stopped…” He stops.
“Say it.”
“You’d stopped looking at me like that. After the diagnosis, after all the years of it, you got so careful with me.
So grateful.” He turns around and his face is destroyed.
“And she looked at me like I was the answer to something. And I let her move into our house because I wanted to keep being looked at.”
The refrigerator hums. Outside, a car goes past with the bass turned up.
“Thank you,” I say.
“For what?”
“For telling me the true thing instead of the flattering one.”
He takes a step. “Then you understand?”
“I understand exactly,” I say. “It doesn’t change anything…
I’m going to say this once and then you’re going to go home.
” I push off the counter. “I’m not doing this to punish you.
I want you to hear that, because you’ll tell yourself otherwise at three in the morning.
There’s no other man. I’m not proving a point.
I’m not waiting for you to earn it back. ”
I put my hand flat under my ribs, which I’ve been not doing this whole time.
“I stopped wanting you,” I say. “Somewhere between seeing you two together and now. It isn’t a decision I made. I can’t undo it. I’ve stopped trying to. That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”
He stands in my living room a long time.
“Text me the appointments,” he says finally. “Whatever ones you’re willing to have me at.”
“I will.”
“I’ll be there for our baby.” His jaw is working. “Whatever else. I’ll be there for them.”
“I know,” I say. I mean it. It’s the kindest thing I have.
He goes to the door. He gets it open. Then he stops with his hand on the frame, not turning around.
“There’s something wrong with the dates,” he says.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He shakes his head once. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
And he goes.
Danny comes for the hinge. He’s ten minutes with the bathroom door. Then, he’s in my kitchen washing his hands at the sink while I sit at the card table with a mug I’m actually drinking from this time.
“Your brother says you’ve got a crib coming.”
“I do. I’m a little surprised Josh would be talking about it though.”
“He’s very excited actually. He’s told me four times.” He dries his hands on the towel. “You want help putting it together, or do you want to do it yourself?”
And I notice something as he says it. He’s asked me that four different ways in three weeks. Now or later. Yourself or with help. Fresh one or keep pretending. Every single time, he hands me the choice and then does whatever I pick without making it mean anything.
Nobody has done that for me in years. I’m not sure anybody ever has.
“I want help,” I say.
“Let me know when it gets here and I’ll come running.” He picks up his bag. “I gotta get going. I need to go check on my mom. She’s not feeling to great at the moment.”
“Oh, no… I hope she’s okay.”
“She’ll be fine,” he says and heads for the door.
“Danny.”
He turns.
There’s a thing I could say. It’s right there, unformed. I don’t have a shape for it. I’m sixteen weeks pregnant, thirty days into a divorce, and it would be the most unfair thing I could put on a person.
“Thank you for the sandwich the other day,” I say. “It was perfect.”
He looks at me for a second longer than he needs to. Something goes across his face and gets put away.
“Turkey, extra mustard,” he says. “You’ve eaten it that way since you were fifteen.”
Then he’s gone down the sixteen steps. I stand at my window with my hand under my ribs and watch his truck pull out.
The phone buzzes on the card table.
Mason. A photograph of a hospital bracelet on a wrist that isn’t his. Then, underneath it…
She had some bleeding, they scanned her, everything’s fine. But they’ve moved her date up by almost three weeks. Apparently the first estimate was off. I keep doing the math and I can’t make it work.
I look at it for a while, wondering why he felt the need to tell me this.
Then, I put the phone face-down on the table and go about my business because none of that has anything to do with me.