Chapter Twenty Three
In the first week of December, Summer opened the wardrobe to find a pair of shoes and saw Kylie’s handwriting. The card had slipped from beneath the keepsake-box lid. She stood looking at the few visible words until Jonah came upstairs with clean towels.
“Is something missing?” Jonah asked. “I’ve only moved the shoes.”
Summer picked up the card. “I don’t want this in here,” she said. “Every time I reach for something, there she is.”
“I’ll put it downstairs,” he said, leaving the towels on the bed. “You don’t need it in here. Give it to me.”
Summer wanted to tear the card across Kylie’s name. Instead she held it by the corners, keeping the handwriting clear of her fingers. She had wanted to throw out the messages too, and then someone had asked for them.
“Keep it with the other things,” she said, giving it to him. “I don’t want it back in here.”
He took it downstairs. Summer sat on the bed with the open box beside her, then lifted the yellow cardigan and let the sleeves unfold.
The due date would have been in two weeks.
She had checked the calendar the night before, although the number hadn’t changed since April.
Jonah came back and sat beside her. He looked at the cardigan without reaching for it.
“I don’t want to keep this either,” Summer said. She held it away from herself, then brought it back as if somebody might take her at her word. “It was for our baby.”
Jonah moved the open box farther along the bed. Summer held the cardigan against her knees, working a little fold between her fingers until the sleeve was wrinkled.
“It was nice when she sent it,” Summer said. “It was a nice thing to do.” Her eyes filled as she tried to straighten the sleeve. “I can’t look at it now.”
“Then we’ll put it somewhere else,” he said. “We can decide what to do with it later.”
She let him take it. The small yellow sleeves lay across his knees, absurd against the dark fabric of his pants.
“I had bought a car seat,” he said. He touched the edge of one cuff. “Did I tell you?”
Summer turned toward him. She remembered arguments about prices, photographs he’d sent while she was working, her insistence that they didn’t need to buy everything at once.
“You bought it?” Summer asked. “Which one? What did you do with it?”
“I returned it.” He kept his eyes on the cardigan. “In June. Dad drove me because I couldn’t get the box in my car.”
She had been on the sofa while people brought flowers, the curtains open because she couldn’t bear feeling shut in. Somewhere in those days Jonah had stood at a counter returning the thing they would have brought their baby home in.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Summer asked. “I was there when you came home.”
“You’d stopped bleeding that morning,” he said. “You were asking to go out. I wanted to take you.”
Summer remembered choosing the longer road home because she’d begun to feel better. Jonah had let her decide at every turning, staying a little behind her as they walked. “Was it horrible?” she asked. “Returning it?”
He rubbed his palm down his thigh. “The woman asked if anything was wrong with it,” he said. “I said no. Then I couldn’t get the rest out.”
Summer moved closer. He kept looking at the cardigan.
“She understood eventually.” His voice thinned. “Dad took the receipt. I went outside.”
“You hardly spoke on that walk,” Summer said, holding his arm. “I thought you were bored. I was angry with you for being bored when I was so sad.”
“I didn’t know what to say.” He swallowed. “I was trying not to make it worse.”
She leaned against him. He put his arm around her, the cardigan trapped gently between their knees.
For a while Summer cried without trying to explain. Then she reached into the box and took out the striped socks.
“I still want these,” she said, laying the socks in his hand. “They’re ours.” Jonah closed his fingers around them.
“I thought you’d been relieved,” she said. Her voice was so low she almost hoped he hadn’t heard.
“About the baby?” Jonah asked, aghast. “Summer, no.”
“No.” Summer shook her head, then stopped because the quick denial wasn’t true enough. “Maybe. I don’t know. I kept thinking we were both pretending, playing house.”
“What do you think I was pretending?” Jonah asked. He turned toward her, and she could no longer keep her face against his shoulder.
“That the wedding hadn’t been a mistake.” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “We were so new. Everybody kept saying we were doing the sensible thing, and then the thing we were doign it for wasn’t there.”
Jonah sat back. “I was trying to get through that summer too,” he said. “I thought we’d got married and then I’d done something wrong.”
Summer looked up at him. “What wrong?”
“I don’t know. You wouldn’t let me near you some nights.” He looked at the socks. “I went downstairs and made soup. I knew how to do that.”
“I liked the soup.” The tears came again, with a laugh caught painfully among them. “I hated all those bowls.”
He looked at her. Then he laughed too, briefly, and pulled her against him.
“You kept hiding them behind the sofa,” he said into her hair. “I’d go looking for a mug and find three bowls.”
“Do you wish we’d waited?” Summer asked. “To get married?”
“No.” He answered at once. “I wish our baby had lived.”
Summer pressed her face into his shoulder, the tears welling up in her eyes. He held her there until she could answer.
“So do I,” she said. She closed her eyes. “So do I.”
Summer found a small wooden box she’d bought years earlier for earrings. Its hinge was loose; Jonah began to examine it, and she took it back with a look that made him smile.
“Tomorrow,” she said. She folded the socks inside. “You can repair it tomorrow.”
The cardigan went in a plain bag at the back of the other cupboard. Summer didn’t decide whether it would be donated or thrown away, only that she didn’t want to see it whenever she dressed.
They went out for lunch, leaving the empty keepsake box on the bed. When they came home, Summer put it with the wrapping paper in the spare room; it was a good box, and she was tired of moving it from one place to another without using it.
That evening she took a bath while Jonah finished the estimate he had promised to send. By the time she came downstairs, the laptop was closed and he had put music on quietly in the kitchen.
He looked up from two glasses of water. Summer was wearing an old soft dress she’d nearly given away, her hair still damp down her back.
“Do you want something to eat?” he asked. His eyes moved over her before he looked at the clock. “We had lunch late.”
“In a while.” She came toward him. “Have you finished?”
“Sent it five minutes ago,” he said, leaving the water glasses on the counter. “It’s somebody else’s problem until morning.”
Summer put her arms around his waist and kissed him. He answered slowly at first, then drew her closer.
She opened his collar and kissed his throat. His breath caught against her temple; when he said her name into her hair, she lifted her head.
“Come upstairs with me,” Summer said, keeping her hands beneath his open collar. “I’ve been wanting you all evening.”
He kissed her before answering, and the eagerness in it made her lean back against the counter. His palm moved along her side, warm through the thin fabric, and she caught his wrist when he began to draw away.
She brought his hand back to her waist. He smiled at her then, a small, unguarded smile that made her chest ache, and followed when she took his hand.
Upstairs, he left the lamp on. Summer drew him toward the bed and kissed him standing beside it, taking her time with the buttons she’d so often fastened in a hurry.
He touched her face, then the damp hair at her shoulder. His mouth followed his hand, and Summer closed her eyes, her fingers tightening at his back.
Her sleeve caught on the watch he hadn’t taken off.
They stopped to free it, laughing, and Jonah put the watch beside the lamp before reaching for her again.
Summer slipped her fingers beneath his open shirt and waited while he kissed her, slow at first, then with enough hunger that she drew him down beside her.
Later, she lay with her cheek on his chest and one knee resting against his. The room had cooled, but she was warm beneath the blanket he kept trying to pull higher.
“I’m warm,” she said. She caught his hand before he could adjust it again. “Are you?”
He nodded. His thumb moved over her shoulder, then stayed there.
For a while she listened to his heart. When she lifted her head, he was watching her.
Summer touched his mouth with her thumb. “I nearly called you away from the laptop. About three times.”
“You should have,” he said, kissing her thumb. “Next time, come and get me.”
She settled against him again and stayed until her stomach growled. Jonah laughed, and Summer groaned against him, suddenly hungry enough to imagine everything in the refrigerator.
They ate toast in the kitchen wearing whatever they had found beside the bed. On the table lay her unfinished sketch for the Christmas window: six small gingerbread houses, each with a different roof.
Jonah looked at the page. “That’s a lot of work,” he said. He had butter on one finger and kept it carefully away from the paper.
“I know.” Summer looked at the middle house, the one with the porch she most wanted to make. “I might only do that one.”
He waited while she considered the rest. She drew a line beneath the porch, then set down the pencil.
“I want a few days off with you.” Summer looked at him. “Whole days. Not afternoons after I finish something.”
Jonah put his hand over hers. “Let’s choose them now,” he said. He reached for the calendar before either of them could postpone it.