Chapter 24. Jude #2
"Twelve hours is enough to feed someone a proper meal.
" She's already cracking eggs into a bowl, and I watch her move through Ford's kitchen like she built it herself.
Maybe she did. She knows where everything is without looking.
The whisk in the third drawer, the olive oil behind the vinegar, the cast-iron skillet hanging from the rack above the island.
Ford told her about us weeks ago. He said her reaction was to squeal with joy and announce, "The best singer in the choir!" totally ignoring that Ford can sing as well.
"Can I help?" I ask, and she looks at me like I've just proposed.
"Oh, honey. Yes. Come here. Chop these tomatoes."
So I chop tomatoes while Martha makes what turns out to be a shakshuka, a really good one.
Ford sits at the kitchen table with Angel on his lap, reading the news on his tablet, and the whole scene is so domestic that I should be crawling out of my skin.
I should be running for the door, because this is the exact kind of warmth I've been afraid of.
The kind that makes you need it. The kind that, when it's taken away, leaves you worse than you were before.
Instead I'm dicing onions and listening to Martha tell me about the woman at her book club who's having an affair with her dentist.
"It's always the dentist," I say, and Martha laughs so hard she has to put down her wooden spoon.
"I like him," she says to Ford, pointing at me with the spoon. "Can you sing something, honey, please?"
Ford looks at me over his tablet. "Don't encourage him."
"I will encourage whoever I want. You won't tell me what to do, not now, not ever."
I start singing "Amazing Grace." It almost makes Martha melt, just as planned.
After breakfast, Ford says he has to catch up with some work before choir practice, so he disappears into his study. I'm left with Martha and Angel.
Martha looks at me. Angel looks at me.
"So," I say. "What do we do now?"
Martha gives me a smirk. Similar to the ones Ford loves to give me. I can see where he got it from.
She has a system. Angel naps at seven thirty, which means I have exactly sixty minutes to prove I'm useful before she wakes up and the real circus begins.
Martha walks me through the routine like a drill sergeant in a daisy cardigan: bottles, baby food, diapers stocked in the changing station upstairs and the one in the living room, because apparently Angel has opinions about where she gets changed.
There's a laminated chart on the inside of a kitchen cabinet. Laminated. Color-coded.
"Ford made this," I say. It's not a question.
"Who else?" Martha shakes her head fondly.
Feed, nap, tummy time, snack, sensory play, nap, feed, bath, story, bed. It's a map of a life measured in two-hour increments, and it's the most tender thing I've ever seen.
Angel goes down easy, and Martha makes tea. We sit at the kitchen table.
"You're good with her," Martha says. I blush slightly.
"She's easy to be good with."
"She's not, actually. She's particular. She doesn't go to just anyone. When Ford's friend Dave comes over, she screams bloody murder. And Dave is a perfectly nice man."
I chuckle. "Maybe she just has taste."
Martha laughs, but then she studies me. Her eyes are the same shade as Ford's. "How old are you, Jude?"
"Twenty-eight."
"Twenty-eight." She repeats it. "And what do you do?"
"Currently? Apparently I chop tomatoes and rock babies to sleep." She laughs again, but I finish the thought so as not to look like an unemployed freeloader. "I work at an IT company."
She nods, but then her face goes serious.
"Ford doesn't bring people into this house," she says quietly. "Into Angel's life. He's very careful about that. You understand?"
"I understand."
"Do you? Because my son…" She pauses, and I watch her choose her words.
"My son has been through more than most people know.
He lost his sister. He became a father overnight.
He restructured his entire life around that little girl, and he did it without complaint, without hesitation.
He is the most stubborn, most devoted, most impossible man I have ever known, and I raised him, so I know. "
"Martha…"
"I'm not finished." She holds up one finger, and I shut my mouth.
"He likes you. I can tell because he's irritated by you, and Ford only gets irritated by things he can't control.
He can't control you, and that terrifies him, and it also…
" She tilts her head. "It lights him up. I haven't seen that in a long time."
My throat goes tight. I take a sip of tea to cover it.
"I'm not asking you for promises," she continues. "I'm asking you to be honest with yourself about what you're doing here. That's all."
I don't hesitate. "I feel honored to be here, and I promise I'll work very hard to show I'm worth it."
She cracks the biggest smile. I blush.
Ford and I go to choir, and when we're back, he says I'm in charge of Angel, together with the nanny Marianne and Martha. He's mostly joking, but I want to prove to him that I can do it.
Ford's schedule is apparently gospel, even to a nine-month-old.
She follows it to a T. The day dissolves into a blur of pureed sweet potato, a blown-out diaper that makes me question every life choice I've ever made, and a forty-five-minute session of "sensory play" that involves Angel systematically destroying a tray of cooked spaghetti while I sit on the floor and wonder what happened to me.
And why I'm the happiest I've ever been.
By three in the afternoon, when Marianne leaves and Teretha, the afternoon nanny, arrives, I'm more tired than I've ever been after a night out.
My shirt has something orange on it. My hair smells like baby shampoo because Angel grabbed a fistful of it during bath time and dunked us both.
Teretha is perfectly happy to just watch from afar.
Martha leaves at four, saying she has afternoon tea with friends.
She gives me two kisses, one on each cheek, as she goes.
I'm sitting on the living room floor with Angel between my legs, stacking soft blocks that she immediately knocks over with a shriek of glee, when the study door opens. Ford walks in. He stops.
"Daddy!" I exclaim. I didn't want to interrupt his work during the day, and he made sure to give me space. Probably just to watch me struggle.
"How was she?" he asks. His voice is rougher than usual.
He's standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, and there's something on his face that he's trying very hard to control.
Jaw tight, eyes soft, the look of a man who just walked in on a scene he's been imagining but didn't believe was real.
"Perfect. A tiny dictator, but perfect. She ate all the sweet potato. She did not eat the peas. She has strong opinions about peas."
He laughs. "Just like you with eggplant. I told you you're a baby."
"Funny, Daddy," I complain, but he's right. I'm a lot like Angel. Noisy, sleepy, I cry all the time, I like to destroy stuff.
Angel reaches for him immediately, and he scoops her up, pressing his face into her neck, breathing her in.
"And you?" he asks, still half-buried in his daughter, sitting down beside me on the carpet. "How were you?"
"Destroyed. Humbled. Covered in various substances."
He laughs. "Good," Ford says. Just that. Just good.
"I'm very happy, though. Weirdly fulfilled. Like I did a good job."
"I'm glad, sweetheart. You made me very proud," he says, and I beam.
We spend the next hour playing and talking. Angel babbles something that sounds suspiciously like a word. Ford lifts her up and blows a raspberry on her belly, and she laughs, and I sit there on the floor of this man's house, wearing his daughter's lunch, and think: oh. Oh, I'm in trouble.