Chapter 3 #2
He was already doing what I was doing. I could see it. He was sitting up against my headboard at six in the morning, trying to figure out what we did next, and he hadn’t yet decided which version of himself he was going to be when he opened his mouth.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
"So," I said. "Last night."
"Yeah?"
"Was a thing."
"It was."
I picked at the tie of the robe at my waist. I made myself look at him. "Astrid and Easton. They're going to be in our lives. For a long time. For years."
"I know."
"We see each other at things. Birthdays. The baby, when they have one. Christmas at the bungalow."
"I know, Callahan."
"This can't be a thing."
He looked at me for a beat. His elbows were on his knees. The sheet was at his waist. The morning light was gray on his face, and I made myself not catalog any further than that.
"Okay," he said.
His jaw shifted. A small thing—the muscle at the hinge, a contraction that lasted half a second and was gone.
If I hadn't spent six years reading the bodies of women in labor, I would have missed it.
But I had, and I didn't, and the half-second told me that okay was not the word his body wanted to say.
"Okay?" I said.
"Okay. It's not a thing. Last night was last night."
I waited for him to push back. I'd built the speech in the bathroom for the version of him who pushed back.
I had a paragraph ready about how this wasn't personal, how I liked him, how we had cleared something out of our systems, and we could be friendly the next time we saw each other at a barbecue. I had the whole thing loaded.
He didn't push back.
He said okay and held my look, and I felt something in my chest do the small, disappointed thing it had no right to do.
"Good," I said.
"Yeah."
I nodded. He nodded. We sat there at six in the morning on the edge of the bed and on the headboard with three feet of mattress between us, and we made a clean adult pact about a thing two reasonable people had done after running out of fuel for the fight they'd been having.
"I should go," he said.
"Yeah."
He got up. He found his pants on the floor and pulled them on with his back to me, which I appreciated more than I was going to think about. His shirt was over the chair where he'd dropped it last night. He picked it up. He looked at me before he put it on. His mouth went up at one corner.
"Eyes up here, Callahan."
"Don't flatter yourself."
He buttoned the shirt from the bottom up, unhurried, and I sat on the edge of the bed in the robe with my arms crossed, watching him not look at me, which was looking too, just slower.
"Sock under the chair," I said.
"How do you know?"
"Because I saw your foot trying to find it from across the room last night, and I find it riveting that you didn't notice you'd lost it."
He laughed, low, surprised, the same laugh he'd done against my mouth four hours ago, and bent down to fish it out from under the chair. He sat on the chair to pull it on. He found the other one at the foot of the bed.
When he straightened up, he looked at me, and I looked at him, and the look lasted a beat longer than it should have. Neither of us took it anywhere.
"Will you walk me out?" he said.
"Yeah."
I walked him to the door. The keys were still on the entryway floor where I'd dropped them last night. He saw them and bent down, picked them up, and set them on the small table by the door without saying anything.
He stopped with his hand on the doorknob.
"Callahan."
"Rhodes."
"I had a good time."
"Don't be cute."
"I'm not being cute. I had a good time. That's all."
I held his look. He held mine. The hallway smelled like coffee from the apartment across the hall. His hand was on the knob. The night was over. We were two people who had agreed it was over.
"Me too," I said.
He nodded once. He opened the door and went through it, pulling it shut behind him.
I leaned my forehead against the wood and closed my eyes.
The thought I had then I chose not to examine.
I went to make coffee.
Two days later, I was back on the floor.
The L&D floor was a place I knew with my eyes closed.
I knew which monitor beeped through its battery first, which fetal heart rate cuff lost contact when a mother turned onto her left side, which of the resident OBs would order a section too early, and which one would wait.
I knew the smell—disinfectant under the iron-and-warm smell of a body in labor, a baby's specific clean newness after the first bath.
Mrs. Alvarez was in her seventh hour. Her husband had not stopped pacing since five in the morning, and she had asked me three times if she could push, and three times I'd told her no.
I had my hand on the small of her back.
"I want to," she said.
"I know you do."
"My body wants to."
"Your body's almost there. Not yet. Breathe through this one with me."
She breathed through it with me. Her husband stopped at the foot of the bed and stood there with his hands at his sides, useless. I caught his eye and nodded at the chair. He sat down in the chair.
This was the part I was good at. The hand at the back.
The voice. The not yet that landed because I said it woman to woman.
Six years on this floor. Something like four hundred women through the worst hour of their lives.
What I knew about this job I'd not learned in school.
I learned it hour after hour, woman after woman, until the competence was a thing I lived inside of.
I checked the monitor. Her contractions were stacking. We were close.
The sound came up from outside.
The lower, longer rumble of a fire truck pulling in under the ambulance bay's overhang, the diesel changing pitch as it slowed, the long sigh as it stopped.
Two stories down and across the parking lot, but I knew the shape of the sound.
Hartsdale General sat on this corner my whole life, and the firehouses came up that drive for all of it.
I caught myself looking at the window.
It was a half-second. My eyes flicked up over Mrs. Alvarez's head to the window above her bed, and the window didn't face the bay—I knew I couldn't have seen the truck from where I was standing, and I looked anyway.
It was Tuesday. Duke's shift was on Wednesday. The truck out front was not his truck, and the men climbing out of it were not his men.
I brought my eyes back down to Mrs. Alvarez and put my hand back at the small of her back.
"Okay," I said. "Now you can push."
She pushed. Twenty-three minutes later, her daughter was on her chest, screaming hard. Her husband was crying in the chair. I had a hand on Mrs. Alvarez's ankle, telling her she had done it.
I didn't look at the window again.
Sunday morning, I drove to my mother's house.
The house was on Birch Hill, set back from the road behind the stone wall my grandfather had built when the property was new.
I'd grown up here. I knew the creak on the third step, the draft in the upstairs hall, the smell of the kitchen when my mother had been cooking since seven—butter, herbs, the iron skillet she refused to replace.
I parked in the drive and let myself in through the side door because the side door was the door we used.
She was at the stove with the frittata on, the good plates already out—the blue ones with the gold rim that had been her mother's—and the linen napkins folded in thirds on the counter. Coffee was made. The kitchen smelled like Sunday.
"Hi, Mom."
"Hi, sweetheart. Sit. It's almost done."
I poured myself coffee and sat at the counter. She had her hair up in the tortoiseshell comb and a cream sweater I recognized from The Yarn Room's fall line. She looked good. She looked rested. I was glad.
"How's Marcie?" I said.
"Marcie is wonderful. She's been pushing me on this Wednesday class idea—a beginner knit-along, two hours. She thinks we could fill it."
"You should do it."
"I'm thinking about it. She wants me to teach the cable stitch in week three, which is ambitious for beginners, but Marcie has always been ambitious."
"How are the regulars?"
"Mrs. Parisi came in on Thursday with that granddaughter of hers. The one who crochets. She made a blanket for the baby. It was gorgeous, Audrey. The edging was perfect."
I listened. I asked follow-ups. I wanted to know that her week had been good, that The Yarn Room was busy, that she had enough people coming through the door to keep her days full.
I'd been checking on my mother in small ways for as long as I could remember—not because she asked me to, but because I'd watched what happened when nobody checked, and I wasn’t going to be the person who didn't show up.
She slid the frittata onto the good plates and sat across from me. She ate neatly, with attention, the fork set down between bites.
"How was the wedding?" she asked.
"It was beautiful, Mom. Astrid looked incredible."
"The dress?"
"The one with the low back. She was right about it."
"And Mrs. Matthews?"
"Cried from the first toast. I think she started during the processional and never really stopped."
My mother smiled. "That woman. I saw her at Stewart's in May, and she teared up at the deli counter, talking about the rehearsal dinner."
"That sounds right."
"How was Easton?"
"He couldn't get through his vows. He got two lines in and had to stop."
Her face softened. She set her fork down. "Good for him," she said. "Good for both of them."
She meant it. She had always liked Astrid, and she had liked Easton from the moment Astrid brought him to the house—because Easton was a man who came home, who stayed, who had a house, a job, and roots in a town that knew his name.
Easton passed the inventory without knowing he was being inventoried. Most men didn't.
"And your toast?" she said.
"I cried during my own toast."
"Of course you did."
"I held it together for most of it."
We ate. She refilled my coffee without asking. The kitchen was quiet, other than the ticking of the clock on the wall. It was a room I'd eaten ten thousand meals in. It was the safest room I knew.
"So," she said. She set her fork down, picked up her coffee, and looked at me over the rim. "Anyone interesting at the wedding?"
I knew she was going to ask. It was part of the Sunday rotation. It came after the food and before the dishes. She’d been asking some version of it for the last two years, ever since the last boyfriend had ended and the first dates had started and stopped.
"Mom."
"I'm asking."
"You're always asking."
"Because you never tell me anything."
"There's nothing to tell."
"There's never anything to tell. You work doubles, and you come here on Sundays. You're twenty-eight, sweetheart."
"I'm aware of my age."
"I'm not pressuring you."
"You're a little bit pressuring me."
"I just want you to be happy."
"I am happy."
She looked at me. She didn't push it. She never pushed it past the first pass—she just made the pass, let it sit, and moved on.
"Okay," she said. "Tell me about the food."
I told her about the food. I told her about the caterer, the buttercream, the band, and the rosemary focaccia that ran out. I gave her everything I could give her about the wedding that didn't include the man I'd left it with.
Duke Rhodes was a firefighter. His father was a football coach. His mother was a second-grade teacher. He lived in a house I'd never seen. His name was on the Little League sponsor board, and he had been in my bed a week ago.
My mother wouldn’t yell. My mother wouldn’t say anything cruel. My mother would say, He sounds lovely, sweetheart, in a voice that carried the entire weight of her marriage, and the sentence would be the whole conversation we would never have out loud.
I knew this because I'd heard it before.
At sixteen, at nineteen, at twenty-three.
Every time I'd mentioned a man who didn't fit the map, the same voice, the same sentence, the same quiet verdict delivered with a smile and a coffee refill.
She was never angry. She was patient. She was sure.
She had seen how this story ended, and she loved me too much to let me walk into it without hearing her version first.
I'd spent twenty-eight years inside that patience.
So I wasn’t going to tell her about Duke Rhodes.
She started clearing the plates. I stood up to help. We moved around each other in the kitchen—her at the sink, me with the dish towel, the blue plates going back in the cabinet one at a time. We had been doing this my whole life.
"You look tired," she said.
"I worked a double on Friday."
"You always work a double."
"That's because I'm a nurse, Mom."
She handed me the last plate. I dried it and put it away. She folded the dish towel on the counter and looked at me with the look she had—the one that started at my hair and ended at my hands, the quick inventory she didn't know she was running.
"You'd tell me," she said. "If there was someone."
"There's no one, Mom."
"But you'd tell me."
"I'd tell you."
She nodded and kissed me on the side of the head, slightly too hard, and went to get her knitting from the living room.
I stood at the counter with my hands on the dish towel and felt the place at the side of my neck under my ear where the mark was almost gone now, a faint yellow shadow under my jaw that my mother had not noticed.