Chapter 23 #2
The months kept going. Nova's first food was pureed sweet potato, on my lap at the kitchen island, the spoon mostly missing her mouth.
She rolled over for the first time at five months on the rug at Easton and Astrid's bungalow, Charlie on a blanket beside her, both of them startled by what their own bodies had done.
She sat up at six and a half months with her hands flat on the rug and her face serious with concentration. She said her first word at nine months.
I was at the kitchen island. Audrey was at the sink. Nova was in the high chair between us, both fists on the tray, looking at me.
"Dada."
I stopped. Audrey stopped. The water at the sink kept running.
Audrey turned off the water, crossed the kitchen, put her hand on the back of my neck, and kissed the side of my head.
"She said it to you first," Audrey said. "I want that on the record."
I filed it beside everything else I was carrying this year—the coffee mugs, the ponytail, the form in the mailbox, the certificate in the drawer. The man I was becoming was a man who filed things he loved and looked at them later, alone, when the looking was just his.
The decision arrived somewhere in the eighth month.
Not a morning I woke up and knew. It came in the accumulation of evenings: Audrey putting Nova down, her voice through the monitor soft and sure.
Audrey on the phone with Colleen, laughing at something about The Yarn Room, the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear while she folded laundry.
Audrey in the kitchen on a Saturday morning in my Hartsdale Fire T-shirt, barefoot, the mascara on, her hair down, looking like a woman who had stopped managing her face and started living in it.
I was the man living his life now. And the woman I was living it with was the woman who opened the door.
I was going to ask her to marry me. The thought didn't arrive as a question. It arrived as a sentence I'd been writing in my head for six months without noticing.
I would ask her on Nova's first birthday. The day we became parents on a state highway had turned into a year of something I never planned for and couldn't imagine undoing. The ring was the question that came after the year.
I called Reese on a Saturday. She picked up on the second ring, and I told her I needed her help picking a ring.
The silence on the other end lasted exactly two seconds before she said, "Finally.
" We drove to Saratoga the following weekend.
Reese vetoed the first three, pointed me to a case in the back I would have walked past, and stood beside me while I looked at the one I knew Audrey would wear: simple, warm, a stone that caught light without asking for it.
I bought it. Reese cried in the parking lot and made me swear not to tell anyone.
I called Astrid and asked if she'd be ready to come to a small thing at my parents' on Nova's birthday. Astrid said yes without asking what it was. She already knew.
I'd not told my parents yet. I drove there on a Wednesday evening, a week before Nova's birthday.
The Rhodes kitchen smelled like vanilla, something baked, and the particular warmth of my mother's stove in late afternoon.
My dad was at the table with the paper. My mother was at the counter, apron on, a serving spoon in her hand.
The radio was on low. The house smelled like every Wednesday of my childhood: small, warm, full of the sounds of two people who had been married for thirty-five years and moved around each other without thinking about it.
My mother turned from the stove before I said a word. She read my face. She had been reading it for thirty-three years now, and she was faster than anyone I'd ever met.
"You want to tell me something," she said.
I stood in the kitchen doorway. I'd rehearsed the line on the drive over. I was going to say the version that had been sitting in my chest for six months.
"I'm going to ask Audrey to marry me. On Nova's birthday."
My mother set the spoon on the counter. She crossed the kitchen without waiting for my father to react. Her arms went around me, firm and tight, her head against my chest because she'd been a head shorter than me for twenty years, and the hug had never changed shape. She held on. I held on.
She let go and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Of course you are."
My dad hadn't moved from the table. He sat with the paper flat under his hands, and his face did something I hadn't seen before. Not the pride thing, not the highlight reel. Something quieter. Something underneath.
He stood. Came around the table. Put his hand on the back of my neck, the same grip from the morning I sat in this kitchen and told him Audrey asked me to leave. The older language. The one from before I was big enough to carry things.
"About damn time, kid." He said it the way he called a play from the sideline—like he'd seen it coming for three quarters and was just waiting for his guy to run it.
He held the grip for a beat. Then he nodded.
"Now ask her."
The words were small, and they were enough. My father, who spent thirty-two years loving me in the language of forward motion and game plans, was standing in his kitchen giving me the only thing the moment needed: permission to stop moving and stay.
My mother was already behind us. She would make the cake. She would tell Caroline. She would make sure Reese didn't ruin the surprise by texting Audrey something cryptic about what to wear. I laughed.
My dad sat back down at the table. Picked up the paper. The small mercy of a man who knew how to let his son walk out of a big moment without having to hold eye contact.
I left.
The truck was in the driveway, the late light on the windshield, the ring box in the back of my closet at home. I sat behind the wheel for a beat.
I spent thirty-two years building a version of my life that nobody could be disappointed in. I didn't build the version I was about to ask Audrey to share. I stopped building. I just lived in it, and the living was the best thing I'd ever done.
I put the truck in gear.