Bonus - Grant #2
Another thump interrupts whatever insult Laurel is preparing, and her head comes up immediately. “Maggie, walking feet, baby! No running on the stairs.”
Silence.
Laurel narrows her eyes at the ceiling while I wait, already knowing exactly what is coming.
A second later, one foot lands upstairs with exaggerated care.
Thump.
A pause long enough to qualify as sarcasm.
Thump.
Another pause.
By the fourth deliberately slow step, I’m laughing so hard that Laurel twists around and points at me. “No. Don’t you dare encourage her. She already thinks every instruction comes with a loophole because you keep congratulating her for finding one.”
“I’ve never congratulated her.”
“You gave her a high five yesterday because I told her not to draw on the wall and she drew on the baseboard.”
From the staircase comes a small, indignant voice. “I was makin’ it pretty!”
Laurel shuts her eyes again and groans out loud.
I lose whatever argument I was pretending to make because I’m laughing again, and Maggie finally appears around the corner in pink pajamas covered in tiny guitars, dark hair pointing in six different directions, one sock on and one bare foot slapping the floor.
She has her stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm by the neck and the deeply offended expression of a child who has been awake for roughly three minutes and has already encountered unacceptable levels of adult interference.
“I did walking feet,” she announces, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. “I did it really, really slow so Mommy wouldn’t say, ‘Maggie, be careful,’ ’cause I was careful. And Bunny was careful too, but Bunny doesn’t got feet like mine, so I carried him.”
“I noticed,” Laurel says, fighting a smile. “Very responsible.”
Maggie nods solemnly, accepting the compliment as her due, then spots me and breaks into a grin so immediate it still catches me off guard.
“Daddy, it’s raining! I looked out my window and it’s raining a lot, and Grandma Celia says when it rains you gotta have pancakes ’cause pancakes make rainy days not boring.
She said that. For real. You can call her if you think I’m lying. ”
Jesus Christ. Four years old and already arriving with corroborating witnesses.
She runs the last few steps across the room, launches herself at me and climbs into my lap with no regard for my spine, my coffee or the fact her knee lands approximately two inches from ending the Mercer bloodline.
I catch her automatically; Laurel catches my mug before disaster joins us on the sofa.
“Careful, menace.”
“I’m not Menace. I’m Maggie.”
“My mistake.”
“I’m Maggie Celia Mercer,” she corrects, because lately the middle name has become essential to all formal disputes.
“And I want blueberry pancakes, but not the blueberries that get all squishy. I want the good blueberries. And Bunny wants chocolate chips, but Mommy said Bunny can’t have food ’cause he’s a toy, so I can eat his. ”
Laurel looks at me. “Tell me again how she inherited her negotiating skills from my side.”
I don’t answer immediately. Maggie has already moved on, explaining at length why the missing sock isn’t actually missing because she knows exactly where it is, she simply doesn’t know where there is.
Her fingers play absently with the band of my watch as she talks.
Laurel sits beside us with one leg tucked under herself, listening with that patient expression she swears came naturally and I maintain was developed through years of surviving me.
And sometimes this part still gets me, and I suddenly understand the meaning of life.
It gets me quietly; a four-year-old knee digging into my thigh, Laurel’s cold feet shoved under my leg because she refuses to wear slippers, rain crawling down the windows, half a cup of coffee going cold on the table, a stuffed rabbit with one ear permanently bent because Maggie carried him through an airport by it for six straight hours last summer.
This.
We spent years putting this off. After the next tour, after the European leg, after the label stopped eating every hour we gave it, after Laurel finished writing an album, after my schedule cleared, after her schedule cleared, after whatever crisis felt important enough at the time to convince us life would eventually hand us a neat little opening and say, Here. Now you can start.
It never did. Life kept moving; we kept moving with it, and later became the easiest word in our marriage.
Until our marriage was gone.
For a long time after Laurel left me, I understood with a kind of vicious clarity that I might’ve fucked myself out of this permanently.
Not just her, not just waking up beside her or hearing her laugh from another room or finding her shoes abandoned directly in the path of every door despite fifteen years of me bitching about it.
This too. A child who knows me as Daddy.
A little girl who crawls into our bed at five in the morning because she had a dream about a shark wearing sunglasses.
Crayons in the junk drawer. Tiny dresses mixed into our laundry.
Plastic cups beside the expensive glassware.
Laurel standing barefoot in the kitchen at midnight cutting strawberries because Maggie announced at dinner that red food tastes better when Mommy cuts it.
All the stupid, ordinary shit I once believed I had unlimited time to want.
Maggie reaches up and grabs my face with both hands. “Daddy. You’re not listening.”
“I’m listening.”
“No, you did the quiet face.”
Laurel glances at me. Of course our kid has catalogued my fucking faces.
“What quiet face?”
Maggie demonstrates by staring blankly into the distance with her mouth hanging slightly open. “That one. You do it when Mommy talks ’bout old stuff too long, and when Uncle Dean tells the fishing story where the fish was this big but Mommy says it wasn’t this big.”
She stretches both arms as far apart as they’ll go, nearly smacking me in the mouth.
Laurel starts laughing. “She has you nailed.”
“Traitor.”
Maggie gasps. “I’m not a traitor. I’m your kid.”
Yeah. She is.
I smooth her hair away from her face, although it immediately springs back into chaos.
Sometimes I think about another child. A boy, occasionally; a little kid following Dean down to the water with a fishing pole twice his height, asking twelve thousand questions while I pretend not to love every one of them.
Other days I picture another girl and know I’d be just as fucked.
I don’t bring it up much. We talked about it once, properly, and Laurel told me she didn’t know whether she wanted another pregnancy, so that was the answer until she decided differently, if she ever did.
Wanting another child doesn’t create a debt she has to pay with her body, and loving the family we have doesn’t become less true because I occasionally imagine another chair at the table.
I mentioned this personal development to Laurel exactly once. She told me, “Grant, you can’t issue yourself a press release every time you demonstrate basic respect for my autonomy.”
I told her recovered addicts get chips for milestones.
She said, “Not controlling your wife isn’t sobriety, babe.”
I maintain the analogy had merit.
Maggie wriggles off my lap with the sudden urgency unique to children who remember breakfast exists.
“Okay, pancakes now. Daddy makes them ’cause Mommy makes the skinny ones, and I don’t like skinny pancakes.
I like the big fluffy ones that go poof.
” She throws both hands above her head to demonstrate.
“And I can stir, but you gotta let me do it by myself this time. Last time you helped when I didn’t need help, and Grandma Celia says helping when people don’t ask is bossing. ”
Laurel’s face goes perfectly still. Mine probably does too.
Our daughter, blissfully unaware she has just walked into years of marital history, looks between us. “What?”
Laurel is the first one to crack. She folds forward, laughing into her hand; I stare at Maggie, who is staring back like both of her parents have become deeply embarrassing in under ten seconds.
“Grandma Celia said that?” I ask.
“Uh-huh. She said you gotta wait till people ask.”
“Your grandmother and I are going to have a conversation.”
“No.” Maggie plants both hands on her hips. “She said you do that too.”
Laurel is laughing harder now.
“Wonderful.”
“Can we make pancakes?”
I look at my wife. She’s older than the girl I married the first time; so am I.
Fine lines appear beside her eyes when she smiles now, and I know every one of them.
I know which knee bothers her when Nashville gets cold, which tea she reaches for when she can’t sleep, which silence means she wants company and which means leave her the hell alone.
I know none of that knowledge gives me ownership over the next version of her.
I only get to meet that woman when she arrives, the same way she keeps meeting every new version of me.
Maybe that is what we should’ve promised the first time. Not forever. Attention. The willingness to keep learning the person standing beside you instead of deciding you already know them.
Maggie grabs one of my fingers and begins pulling with the full force of her twenty-something-pound body. “Daddy, come on. The rain is gonna stop.”
“That isn’t how breakfast works.”
“Yes, it is. Pancakes are for when it’s raining.”
“Who made this law?”
“Grandma Celia.”
“Of course she did.”
“And she’s a grandma, so she knows stuff.”
Laurel gets up beside me, slips her hand into mine and squeezes once. Such a small thing. Years ago, I would’ve held tighter. Now I just hold back.
Maggie drags us toward the kitchen, talking the entire way about blueberries and Bunny and how she needs two pancakes because she is four now and four-year-olds are “bigger hungry.” Laurel catches my eye over our daughter’s head; the smile she gives me is soft, familiar, still entirely her own.