13. Brooke #2
Days of driving me to work, of tea, of small careful questions about the nausea, and he has never once mentioned that he detonated the biggest success of his life and ate a penalty that could have bought the house he built me out of cardboard for real.
He had a hundred chances. Any other man would have found a way to work it in, casually, oh, by the way, I pulled the book, in case you were wondering how serious I am. It would have been the easiest card to play.
He never played it. He just did it, quietly, and let me find out from my cousin, and drives me to work like it never happened.
I put the sandwich down. I am so tired of being moved by this man against my own will.
***
The OB appointment is on a Friday, and I don’t tell him about it, because it isn’t his to attend, because I have drawn a very clear line about what he gets to be part of and a doctor’s appointment I haven’t decided how to feel about is not on the approved side of it.
My mother drives me. It’s fine.
It’s early, the doctor says everything looks right for how far along I am, a little heartbeat going fast and small on the monitor, a quick insistent flutter that turns me inside out in a way I’m not ready to talk about with anyone.
I hold it together in the room and in the hallway. I hold it together right up until we walk out into the parking lot and I see his car.
He’s parked in the far corner, engine off, and he’s just sitting there, not looking at the building, looking at his hands on the wheel, and my whole body goes hot with a feeling between fury and the other thing I refuse to name.
I tell my mother I’ll be one minute. I walk over. I knock on his window harder than I need to.
He rolls it down. He looks tired and caught and entirely unashamed.
“How did you even know I was here?”
“I didn’t, not for sure.” He doesn’t lie, which is new, which he’s been doing lately, this terrible disarming not-lying.
“Your mom mentioned an appointment this week to Laura, and Laura mentioned it to my mother, and it’s a small circle, Brooke.
I didn’t know which day. I’ve been driving past the three OB practices near your mom’s house on my lunch break all week hoping to see her car. ”
“That’s insane. You understand that’s insane behavior.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t come in.”
“No.” He says it like it’s obvious. “You didn’t ask me to.
It’s not mine to come in. I know that.” He looks at his hands again.
“I just needed to be close. For the part where I’m allowed to be close, which is out here, in a parking lot, forty feet away, not knowing anything.
I just wanted to be in the same lot as the two of you for an hour. That’s all. I’ll go.”
My eyes sting, right there in the parking lot, and I hate it, I hate that he’s found the one thing that gets past everything, which is not the grand gesture, it’s this, the man sitting in a car forty feet away asking for nothing, wanting only to breathe the same air as a heartbeat he’s not allowed to hear yet.
“It was good,” I say, before I can stop myself. “The appointment. Everything’s, it’s good. It’s healthy.”
His whole face changes.
It just breaks open, relief and joy and grief all at once, and his hand comes up to his mouth and he nods, fast, and he can’t say anything for a second, and I watch this man who once forgot I existed come apart over three words about a heartbeat, and I have to walk away before I do a thing I’ll regret, like reach through the window and touch his face.
“Go home, Adrian,” I say, walking backward. “I mean it. Go home.”
“Thank you,” he says, wrecked. “Brooke. Thank you for telling me.”
***
The pastry is Gemma’s fault, technically.
She calls while Adrian’s driving me to work, and I have her on speaker because my hands are cold, and she asks what I’m craving because apparently that’s a thing she needs to know now.
I say, not thinking, not remembering the man in the driver’s seat is a human being with ears, that I would sell a kidney for one of those almond croissants from the place out in Altadena, the tiny one, the one that’s forty minutes away and only open till noon and worth every mile.
“So drive out and get one,” Gemma says.
“It’s forty minutes, Gem. I have a job. I’m not driving eighty minutes round trip for a croissant.”
I forget about it by the time I’m at my desk.
The next morning there’s a white paper bag on my mother’s counter, folded shut, a little grease spot blooming through one corner, still faintly warm. Inside, one almond croissant from the tiny place in Altadena that’s forty minutes away and only open till noon.
There’s no note. There’s never a note.
My mother watches me find it, sipping her coffee, saying nothing.
I stand there in her kitchen holding a warm paper bag and I do the math on what it took.
The eighty minutes, the before-noon window, which means he drove out there yesterday after he dropped me at work and then again this morning, or last night, or God knows, and he did it so it would be warm, and he left it on the counter and let himself out and drove back to be at the curb at seven-thirty like always with the tea, oat milk and one sugar, saying nothing about a croissant.
I eat it standing at the counter.
It’s perfect. Of course it’s perfect. I’m so angry I could cry and it’s the best thing I’ve eaten in weeks and both of those are true at the same time and I’m getting really tired of both of those being true at the same time.
That night I can’t sleep.
I lie in my childhood bed in the dark, and the model house sits on the nightstand a foot from my face, a cardboard silhouette against the streetlight coming through the curtains, and I stare at it the way you stare at a thing you’re trying to talk yourself out of.
It’s just cardboard, I tell myself. It’s glue and cardboard and a man who’s good at grand gestures and bad at the daily two years that actually count. Gemma’s right.
Everyone’s right. Days of tea doesn’t erase it. A cardboard house doesn’t erase it. A croissant, a parking lot, a burned career, none of it reaches back and unbreaks the thing he broke.
I know all of that. I believe all of that.
And I catch my hand halfway to the nightstand.
I don’t even decide to reach for it.
My hand just goes, on its own, toward the little rough roofline, toward the tiny reading nook, toward the garden with my dead father’s tomatoes glued into it by a man who finally too late, learned to read me.
I catch it there, six inches from the house, hovering in the dark, and I pull it back to my chest and hold it there with the other one like it’s committed a crime.
Because I know exactly what I want, lying there in the dark with my hand pulled back from a cardboard house.
I want to stop being angry. I want it so badly it frightens me.
And I am furious, absolutely furious, at how much I want to stop being furious, because the anger is the last wall I’ve got, and it’s starting to feel like cardboard too.