26. Charly
— ? —
Charly
I’ve tried to tell him twice now, and both times the words just died in my throat.
The first time was in the kitchen, two days after the appointment. He was making coffee, humming, stealing my mug like he always does, and I opened my mouth to say it and instead asked if we were out of oat milk.
The second time was in the car, his hand on my knee at a red light, and I got as far as “Hey, so the doctor,” before I chickened out and turned it into some dumb thing about parking. Both times he looked at me a beat too long. He knows I’m keeping a secret.
He just hasn’t asked, and honestly that’s worse, because every time he’s sweet to me it’s one more thing I’m lying about.
Saturday we go to my dad’s. His garage has been a wreck for about a decade and he finally admitted he can’t move the big stuff on his own anymore.
I sit on an overturned bucket pretending to sort screws, but really I’m just watching Clarence. He’s got an old shirt on and a smudge of grease on his jaw, and he’s dragging a workbench across the floor like it’s nothing while my dad tells him the boat story for the hundredth time.
Clarence actually laughs at it, like he hasn’t heard it four times already. Hands him the right tool before he even asks for it. He just fits here, in the garage, with my dad, like he’s always been part of this and I somehow only just noticed.
My dad straightens up and points a wrench at me. “You know, I like this one. He shows up. You hang on to him, you hear me?”
“I hear you, Dad.” I keep my eyes on the screws. “I’m planning on it.”
“She doesn’t get a choice,” Clarence says, hefting a box onto the shelf. “I’m not letting her go anywhere.”
“Good man.” Dad points the wrench at him now. “So. When are you two actually getting married?”
“Dad.” I feel my face go hot. “We just got engaged.”
Clarence chuckles, not even looking up from the shelf. “We’re planning it, sir. I promise. We’ll give you plenty of warning.”
“Good. I just want to make sure it happens while I’m still above ground.” Dad sets the wrench down. “I’m not getting any younger over here.”
“Dad, stop. You’re going to outlive all of us. You’re too stubborn to die.”
“That’s probably true.” He laughs and claps Clarence on the shoulder, and Clarence ducks his head the way he does when he’s pleased and trying not to show it, and the whole thing just hits me out of nowhere.
Because I can see it. The next ten years, twenty. The two of them out here bickering over some other project. Christmases. Clarence still showing up with grease on his face, still part of all of it.
If I don’t blow it up first.
“You okay over there?” Clarence looks over at me. “You went somewhere just now.”
“I’m fine. Sorting screws.”
“You’re really not, but okay.” He waves me over. “Come here, hold this end for me so I don’t take your dad out with a shelf.”
So I go. I hold the shelf, his hand bumps mine on the bracket, and he smiles at me like I’m the best thing in the room, and I smile back like I’m not hiding a thing the size of the house.
***
In the car on the way home I go quiet again. He notices, he always does, but he doesn’t say anything about it. He just reaches over and holds my hand on the console, his thumb moving back and forth over my knuckles while he drives.
“My dad loves you, you know that, right?” I say. “Like, genuinely. He does not do that with people.”
“I got that feeling. He let me touch his tools.”
“Oh, that’s huge. That’s basically a blood oath in my family.”
“Yeah?” He glances over, pleased with himself. “Was it the part where he threatened me about keeping you, or the part where he made me move the same workbench twice for no reason?”
“Both. In dad language, that’s a marriage proposal.”
He laughs, and it’s so easy, so warm, and I lean my head back against the seat and just look at him for a second. The grease still on his jaw. The way he drives with one hand so he can keep holding mine with the other.
“Thank you,” I say, quieter. “For being good to him. For showing up like that. It means more than you know.”
“Hey.” He brings my hand up and kisses the back of it. “He’s my family now too. That’s how this works, right?”
And that’s the thing that does it. Family now too. I look down at our hands, at the ring catching the streetlights, the real one, the one he got on his knees for without knowing a single thing about that cold little room, and here I am letting him love me on half the story.
“Where’d you go?” he says softly. “You keep doing that today.”
“I’m just tired.” I make myself smile. “You worked me to the bone holding shelves.”
He doesn’t buy it. I can tell. But he lets it sit, and he keeps my hand in his the whole way home, and somehow that’s worse than if he’d dug.
***
That night we end up on the couch in a pile, the way we do. He’s got one arm around me and the remote in his other hand, flipping past everything without landing on anything, and at some point he just gives up and tosses it onto the cushion. I’ve got my head on his chest.
His heartbeat’s right there under my ear, slow, even, the most steadying sound I know.
We don’t say anything for a while. Then he does, in that low voice he gets when he’s half thinking out loud.
“I think we keep the wedding small,” he says. “I don’t want a whole big thing. Just the people who actually love us, decent food, and you in a dress that makes me forget my own name.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot.”
“Constantly. It’s bad.” His fingers move slow up and down my arm. “I keep thinking about the honeymoon too. Somewhere with no signal so nobody can bug us. Just us being idiots in matching tourist hats. I want a picture of you in a really stupid hat.”
“You’re such a sap.”
“Yeah, I know.” He kisses the top of my head. “And then when we’re back, we’re getting a dog. I decided.”
“You and this imaginary dog.”
“A big one. Big and dumb, knocks everything over, loves us anyway.” I can feel him smiling into my hair. “Big yard someday. The dog. You yelling at me to wipe its paws before it wrecks the floors. That’s the dream. That’s the whole thing right there.”
And there it is, the thing I keep almost catching. Every time he talks about what’s coming, he sticks me right in the middle of it. Not what he wants for himself. Not some list. Just us. Every version, every time. Him and me and the dumb dog and the muddy floors.
“Oh, there’s this kid next door,” he says, laughing already. “Like four. She’s decided every package on the whole street is hers. Caught her hauling one of my boxes down her driveway last week like a tiny little thief. I love her, honestly.”
He’s laughing. I’m not.
“Do you want kids?”
It just falls out. I try to make it sound like nothing.
He looks down at me, surprised. “Like, someday?”
I nod against his chest.
He actually stops to think about it, which is so him. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think I do.”
It lands in me like a rock going down a well.
“How many?”
“I don’t know.” He laughs. “Didn’t know there was a quiz.”
“Just ballpark. One?”
“Maybe one. Maybe none for a while, I’m not in any rush.” He shrugs under me. “I just got you. I’m not trying to pack the house tomorrow.”
“What about a whole bunch? You seem like a chaos guy.”
“I’m flexible. I contain range.” He’s still smiling, still not getting it, still talking about it like it’s some fun little someday thing and not the rock sitting on my chest. “Why, you trying to put together a baseball team? Should I be scared?”
“What if you couldn’t have any?”
That one makes him look at me. Really look. His whole face changes.
“Hey.” He shifts so he can see me better. “Where’s this coming from?”
I sit up. I can’t do this with his heartbeat in my ear. “Just answer it. What if you couldn’t. Ever.”
“Why are we doing this right now?”
My eyes are already going. “Please. Just answer me.”
He’s careful now. “Then we’d be okay. If that happened, we’d deal with it.”
“That’s not a real answer.”
“It is, though.”
“It’s not a real answer.” My voice cracks right in half. “It’s the thing everybody says. They all say it, and then five years go by and it turns out to be the exact thing that ends them.”
He’s all the way here now. I can see it click, the second he realizes he’s finally hit whatever I’ve been sitting on all week, and he goes still.
He reaches for my hand. I pull it back.
And then it just comes out. All of it.
“The appointment wasn’t nothing.” Once it starts I can’t stop it. “There’s scarring. A lot of it. Way more than there should be.”
“Okay.” He says it so gently it somehow hurts more. “Okay. What did they tell you?”
“That my chances are bad. That it could take years, and we’d probably need help, and even then it might not work.
That it might just never happen at all.” I’m shaking now.
“And I stood in that waiting room and looked you right in the face and said it was nothing. I let you kiss me, I let you take me to lunch. And it wasn’t nothing, Clarence. It was that.”
“Baby, hey.”
“Don’t. Let me get it out or I never will.”
He shuts his mouth.
I’m crying for real now. Not the pretty kind. The ugly kind, the kind I never let anybody see.
“I didn’t tell you because you asked me to marry you before you knew I might not be able to give you children.
You got down on that couch and asked me without knowing any of this.
” My voice goes to nothing. “And I keep thinking, what if you had known. What if you would have taken it back. What if you never would have asked me at all.”
He just stares at me. Like I slapped him.
“That’s what you’ve been carrying around all week,” he says. “You really think I’d have changed my mind about you. Over that.”
I can’t even answer. I’m crying too hard.
He’s off the couch before I can stop him, down on the floor on his knees in front of me, both hands coming up to my face so I’ve got nowhere to look but right at him.
“Look at me. Charly. Hey. Look at me.” He waits till I do. His eyes are wet now too. “I did not ask you to marry me to get kids out of you. Is that what you think this is? Some kind of trade?”