Chapter 17 You Don’t Get Points
Lesley
My thirty-sixth birthday fell on the last Thursday in February, and it was the first birthday in eight years that I didn’t spend wondering what time my husband would get there.
I spent the morning at work, running a design review for the Union Station expansion with the historic preservation board, a group of retired architects and civic volunteers who took their jobs extremely seriously and considered every change to the building’s century-old facade a personal attack.
It went well. Priya handled the presentation of the window studies without a single stumble, and one of the board members, a woman in her eighties with a silver bob, told her afterward that she had “a real feel for masonry,” which Priya treated as the greatest compliment of her life.
At noon, Gail brought in a cake. The whole office sang, badly. Brody, the popcorn intern, gave me a card that said Sorry about the fire alarm on the front and Happy birthday on the inside, and I laughed so hard I had to sit down.
At twelve thirty, my phone rang. It was Hank.
He’d texted me the week before. Would it be okay if I called you on your birthday? Maybe around lunch? If you’d rather I just text, that’s fine too. I’d said a call at lunch was fine.
It rang at twelve thirty exactly, without the five-minute drift or the ten-minute apology I’d once have braced for. I stepped into an empty conference room and answered.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Are you having a good day?”
“I am, actually.” I told him about the preservation board and the woman who’d complimented Priya’s masonry instincts, and Brody’s card, and he laughed at the right places.
He asked how I was feeling. I told him the heartburn had gotten ridiculous, and he said his mother had sworn by almonds for heartburn when she was pregnant with Randy, and I told him I’d try it.
He didn’t mention a gift. He didn’t mention dinner. He didn’t ask what I was doing that night, although I suspected he wanted to know. After about ten minutes, he said, “I’ll let you get back to your day. I just wanted to hear your voice and say happy birthday.”
“Thank you for calling.”
“Thank you for letting me.”
That night, Heather and Jo and Amy took me to dinner at a Basque place on Tennyson Street, and we ate too many croquetas, and Amy gave me a baby onesie that said My mom can handle it across the front, and then took it back and replaced it with one that said My mom asked for a project coordinator, which she’d had custom printed after I told her the story.
I laughed until I cried. When I got home at ten there was nothing on my doormat and no new message on my phone.
I stood in my kitchen and noticed that I felt fine about that. Better than fine. There had been no grand gesture to evaluate, no roses to decide how to feel about. He’d called when he said he’d call, talked for ten minutes, and let me have my night.
My mother had called that morning at six fifteen, before I was even out of bed, which she’d done every birthday of my life at almost exactly that hour, because it was the minute I’d been born.
She’d sung the whole song, badly, the way she always did, and I’d laughed and let her.
Then she’d asked whether I thought he’d call.
I called her back that night and told her.
“At twelve thirty,” I said. “Exactly when he said he would.”
My mother was quiet for a moment. “Hm,” she said.
That was all she said about it. She asked about the baby and my ankles and the hotel project, and told me about her neighbor’s new rescue dog, which had eaten a whole ristra of chiles off her porch.
When we hung up, I sat on the sofa for a long time with the phone in my lap, thinking about that Hm.
My mother had spent years waiting for my father to call when he said he would.
I wondered what it cost her to say nothing more than that.
The glucose test was the following Tuesday.
I was twenty-seven weeks pregnant, and the test involved drinking a bottle of something that tasted like flat orange soda mixed with regret, waiting an hour in Dr. Kessler’s office, and then having my blood drawn.
Hank was in the waiting room when I arrived, as usual.
He’d brought a paperback, which I noticed with some amusement, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Hank read a book that wasn’t about hotel financing.
“What are you reading?”
He held up the cover. It was a guide to the first year of a baby’s life, dog-eared in several places.
“Randy’s girlfriend lent it to me,” he said. “Tess. She’s a pediatric occupational therapist. Did you know newborns can’t see more than about a foot in front of their faces?”
“I did know that.”
“I didn’t.” He put the book down. “I’m on the chapter about sleep. It’s terrifying.”
I drank my orange sludge. We sat side by side with one empty chair between us, which had become our habit without either of us discussing it, and waited for the hour to pass.
Across the waiting room, a young man with a toddler asleep on his shoulder and a very pregnant wife beside him kept glancing at Hank’s book. Eventually he leaned over.
“Sorry. Is that the one about the first year? My sister-in-law keeps telling me to read it.”
“It’s good,” Hank said. “The sleep chapter is terrifying. Skip it until you have to.”
The man laughed. They talked for a few minutes about car seats. Hank told him about the free inspections at the fire station on South Pearl Street, and wrote the address on the back of a receipt, and handed it over. The man thanked him and went back to his wife. Hank went back to his book.
I watched the whole thing sideways. It was nothing.
A stranger with a question and a man who answered it kindly and then let it go.
I’d seen Hank be generous to strangers a thousand times.
What I noticed was that he hadn’t turned the conversation into a performance for me.
He hadn’t glanced over to see if I was watching. He’d simply helped, and stopped.
It was a strange hour. Easy, in a way I hadn’t expected.
We talked about the baby. We talked about the house, where he’d hired a painter to do the room for her in a soft yellow he’d picked from a sample card Heather had helped him choose.
I raised my eyebrows at that, and he said Heather had called him out of the blue in January and offered to help, and made it very clear that she was doing it for the baby and not for him, and he’d said that was fair.
We talked about his parents. His father was building a rocking horse in his workshop.
His mother was knitting a second blanket because she’d decided the first one wasn’t warm enough for a Colorado winter.
At some point, he said, very casually, “I’ve made every appointment. Since November.”
I turned my head and looked at him.
He said it without any particular weight. It wasn’t a boast. It sounded more like a man thinking out loud, noticing something about himself that surprised him. But I heard what was underneath it. I heard the part of him that had been counting, and hoping I’d been counting too.
“I know you have,” I said.
“I just mean...” He stopped. “I don’t know what I mean.”
“I think you do,” I said gently. “I think you want me to notice.”
He looked at the floor.
“I have noticed,” I said. “I’d have to be blind not to. You’ve been early to every appointment. You call when you say you’ll call. You haven’t come to the condo without being asked. You don’t push. Your phone’s always away. I see all of it, Hank.”
“Okay.”
“But you don’t get points for becoming dependable after I leave.”
I said it quietly. I didn’t say it to hurt him. I said it because it was true, and because I’d been thinking it for weeks and knew that if I didn’t say it once, clearly, it would sit between us and harden into something worse.
“If you’d done this two years ago,” I said, “or last year after I told you in the kitchen how I felt, or after the counseling, or the day I showed you the pregnancy test, it would have meant everything. It would have saved us. But you did it after I packed a suitcase. After I nearly died in a fire. I’m glad you’re doing it.
I really am. For her sake and for yours.
But I can’t give you credit for doing the things you should have been doing all along, just because you finally started when you were about to lose me. That’s not how it works.”
He was quiet for a long time. The nurse came out and called another patient’s name. A toddler across the room dropped a plastic truck and burst into tears.
“You’re right,” Hank said finally.
I waited for the rest of it. The explanation. The but. The list of reasons.
It didn’t come.
“I don’t want points,” he said. “I think I did, a little. Just now. I think some part of me has been keeping a tally, hoping it adds up to something.” He rubbed his thumb along the spine of the baby book.
“I think when you’ve been told you failed at something, you want very badly for somebody to tell you you’ve stopped. ”
“That makes sense.”
“It does. It’s also not your job.” He looked at me.
“I don’t want to be a father who counts the times he showed up.
I want to be the kind of father where it would never occur to anyone to count, because of course I was there.
Of course I’m there. That’s just who her dad is.
” He paused. “If I’m keeping score, I’m still treating it like something extra.
Like I’m doing you a favor. And it’s not extra. It’s the whole thing.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t, for a moment.
The nurse called my name. I stood up to have my blood drawn. When I came back ten minutes later, pressing a cotton ball against the inside of my elbow, he was reading the baby book again, as though the conversation had never happened.
He didn’t bring it up again. Not in the parking lot, not in his text that evening asking how I was feeling after the sugar drink. He didn’t make a speech about how he’d grown. He didn’t thank me for my honesty in a way that made it about him.
He just kept showing up.
The results came back three days later. I’d passed. No gestational diabetes. I texted him the news, and he replied with a single line.
That’s great. She’s already better at tests than I was.
I laughed, alone in my kitchen. Then I put the phone down and stood there for a while with my hand on my stomach, thinking about what he’d said in the waiting room, and about how hard it must have been for him to agree with me without reaching for a single defense.
I’d known Hank Cavanagh for eight years. I had never once seen him lose an argument without explaining why he should have won it.