Chapter 23 The Life Without Him #2
“She is,” I said, and I heard how easily it came out, and how little it cost me to say.
I walked home at ten, which was late for me now, slowly, under a clear sky with the city humming all around.
I hadn’t checked my phone all night. When I finally did, climbing the stairs to my door, there was nothing from anyone but a photo from Heather of Moose asleep on the porch with his legs in the air.
I’d had a whole evening that belonged to me, and I hadn’t once wondered where anyone else was.
Evelyn Price came to lunch on the first Saturday in May.
She’d called me the week before, having gotten my number from Tom Whitaker, and asked in her crisp, bright voice whether she might take me out before the baby came.
Her nephew drove her down from Boulder. I met her at the Terminal Bar in Union Station, the old ticketing hall with its soaring arched windows and brass chandeliers, the building my team would spend the next three years expanding.
She looked wonderful. She was wearing a navy wool coat and a silk scarf and walked with a cane she barely seemed to need. When she saw me coming across the Great Hall, she stopped and put her hand over her heart.
“Look at you,” she said. “Oh, look at you.”
We ate at a table by the windows. She ordered a gin and tonic at noon without apology and asked me about everything: the baby, the project, the condo, Priya, the childbirth class.
She laughed at the story about the uterus earrings until she had to dab her eyes with her napkin.
When I told her that my team had gotten the hotel expansion approved, she looked around at the Great Hall and then back at me.
“This building,” she said. “You’re going to add to this building.”
“My team is. I’m going on leave in two weeks.”
“You’re going to add to this building,” she repeated firmly. “I’ll come and see it when it’s done. I’ll be eighty. I’ll bring my cane and tell everyone that I know the architect.”
Near the end of lunch, she reached into her handbag and took out a small package wrapped in tissue paper. Inside was a pair of hand-knitted booties in soft yellow wool, with tiny pearl buttons.
“I haven’t knitted anything in fifteen years,” she said. “My hands aren’t what they were. But I wanted to make something for her.”
I held the booties in my palm and couldn’t say anything for a moment.
Evelyn watched me. Then she said, “May I tell you something about myself?”
“Of course.”
“My husband died when I was sixty-one,” she said.
“We’d been married thirty-four years. He was a good man, Frank.
A kind man. He also traveled for work for most of those thirty-four years, and I raised our three children largely on my own, and everyone always told me how strong I was.
” She smiled slightly. “After he died, I went to Portugal by myself. I’d always wanted to go.
We’d always said we’d go together, when he had time.
And everywhere I went, people asked me who I was waiting for.
The waiter at dinner. The woman at the hotel desk.
They’d see me alone and assume someone was coming. ”
“What did you tell them?”
“The truth,” Evelyn said. “That no one was coming, and I was having a marvelous time.” She took a sip of her gin and tonic. “It took me sixty-one years to find out I could be entirely happy on my own. I hope it takes you less.”
I looked at her across the table.
“I saw you in that hallway,” she said quietly.
“When everyone else was stepping over me. You stopped. You made a plan. You got five people out of a burning building while you were pregnant, with nobody’s help.
” She set her glass down. “I don’t know what you’ll decide about your husband.
It’s none of my business, and I won’t ask.
But I know this. Whatever you decide, you’ll be all right. I’ve seen what you’re made of, dear.”
“Thank you,” I said. My voice wobbled.
“And one more thing.” Her eyes twinkled. “You don’t have to prove it every day. Being strong. You’ve already proven it. You’re allowed to let someone else carry the heavy things sometimes, if they’ve earned it. And you’re allowed to decide they haven’t.”
Her nephew picked her up at two. I walked her to the curb and helped her into the car, and she kissed my cheek and told me to send her a picture the minute the baby came.
I walked home across the Highland bridge with the booties in my pocket, and I didn’t think about Hank once until I was halfway up the hill.
When I did, it wasn’t with pain. It was the same thought I’d been having more and more often lately, in odd moments.
I wondered whether he’d have liked Evelyn.
Then I remembered that he’d met her on a gurney in a parking lot at midnight, and she’d told him his wife didn’t wait for anybody.
He’d told me about it in January, at the coffee shop on Tennyson Street.
He’d said it was one of the worst and best moments of his life.
The evenings were harder.
I won’t pretend they weren’t. I had friends and work and a daughter coming, and a life that I’d built with my own hands, and most days it was enough.
More than enough. But there were nights when I sat on my sofa after dinner, with my feet up and the lights of downtown coming on outside, and I missed him so much it felt like a physical ache under my breastbone, next to where the baby’s feet were.
I didn’t miss the Hank who’d been late. I missed the one who sang Motown badly in the shower. The one who’d sat on the hallway floor crying with a pregnancy test in his hand. The one who, lately, had begun to show up in my life again in small, careful ways that didn’t ask me for anything.
One night in early May, the baby got hiccups. It went on for almost twenty minutes, a rhythmic little jolt every few seconds, and I sat there with my hand on my stomach laughing, and before I’d thought about it, I’d picked up my phone and texted him.
She has hiccups. It’s been fifteen minutes. She’s going to be so annoyed about this when she’s older.
He replied in under a minute. Dr. Kessler said they practice breathing in there. She’s getting ready.
Then: Thank you for telling me. I love hearing about her.
I set the phone down on the sofa cushion. The hiccups kept going. My eyes burned.
It was a message about the baby. It was exactly the kind of thing I’d told him in November I’d always share. It was fine. It was fair.
It was also the kind of thing you send to someone you want to share your life with, and I knew it, and I sat there with that knowledge for a long time.
I called Marisa Holt the following Monday to follow up on Priscilla.
She’d done her research. She told me there might be a civil claim, something about intentional infliction of emotional distress, but it would be long and ugly and expensive and would mean reliving every minute of that night in depositions for the next two years.
“What do you want?” she asked me. “Not legally. Personally.”
I thought about it.
“I want her out of my life,” I said. “I don’t want a settlement. I don’t want an apology. I don’t want to see her name on a court filing. I want to never think about her again if I can help it.”
“Then don’t file,” Marisa said. “You can always change your mind. The statute of limitations gives you time.”
“Thank you.”
“For what it’s worth,” Marisa said, “I think it’s the right call. Most people in your position want to make someone pay. It’s rarer to want to be free.”
That evening, I sat in the glider in the nursery with the booties from Evelyn in my lap and a new list on my legal pad.
Pediatrician confirmed. Daycare deposit paid.
Hospital bag packed, with Heather’s list checked off.
Maternity leave starting May fourteenth.
My mother arriving from Santa Fe on the seventh to stay through the birth.
Under all of it, at the bottom of the page, I’d written one more line without quite meaning to.
Hank?
I looked at it for a long time. Then I left it there.