Chapter 25 The Shower
Lesley
Heather and Amy threw the baby shower on the second Saturday in May, in the backyard of Heather and Jo’s house in Park Hill, under a lilac hedge that had burst into bloom that week as though it had been planning for the occasion.
I’d asked them to keep it small. They’d ignored me, which I’d expected.
By one o’clock, there were thirty people in the yard, and Jo was manning a grill with the grim focus of a woman who took her bratwurst seriously, and the greyhounds were weaving through the crowd accepting pats and stealing whatever anyone put down.
My mother had arrived from Santa Fe on Friday.
She was standing near the lilacs in a turquoise blouse and silver earrings, drinking lemonade and telling Gail about the posole she’d made at Christmas.
She’d been talking to my boss for twenty minutes.
I suspected Gail was going to walk away with a recipe and possibly a job offer.
I’d invited the Cavanaghs myself.
It had taken me a while to decide. This was my shower, thrown by my friends, in my best friend’s backyard.
But the baby was a Cavanagh too. Nancy had knitted her a blanket and written me an apology that asked for nothing.
Clive had spent five months building her a rocking horse in his workshop.
Randy had driven over to help Hank assemble a crib, and Tess had lent Hank a baby book, and they were going to be this child’s grandparents and uncle and aunt for the rest of her life.
I wasn’t going to exclude them from celebrating her because of what was happening between her parents.
And I’d invited Hank. I’d thought about that longest of all.
In the end, it was simple. He was her father.
His family was coming. Leaving him out would have been a statement, and I didn’t want to make one.
I’d texted him the invitation two weeks earlier, with the time and the address, and added that it would be a lot of people and he shouldn’t feel obligated.
He’d replied: I’ll be there. Thank you for including me and my family.
He arrived at one o’clock exactly.
I saw him come through the side gate carrying one end of a wooden rocking horse, with his father carrying the other.
Clive had a plastic shield taped over his left eye and a pair of enormous wraparound sunglasses over that, and he was complaining loudly that he couldn’t see where he was going.
Nancy followed behind them with a gift bag, then Randy and Tess.
They set the rocking horse down on the grass near the gift table, and Heather came over to greet them, and I watched Hank say something to her that made her laugh.
It was a beautiful rocking horse. Solid maple, sanded silk-smooth, with a real horsehair mane and tail and a little leather saddle. Clive had carved a tiny columbine on the side of its neck.
Hank didn’t come over to me right away. He greeted my mother first, politely, with a handshake she accepted with a cool nod.
Then Neil and Amy. Then Priya, whom he’d never met, and Gail, whom he had.
He found Jo at the grill and asked if she needed help, and when she handed him a pair of tongs with an expression of deep suspicion, he took them without comment and started turning bratwurst.
It was another twenty minutes before he came to where I was sitting.
I’d been installed in the place of honor, which was a low Adirondack chair under the lilacs with a pillow behind my back and my swollen feet propped on an ottoman. At thirty-seven weeks, I could get into the chair. Getting out of it was going to be a separate project.
“Hi,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a planet,” I said. “Hi.”
“The yard looks great. Heather and Amy did an amazing job.” He glanced around. “Can I get you anything? Water? Food?”
“I’m fine. Priya’s been bringing me lemonade every fifteen minutes.”
“Okay.” He nodded. He didn’t sit down. He didn’t pull up a chair or crouch beside me or put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll let you enjoy your party. If you need anything, just wave.”
He went back to the grill.
I watched him go. So did my mother, from across the yard. So did Nancy, from where she’d been settled into a folding chair near the gift table, and so did Heather and Amy, who were very obviously pretending not to.
Over the next two hours, I kept track of him without meaning to. I told myself I wasn’t doing it. I was doing it.
He grilled with Jo until the bratwurst was done.
He carried a folding table from the garage when Amy decided they needed one more for the desserts.
He noticed that one of its legs was wobbly and fixed it with a matchbook folded into quarters, which took thirty seconds and which nobody would have noticed if I hadn’t been watching.
He talked to Neil and Amy’s boys about the Rockies’ bullpen.
He let the greyhounds lean on his legs. He spent a long time talking to Evelyn Price, who’d come down from Boulder with her nephew, and at one point Evelyn put her hand on his arm and said something that made him look at the ground and nod slowly.
His phone buzzed once while I was watching. He took it out, glanced at the screen, typed something short, and put it away. The whole exchange took perhaps ten seconds.
I heard Neil say to Amy, not quietly enough, “He hasn’t taken a work call after six in two months. Diane’s handling the on-call now. You should have seen Pike’s face on Thursday.”
“What happened Thursday?” Amy asked.
“Tell you later,” Neil said, and glanced at me, and moved away.
When it was time to open gifts, Heather brought everything over to my chair, and I opened them one by one while Amy wrote down who’d given what.
Onesies and swaddles. A baby carrier from Gail.
A set of board books from Priya, including one about architecture called Iggy Peck.
The yellow booties from Evelyn, which she’d already given me but asked me to open again for the crowd, and which made half the women in the yard say Ohhh in unison.
A second blanket from Nancy, in cream with yellow edging, because she’d decided the first one wasn’t warm enough.
Hank’s gift was small. A children’s board book about Colorado wildflowers, with bright, simple illustrations of columbines and paintbrush and lupine. There was no card. There was nothing written inside the cover.
I held it for a moment longer than the others. Then I handed it to Amy to write down and picked up the next one.
After the gifts, I needed to stand. My back had started to ache, and the baby had wedged a foot somewhere uncomfortable. I planted my hands on the arms of the Adirondack chair and pushed, and nothing happened. I tried again. The chair tipped back slightly and I stayed exactly where I was.
Across the yard, Randy started laughing.
Hank was standing near the grill, twenty feet away. I saw him see me. I saw his whole body move half a step in my direction, the instinct so strong it was almost visible. Then I saw him stop himself, and wait.
He didn’t come. He didn’t rush over and haul me up in front of thirty people like I was helpless. He stood there, watching, with his hands at his sides, and waited to see whether I wanted help, and from whom.
“Hank,” I said. “Can you give me a hand?”
He crossed the yard. He held out both hands. I took them, and he braced his feet and pulled me up out of the chair in one smooth, careful motion. For a second we were standing very close, my hands still in his, my stomach between us. The baby kicked, hard, right against him.
He felt it. I saw his face change.
Then he let go of my hands and stepped back.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Anytime,” he said, and went back to the grill.
My mother appeared at my elbow a minute later with a fresh glass of lemonade and pressed it into my hand.
She didn’t say anything about what had just happened.
She stood beside me and watched the yard for a while, her silver earrings catching the sun, her eyes following Hank as he went back to the grill and took the tongs from Jo without being asked.
“You’ve been watching him all afternoon,” I said.
“I have.” She sipped her own lemonade. “So have you.”
“What are you watching for?”
My mother thought about it. “Ask me after the party,” she said. “Not today. Today’s for the baby.” She squeezed my arm and went to find Gail, who had been trying for an hour to get her recipe for posole.
Nancy found me in the kitchen twenty minutes later, where I’d gone to sit on a stool by the counter and get away from the noise for a few minutes. She stood in the doorway with her hands folded in front of her, looking unusually uncertain.
“May I come in?”
“Of course.”
She came in and sat on the stool next to mine. For a while she didn’t say anything. She looked out the window at the yard, at the lilacs and the crowd and her son standing by the grill with Jo.
“I wanted to thank you for your note,” she said finally. “After my letter. I know you didn’t have to answer it.”
“I wanted to.”
“I’m not going to say anything about you and Hank,” she said. “I want you to know that. I’ve done enough talking about things that weren’t my business.” She paused. “But I wanted to tell you something, if that’s all right. Not for his sake. For mine, I think.”
I waited.
“On Tuesday I called him and asked him to drive Clive to his eye surgery,” she said. “It was Thursday morning, the same time as your appointment. I didn’t know that when I called. And when he told me, do you know what I said?”
I thought I might.
“I said, ‘Couldn’t you go to the next one? Lesley would understand.’” Nancy’s mouth tightened. “I didn’t even hear myself say it. I’ve been saying things like that for seven years. I’ve been saying them for forty-four, if I’m honest. About myself.”
“What did he say?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
“He said you would.” Nancy looked at me. “And that was exactly why he wasn’t going to ask you to.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.