Chapter 29 Building Something Different
Lesley
Our first date was at a tiny Italian place on Thirty-Second Avenue with eight tables, a chalkboard menu, and an owner named Sal who treated every customer like a nephew who’d been away too long.
It was four blocks from my condo. Hank had called ahead to ask for the table closest to the restroom, and when Sal seated us there with a wink, I didn’t know whether to be mortified or touched.
I settled on both.
“You called ahead about the bathroom,” I said.
“You said you couldn’t be far from one.” He looked briefly uncertain. “Was that too much?”
“No.” I lowered myself into the chair, which took a moment. “It was exactly enough.”
I got up three times during dinner. The third time, Sal intercepted me on my way back to the table and pressed a small plate of lemon cookies into my hands, on the house, for the baby.
Hank had ordered for me while I was gone, the lemon ricotta pasta I’d been eyeing on the board, and when I asked how he’d known, he said I’d looked at it four times before I sat down.
For the first half hour, we were awkward.
Neither of us knew how to do this. We’d been married for seven years and separated for six months, and I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, and we were sitting across a checkered tablecloth like two people on a blind date who’d been warned about each other.
We talked about the baby, because it was easy.
We talked about my leave, which was five days old and already felt strange, like a sweater that didn’t quite fit yet.
Then Hank said, “Can I ask you about something that isn’t the baby or us?”
“Please.”
“The Union Station expansion. You never told me about the design. I’ve been wondering. What did you do with the north facade?”
So I told him. I told him about the window studies, and the mortar joints, and the commissioner with the silver bob.
I told him about Priya presenting and how proud I’d been.
He asked good questions, real ones, about setbacks and materials and how we’d handled the transition between the historic brick and the new glass.
At some point I noticed that I was drawing on a napkin, sketching the elevation for him with Sal’s ballpoint pen, and that he was leaning over the table watching me draw with an expression I remembered from a long time ago.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” He smiled. “You used to do that. When we first met. You drew on everything.”
“I did not.”
“You drew on my contract,” he said. “The day we met. The renovation at the Oxford. You didn’t like where I wanted to put the windows on the new restaurant, and you took the contract right out of my hands and drew what you thought it should be on the back of page four.”
I laughed. I’d forgotten. I had been twenty-eight and the most junior project manager at my firm, and he’d been the rich, arrogant developer who’d bought the old hotel in LoDo and wanted to modernize it, and I’d been sent to tell him no on half his plans.
I’d been so nervous that my hands shook.
And then he’d shown me a window placement so obviously wrong that I’d forgotten to be nervous and just fixed it.
“You were furious,” I said.
“I was furious for about four minutes,” he said. “Then I saw you were right. Then I asked you to dinner.”
“And I said no.”
“Three times.” He turned his wine glass slowly on the tablecloth.
“I asked you out three times, and you said no every time, because you said it wasn’t professional while you were on my project.
The day the renovation finished, you called me yourself.
You said, ‘The project’s over. You can ask me again now. ’”
I’d forgotten that too. I sat there with Sal’s pen in my hand and the napkin sketch in front of me and remembered being that woman, the one who’d told a rich man no three times and then called him on her own terms when she was ready.
“I was never a pushover,” I said.
“No,” Hank said. “You never were. I just forgot for a while that it didn’t mean you didn’t need anything.”
He walked me home afterward, slowly, at my pace, down Thirty-Second Avenue in the warm May dark. At my door he stopped, and I kissed him again, and it was less clumsy this time.
“Next Thursday?” he asked.
“If I’m not in the hospital.”
“If you’re in the hospital,” he said, “I’ll bring the lemon cookies.”
When Hank asked Dr. Morrow for the names of couples therapists, she gave him three.
We met two of them and chose Dr. Miriam Solberg.
I liked that she’d never met either of us.
We weren’t going back to the gray couch in Cherry Creek where we’d given up after three sessions.
We were starting somewhere new, on purpose.
Our first session was on the Monday afternoon after that first date.
Dr. Solberg’s office was on the second floor of a converted Victorian on Pennsylvania Street in Capitol Hill, with a bay window, a worn red rug, and a sofa that sagged a little in the middle.
She was in her fifties, tall and unhurried, with gray-streaked braids and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she offered us tea before she asked us anything.
Hank and I sat on the sofa with a foot of space between us.
She sat across from us in an armchair with her hands folded.
“Lesley,” Dr. Solberg said. “I’d like to start with you. What do you need to see, to keep going?”
I’d thought about it.
“I need to be able to say it the first week,” I said. “When something starts to slip. I don’t want to wait until it’s a pattern. I want to be able to say, That. What you just did. That’s the thing. And I need him to hear it without explaining why it was reasonable.”
Dr. Solberg looked at Hank.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I want too.”
“And what do you need, Hank?”
He was quiet for a moment. “I need her to actually say it,” he said.
“I know that sounds strange. But for seven years she told me things, and I didn’t listen, and she kept telling me anyway, right up to ten o’clock the night of the fire.
” He looked at me. “I don’t want her to ever decide there’s no point.
I need her to keep telling me, even when it’s small. Especially when it’s small.”
Dr. Solberg wrote something on her notepad. “Good,” she said. “Then that’s where we’ll start.”
My daughter was born the next morning.
The contractions started at eleven that night, while I was brushing my teeth.
I’d had practice ones for weeks, but these were different.
They came from somewhere deeper and had a rhythm to them, like a tide coming in.
I timed them sitting on the edge of my bed with my phone.
When they’d been five minutes apart for an hour, I called Heather.
“It’s happening,” I said.
“On my way,” she said. “Call your mom. Call Hank. Don’t do anything heroic.”
I called my mother, who was out of Heather’s guest room and in Heather’s car before I’d finished the sentence. Then I called Hank, exactly the way we’d planned.
He answered on the first ring. It was eleven fifty at night. He sounded wide awake.
“It’s starting,” I said. “Heather’s coming to get me.”
“Okay.” His voice was very calm, and I could hear underneath the calm how much it cost him. “I’ll meet you at the hospital. I’ll be in the waiting room. I’ll wait for Heather’s texts.”
“She’s going to text you once an hour.”
“I know. I’ve been warned.” A pause. “Les. You’ve got this. You’ve always got this. But you don’t have to do it alone. Heather’s there. Your mom’s there. I’ll be right outside the door.”
“I know,” I said, and a contraction hit, and I hung up on him mid-sentence and breathed through it the way Bev had taught us, and Heather’s voice was at my door, and then the night became something else.
I don’t remember all of it. I remember Heather’s hands.
I remember my mother’s voice, singing something in Spanish that her own mother had sung to her.
I remember Dr. Kessler arriving at four in the morning in scrubs with her silver hair pulled back, looking as though she’d been awake for hours and was perfectly delighted about it.
I remember deciding at five that I did not, in fact, need to be a hero about the epidural, and the anesthesiologist becoming, for a brief moment, the person I loved most in the world.
I remember Heather showing me her phone at some point, a text from Hank that said only Thank you.
I’m here. after her four o’clock update, and nothing else, because she’d told him once an hour and he’d listened.
At a quarter to seven, Dr. Kessler said it was time. Heather stepped out into the hallway and came back with Hank.
He’d been in the waiting room for seven hours.
His hair was a mess, and his eyes were red, and he was wearing the same gray sweater he’d worn to my condo two weeks earlier.
He stopped just inside the door and looked at me, and I saw everything in his face at once: terror and joy and the effort of staying exactly where he’d been told to stay.
“Where do you want me?” he asked.
“Here,” I said, and held out my hand.
He came and took it. He stood beside my head, and Heather stood on my other side, and my mother stood at the foot of the bed with her hands pressed over her mouth. Dr. Kessler told me to push.
At twelve minutes past seven on the morning of May twenty-fifth, our daughter came into the world furious, red-faced, and loud.
Dr. Kessler put her on my chest, slippery and warm and screaming, with a damp fuzz of hair on her head that was, unmistakably, the color of a new penny.
She opened her eyes and looked up at me with an expression of profound outrage.
I laughed and cried at the same time, and so did Heather, and so did my mother, and so did Hank, who had his free hand pressed flat against the top of his head as though it might come off.
“Hi,” I said to her. “Hi. There you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”