22. Andrea
— ? —
Andrea
Kirk asks me to keep Thursday afternoon free, and won’t say why, and shows up at noon wearing the navy tie with the tiny gold diamonds.
His father’s tie. The borrowed one. The one from the courthouse.
“Kirk.” My stomach performs a maneuver that has nothing to do with the baby. “What did you do?”
“Happy anniversary,” he says. “Six years today. Get in the car.”
“Our anniversary is-” I stop, count, and the date lands on me all at once, because I’ve been measuring this year in weeks-since-the-accusation for so long that I stopped measuring it in anything else. “Oh my God. It’s today.”
“It’s today.” He opens my door. “I have one stop planned. If you hate it, we leave, and we never speak of it, and I take you for waffles. That’s the whole itinerary. Waffles are guaranteed either way.”
The car winds downtown, and I know where we’re going four blocks before we get there, and my hands go cold in my lap.
The courthouse smells like floor polish and old paper.
Six years and it hasn’t changed: the water-stained ceiling tiles, the fluorescent lights that make everyone look vaguely ill, the corridor where I once stood in a forty-seven dollar dress and shook.
Kirk leads me past the clerk’s window, down the hall, to the little ceremony room, and standing beside the table, gray-haired now, in a cardigan instead of robes, is a face I haven’t seen in years.
“Margaret,” I breathe.
“Well.” She looks me over - my face, the bump, Kirk’s hand around mine. “You two got taller. And rounder, one of you.”
“You remember us.”
“Honey, I married four thousand couples in that job. I remember maybe ten.” She settles her glasses. “You’re the couple with the napkin vows. I remember he cried before you did. I had money on it going the other way.”
Kirk’s ears go red. I don’t look at him, but I can feel it.
“I kept it, you know.” She digs in her purse and comes out with a scrapbook, soft at the corners, and flips it open near the middle.
There it is - Kirk’s handwriting on a cocktail napkin, pressed flat under plastic.
“I photocopied it right after the ceremony. It’s in here between a couple who said their vows in Klingon and a bride who showed up on a horse she couldn’t stop. ”
Kirk makes a sound that’s half a laugh and half something else.
She closes the book and points at two spots on the floor. “Stand there.” Then, to Kirk: “You called my niece, who called my daughter, who drove me in from Cedar Falls, so this better be good. Go on. You said you had a speech.”
Kirk takes both my hands. His palms are sweating. Six years, and his palms are sweating.
“Andrea. I’m not here to renew our vows.” His voice is steady but only just. “The old ones don’t need renewing. They need amending, because I broke one, and I don’t want to stand in front of you pretending I didn’t.”
The room goes very still. Margaret’s smile fades into quiet attention.
“Six years ago, in this room, you made me promise to always believe in you.” His grip tightens.
“Even when everyone else doesn’t, you said.
And I said always. And then the one time it counted, the one time the whole world was one voice telling me not to believe you, I broke it.
So I can’t just stand here and re-say it like the words still have their warranty-”
“Kirk.” My voice cracks straight down the middle. “Stop.”
He stops. The old panic crosses his face, the fear that he’s built the wrong gesture.
“You don’t get to do this here,” I whisper, and the anger arrives out of nowhere, riding in on the grief, both of them mine and both of them true. “This room is the one place where those words were perfect. You brought me back to the scene of the promise to tell me the promise is dead?”
“No. God, no. Andrea, look at me. I brought you back to make a better one.”
The fluorescent lights hum. Margaret has become a statue in a cardigan. The baby rolls, slow, under my ribs.
“Then make it,” I say. “And Kirk. It had better be true. Not beautiful. True. I’ve had beautiful. Beautiful nearly killed me.”
He nods. Breathes. And when he speaks, it isn’t a speech, it’s slower than a speech, it’s a man laying stones one at a time and checking each one holds weight.
“I promise to believe you,” he says. “And on the days when the old voice gets loud and belief comes hard, I promise you’ll know.
I will bring you the doubt while it’s still small, in daylight, out loud, instead of feeding it in the dark until it’s big enough to eat us.
You’ll never again learn what I’m afraid of from what I do.
You’ll hear it from me first. That’s the amendment.
Not ‘I’ll never doubt.’ I’m not built to promise that anymore, and you’d be right not to buy it.
‘You’ll always know.’ That one I can keep until I die. ”
The lights hum. My face is soaked. Somewhere down the hall, a copier churns, and life goes on the way it always does.
“Margaret,” I manage. “Do you have a tissue?”
“Honey, I brought the box.”
I take one. Blow my nose with zero elegance. And then I take my husband’s hands back, because it’s my turn, and I owe him a true one too.
“I promise to tell you when I’m testing you,” I say.
“Because I do it. I have been doing it for three months. I leave gaps and watch to see what you do with them, and every time you pass, I move the wall back another foot without telling you the wall moved. That’s not fair fighting.
So: you’ll always know too. Where the wall is.
When it moves. What passed and what didn’t.
” I press his hands flat against the curve of our daughter.
“And I promise to believe in the man you’re building.
Not the one your mother built. I’ve met them both now. I know the difference.”
Margaret clears her throat. It takes her two tries.
“Well,” she says thickly. “By the power vested in me by absolutely nobody anymore, I pronounce you still married. Better than before, if you want my professional opinion, and you’re getting it either way.” She points at Kirk. “Kiss her. That part I’m still licensed for.”
He kisses me, and I laugh into it, and we’re both crying, and Margaret pretends not to notice, the way she pretended six years ago, the way she has pretended for four thousand couples, the very best of them.
Before we leave, she presses a small card into my hand. Yellowed. Official. Our names in typewriter font, a date six years old.
“File card from the original ceremony,” she says. “I kept my ten. Told you that. You two were number six.” She closes my fingers over it. “Bring me the baby sometime. I’ll waive the fee.”
On the courthouse steps, in the afternoon sun, Kirk stops me.
“Waffles?”
“Obviously waffles. Your daughter has been chanting for them since the vows.”
My phone rings in my bag.
I almost let it go. On this step, in this light, with this man, the world can wait. But three months of hard-won transparency have their reflexes, so I check the screen, and the number on it stops me cold.
A number I don’t know.
Kirk reads my face, then the screen. His jaw tightens by one degree.
“You don’t have to-”
“We don’t hide from phones anymore.” I answer it. “Hello?”
“Andrea. It’s Katherine - Katherine Ellis.
I’m sorry to call out of nowhere, and sorry for how I got the number; I asked Jenna.
I hope that’s all right.” Her voice is careful, wound tight, a woman choosing every word off a shelf.
“It’s not an emergency. But it’s not nothing, either, and you should hear it before Saturday, and not at your own baby shower. ”
“Hear what?”
A pause travels down the line from wherever careful women pause.
“It’s about Ethel,” she says. “And what she’s telling people in Palm Beach.”