Chapter 32 Andrea
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Andrea
He showed up at six the next morning.
I was still in bed when I heard the knock, and by the time I got downstairs Grandma had already opened the door.
He was standing on the porch holding a paper bag from the bakery on Main Street and a box of tea that I recognized immediately because it was Grandma’s brand, the specific chamomile blend she ordered from a shop two towns over that nobody else in the world drank.
Grandma looked at the tea. Looked at him. Looked at the tea again.
“How did you know what kind I drink?”
“Andrea mentioned it.”
I was standing at the bottom of the stairs in pajamas with my hair going in four directions and I absolutely did not mention Grandma’s tea to Finneas. I mentioned it to Fin. On the porch. Talking about what I was going to get her for Christmas.
Grandma took the tea. “Come in. But I’m watching you.”
He sat at the kitchen table. Grandma put a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him without asking if he wanted any, which was her way of establishing that this was her house and she fed people in it whether they liked it or not. He picked up his fork and started eating.
“So,” Grandma said, sitting down across from him with her coffee. “You live in Atlanta.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Big house?”
“It’s... yes. It’s big.”
“How big?”
He paused mid-chew. “There’s an east wing.”
Grandma’s eyebrows went up. She looked at me. I shook my head: don’t.
“And what is it you do, exactly? Andrea said you run a company.”
“I do. An investment firm.”
“You any good at it?”
“I’d like to think so.”
“Humble too.” She sipped her coffee. “How long have you known my granddaughter?”
“A little over two years.”
“Two years.” She set the coffee down. “And in two years you never once thought to come meet the woman who raised her?”
He put his fork down. “No ma’am. I should have.”
“You should have.” She picked her coffee back up. “Eat your eggs before they get cold.”
I watched this exchange from the bottom of the stairs with my arms crossed, torn between horror and a grudging respect for how efficiently Grandma could make a six-foot man look like a schoolboy in the principal’s office.
He ate his eggs. He answered every question she threw at him without dodging or trying to be charming, which was smart because Grandma could smell charm the way other people smelled burnt toast and she trusted it about as much.
“Andrea has a doctor’s appointment this afternoon,” Grandma said casually, refilling her coffee. “Prenatal check-up.”
“Grandma.”
“What? I’m making conversation.”
I glared at her. She smiled into her mug.
Finneas looked at me. “Can I come?”
I’d told him co-parenting. I’d told him he could be in the baby’s life. Saying no to a doctor’s appointment would be petty and I was trying very hard not to be petty even though petty felt really good right now.
“Fine. But don’t be weird about it.”
He was weird about it. He was a disaster.
In the waiting room he picked up every pamphlet on the rack and read them with the intensity of a man studying for a final exam.
He asked the receptionist three questions before I pulled him into a chair.
His knee bounced the entire time we waited, and when the nurse called my name he stood up so fast his chair scraped the floor.
“Calm down, caveman,” I muttered as we walked back.
He was quiet during the exam. Stood in the corner with his arms crossed, jaw tight, watching the monitor like he could will the baby into appearing faster. When the doctor pointed out the heartbeat on the screen, his whole body went still.
“Strong heartbeat,” the doctor said. “Everything looks good.”
I glanced at Finneas. His eyes were locked on the screen, his jaw working, and I realized with a jolt that his eyes were wet. He blinked hard, looked at the ceiling, looked back at the screen.
“You okay over there?” I asked.
“Fine.” His voice was rough.
“You don’t look fine.”
“I’m fine, Andrea.”
He was not fine. He was standing in the corner of an exam room with red eyes trying not to cry about a heartbeat on a monitor and I had to look away because something in my chest cracked at the sight of it.
In the car afterward I handed him the ultrasound printout without looking at him. “Here.”
He took it. Stared at it for so long I checked to make sure he was still breathing. His thumb rested on the edge of the image, careful, like he was afraid of smudging it.
“That’s our baby,” he said quietly.
“That’s our baby.”
He drove us home one-handed because he wouldn’t put the photo down.
The next morning he showed up with peonies and a question.
“Date?”
“No.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow.”
He left. I stood at the counter holding the peonies and Grandma poured herself more coffee without looking at me.
“He’s persistent,” she said.
“He’s annoying.”
“Those are sometimes the same thing.”
A few days later I came downstairs and he was already at the table with Grandma, both of them with coffee, mid-conversation about the fence.
“It’s been crooked since 1987,” Grandma was telling him. “My husband Harold tried to fix it. Harold was a wonderful man but he was not a fence person.”
“I could take a look at it.”
“That’s what Harold said.” She sipped her coffee. “Harold was wrong.”
“I think I can handle a fence.”
Grandma raised an eyebrow at me from across the table.
I raised one back. He went out and fixed the fence that afternoon, and when he was done it was straight.
Actually straight. Grandma inspected it three times, running her hand along the top rail, before she said “it’ll do” which was the highest praise she gave anyone who wasn’t dead.
Another morning I came down and heard his voice from outside. I looked through the kitchen window and he was in the garden pulling weeds while Grandma sat in her lawn chair with her tea, pointing at spots he’d missed.
“That one. No, the one next to it. The tall one. Finneas, that’s a flower.”
“They look the same.”
“They do not look the same. One has rounded leaves and one has pointed leaves. Your generation can’t tell a weed from a petunia.”
I watched him crouch in the dirt in clothes that probably cost more than Grandma’s monthly grocery bill, pulling weeds under the supervision of a seventy-three-year-old woman in a lawn chair, and I had to turn away from the window because my face was doing something I didn’t authorize.
He asked me on a date every morning. I said no every morning.
He said okay every morning. He never sulked about it, never guilt-tripped, never brought it up again after I answered.
But he kept asking, and that was the most infuriating part because I wanted him to stop so I could stop thinking about what I’d say if I ever changed my mind.
One afternoon I came home from my walk and heard Grandma cackling from the living room.
I walked in and found Finneas on the couch beside her with a photo album open across both their laps.
“And this one,” Grandma was saying, pointing at a page, “this is her first day of school. She refused to wear the dress I picked out and wore her mother’s rain boots instead. With shorts. In September.”
“Grandma.”
“Oh, you’re back! Come sit, I was just showing him...”
“I can see what you were showing him.”
“She had the chubbiest cheeks,” Grandma said to him, ignoring me entirely. “Everyone wanted to pinch them. She bit a woman at church once for trying.”
“I was three.”
“You knew exactly what you were doing. You looked her right in the eye and chomped.”
Finneas was looking at the album with an expression I couldn’t read. His finger was resting on a photo of me at maybe three years old, sitting on a man’s shoulders, both of us grinning so wide our faces were mostly teeth.
“That’s her father,” Grandma said, softer now. “Michael. Tallest man in Whitebrook. She used to climb him like a tree.”
“What was he like?” Finneas asked, and the way he asked it, leaning forward, his voice dropping, made me stop in the doorway because it wasn’t small talk. He wanted to know.
“Terrible taste in music,” Grandma said.
“Worse cook. Burned water once. I didn’t think that was possible but he managed.
” She turned a page. “He built that porch swing out there. Took him three tries. The first two collapsed the second anyone sat on them. Andrea’s mother said if the third one broke she was buying one from the store and he could live with the humiliation. ”
“Did it hold?”
“It’s still there. Twenty-five years and it hasn’t wobbled once. He was bad at most things but when he got something right, he got it right for good.”
She said that last part looking at me, not at Finneas, and I knew it wasn’t about the swing.
He asked about my mother next. Grandma turned to a page near the back, my parents’ wedding photo, my mom in a simple dress with flowers in her hair, my dad grinning so hard his eyes were nearly closed.
“She was a vet,” Grandma said. “Had a practice on Oak Street. Every stray in a twenty-mile radius ended up at her door. Your girl gets that from her.”
“I’m not his girl, Grandma.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Andy. I was talking to him.” She didn’t look up from the album. Finneas had the good sense not to react.
“Andrea always loved animals,” Grandma continued, turning the page.
“She doesn’t just love them, she collects them.
As a child she brought home everything. Frogs, a bird with a broken wing, a snake once that I did not appreciate.
I found it in the bathroom and nearly had a heart attack.
She was seven and she looked me dead in the eye and said ‘Grandma, he was cold.’”
He almost smiled. I could see the corner of his mouth fighting it.
“The peonies in the garden,” Grandma continued, running her finger along a photo of my mom kneeling in the dirt, flowers everywhere.
“Those were hers. She planted every single one. After the accident I couldn’t bring myself to pull them out.
They died on their own a few years later.
The soil changed or something.” She paused. “I never replanted them.”
Finneas was quiet, his eyes on the photo. Then: “Andrea used to talk about them. The peonies. How her mother grew them along the fence.”
“She told you that?”
“Yes.”
Grandma looked at him differently then. Something shifted in her face, the interrogation softening into something more complicated. She closed the album and patted his hand once, brief, almost businesslike.
“You want more coffee?”
“Please.”
I stood in the doorway watching my grandmother pour coffee for the man who broke my heart, and the annoyance I was supposed to feel wasn’t there.
Instead I watched him hold the mug she handed him with both hands, the same careful way he’d handled the album, and felt something loosen in my chest that I’d been gripping for weeks.
I told the therapy group about it on Wednesday.
“He’s been showing up every morning. Flowers, breakfast, Grandma’s tea. He asks me on a date, I say no, he says ‘okay’ and comes back the next day.”
“How long?” Adela asked.
“Two weeks.”
“Make him earn it. If he folds after a month, he wasn’t worth it. If he’s still there in three, consider it.”
“Is he hot when he begs?” Hallie asked.
“Hallie.”
“What? It’s a valid question. Begging is a spectrum. Some men do it pathetically, some do it attractively. Where does he fall?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“You’re blushing. That answers it.”
Tara handed me a granola bar. “How are you feeling? Still nauseous?”
“Better. The mornings are easier.”
“Prenatal vitamins?”
“Taking them.”
“The folate?”
“Tara, I laminated the list.”
“That’s all I needed to hear.”
The group chat lit up that night.
Hallie: scale of 1-10 how hot is the begging Adela: leave her alone Hallie: I’m doing research Tara: Andrea please drink water before bed the second trimester dehydration is real Hallie: TARA WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HOT BEGGING Tara: hydration is always relevant
I laughed so hard I woke Grandma up. She knocked on my wall. “Go to sleep, Andy.”
The next morning I came back from my walk and he was on the porch.
Sitting on the bench the way he did every day, but this time he was reading.
I stopped at the bottom of the steps because the book in his hands was mine.
My copy, or a copy of it anyway, the same one I’d read to Fin on the porch dozens of times.
He was about halfway through, brow furrowed, turning pages with his thumb, so absorbed he didn’t look up when I approached.
I stood there watching him read my book on my grandmother’s porch and felt something in my chest crack open a little further.
I sat down beside him. He glanced up, surprised, because I hadn’t chosen to sit near him since the night on the porch steps. I could see him processing it, the careful way he didn’t react too much, didn’t smile, didn’t shift closer. He looked at me for a second, then went back to his book.
I pulled my own book out of my bag and opened it.
We read side by side for an hour. Neither of us spoke.
The morning was quiet around us, birds in the garden, Grandma’s radio playing through the kitchen window.
His shoulder was six inches from mine and I was aware of every one of those inches, the warmth radiating off him, the sound of his breathing, the way he turned pages with his thumb.
I could smell his cologne, faint, mixed with coffee, and underneath it the scent that was just him, the one my body recognized before my brain caught up.
I’d missed this. Reading beside someone.
The quiet company of a person who didn’t need to fill the silence to justify being there.
I’d missed it since the library at the estate, the two armchairs, the fireplace, the hours we spent in the same room without talking because the talking wasn’t the point.
He finished a chapter and closed the book on his thumb, looking out at the garden. I finished a page and didn’t turn it.
My phone buzzed with a text from Mary. I picked up my bag, stood, and on my way past his chair my hand found his arm and squeezed. Brief, barely there, my fingers pressing into the warmth of his skin through his sleeve before letting go. I didn’t look at him when I did it.
I went inside and stood in the hallway with my hand still warm from his arm, my heart doing something complicated that I wasn’t ready to name.
That evening I called Mary, lying on my bed with one hand on my stomach, phone on speaker.
“He won’t leave,” I said.
Silence on the other end. Then: “Do you want him to?”
I stared at the ceiling, at the crack above the light fixture, the same crack that had been there since I was a kid.
“Maybe not.”