Chapter 5 – June
JUNE
The dining table has become a war room.
Three venue brochures fanned out by the salt cellar.
The guest list with my handwriting now crowding the margins next to Tanya's, cross-outs and question marks and a little tally of dietary restrictions I compiled because of course I did.
The fabric swatch pinned to the Pinterest printouts with an earring I couldn't find the mate to.
A seating chart in pencil. A second seating chart in pen, because the pencil one failed to account for the feud between Tanya's cousin and Tanya's other cousin, information she delivered by text at midnight with seven follow-up messages and a voice note.
Forty names. Five months out. And I've already called two florists.
I catch myself reaching for the third brochure and stop, hand flat on the table.
How did this happen? Four days ago I opened a folder out of politeness.
Now I know the deposit structure of a party venue in Chelsea and I've had a twenty-minute phone call with a woman named Gisele about balloon arches, during which I said the sentence we'd prefer organic shapes over columns with total sincerity.
I used to hold thirty teenagers' attention with nothing but a copy of Of Mice and Men and force of will. Now I'm an unpaid event planner for a lime-sized baby.
The lock clicks. I look up, surprised—it's barely six, and six o'clock Matt sightings have become rare enough to remark on.
He comes through the door with his jacket over his arm, mid-loosening his tie, and stops when he sees the table. For a second I watch him take it in. The brochures. The swatch. The two seating charts. Me, in the middle of it, with a highlighter behind my ear I didn't know was there.
"What's all this?" He comes closer, picks up a brochure, flips it over. "Is this—Tanya's shower?"
"The shower that is five months away, yes. The shower for the baby who currently weighs half an ounce. That shower."
He laughs and sets the brochure down, and then he's behind my chair, hands on my shoulders, thumbs digging into the knot that's been living at the base of my neck since the balloon phone call.
"Look at this. June." He surveys the table again, and there's real admiration in his voice, warm and easy. "The seating chart alone. You've already figured out the cousin thing?"
"How do you know about the cousin thing?"
"Tanya told me. She said you were handling it." He kisses the top of my head. "This is incredible, baby. You're incredible. She's lucky to have you."
"She's lucky to have your credit card, apparently."
"Both. She can have both." He comes around and drops into the chair across from me, and for once there's no phone in his hand, no screen lighting up his face.
He's just looking at me, smiling, and it's the smile from the old kitchen, the inventory-spreadsheet kitchen, the one where we were tired and broke and certain.
"I'm serious. I keep thinking about how good this is.
You two. Spending real time together, doing this stuff.
My girls, finally close. It took years but we're getting there. "
My girls.
The words land in my chest and sit there, wrong-shaped.
My girls. As though Tanya and I are a matched set.
As though his oldest friend and his wife are two planets he's been patiently nudging into alignment, and now he gets to stand back and enjoy the view of his own handiwork. As though any part of this was my idea.
I look down at the seating chart so he won't see whatever just moved across my face.
He means it kindly. That's the unbearable part.
There's no cruelty in it, no calculation.
He watched me quit my job, watched me fold my life into his for sixteen years, and it genuinely never occurred to him that I did it for him and not for the world that came with him.
In his head, Tanya and I becoming close is a gift he's giving both of us.
My Tuesday yoga class, my afternoons, my table, my highlighter.
All of it redistributed in the name of harmony, and he's proud of the arrangement.
"June?" He leans forward, catching the silence. "You okay?"
"Fine." I pull the swatch loose from the earring pin and smooth it against the table. "Dusty rose. The good dusty rose, apparently."
"There you go." He grins, satisfied, crisis averted, whatever that crisis was passing right over his head.
I watch him for a second. He's got his jacket back over his arm already, which means this is a stop, not a stay. Something in me decides to push, gently, just to see what gives.
"What about you?"
"What about me?"
"What are you planning?"
He blinks at me, genuinely blank. "Planning for what?"
I let the pause sit there. One second. Two.
"My birthday."
"Oh—" His face does something complicated, half laugh, half flinch, and then it's all laugh, easy and confident, the laugh of a man covering a gap he hopes you didn't notice. "Of course. Baby, of course. It's three weeks away. I know when your birthday is."
"I didn't say you didn't. I asked what you're planning."
"I'm planning—" he gestures loosely, "—something great. Something you'll love. It's handled."
Handled. The word his staff uses in emails. It's handled, Mr. Tierney. Somewhere in his office, I would bet the good dusty rose table linens, there's an assistant named Denise holding a calendar reminder with my name on it.
I gesture at the table. At the brochures and the two seating charts and the midnight voice notes made visible.
"Because Tanya isn't going to pop for another five months, and yet here we are.
Full-scale planning. Venues booked, deposits discussed, a folder with tabs.
Her thing gets five months of runway." I keep my tone light.
Breezy, even. "My thing gets a handled."
He doesn't bristle. He never bristles. He comes around the table again and takes my face in his hands, the move that still works on me after sixteen years, God help me.
"June. Listen to me." His eyes are steady and warm and completely sincere.
"Your birthday is going to be perfect. I promise you.
Perfect. I know exactly what I'm doing. Three weeks, and you're going to walk in somewhere and your whole face is going to do the thing it does, and I'm going to feel like the smartest man in the city. "
"What's the thing my face does?"
"The thing where you're trying not to cry because you're happy." He kisses me, quick and sure, and grabs his briefcase from where he dropped it by the door. "I know my wife."
I know my wife. Said by a man who didn't know his wife was at a baby store on Tuesday until his best friend texted him a report about it.
"Where are you going?" I ask, though I already know.
"Back to the office, just for a couple hours.
The fit models ran late and Denise moved the review to seven.
I only came home because I forgot the spring deck.
" He holds up a flash drive from his pocket as evidence, exhibits it, then points at me on his way to the door.
"Don't wait up, but don't let me sleep past six, the Milan call is at six-thirty. And June?—"
He stops at the door and looks back at me, at the table, at the whole pastel war zone, and his face goes soft.
"Thank you. For doing all this for her. For being who you are. I don't say it enough but I see it, okay? I see you."
The door clicks shut behind him.
I sit there in the quiet, in the penthouse I decorated, at the table I set for his friend's baby, under the skyline he bought me.
I see you. He says it and means it and gets it entirely wrong, all at once.
He sees a generous wife delighting in a project.
He doesn't see the folder that was handed to me instead of asked about.
He doesn't see the ambush at the yoga studio, the scorekeeping at the baby store, the reports filed to him before I've gotten my shoes off.
He sees the version Tanya texts him. He's been reading her drafts for sixteen years and calling it June.
I pick up the highlighter. I put it down. I pick up my wine instead, and it's gone warm, and I drink it anyway.
His birthday record, if I'm honest with myself, runs about fifty-fifty.
There was the year he flew us to Lisbon on two days' notice because I once said I wanted to see it, and the year he forgot entirely until Mark—Mark, the mover—mentioned it in the freight elevator, and Matt came home at eleven with flowers from a bodega and an apology that cost more than the flowers, emotionally speaking.
There was the year he took the whole day off, phone in a drawer, just the two of us.
That was four years ago. Before the expansion. Before the phone grew into his hand.
Three weeks. Something great. It's handled.
I look at the seating chart, at Aunt June, obviously in Tanya's looping hand at the bottom of the guest list, and I feel the whole weight of the pattern pressing down.
Her event, five months out: folders, deposits, midnight texts, a husband's credit card, a wife's afternoons.
My birthday, three weeks out: a laugh, a kiss, a flash drive held up as evidence of a reason to leave.
I believe him about the something great.
That's the thing. Matt can summon greatness when the reminder goes off.
Lisbon was real. The bodega flowers were real, in their way.
What I'm afraid of isn't that he'll forget.
It's that Denise won't let him, and I'll spend my forty-seventh birthday smiling across a restaurant table at a man who's checking his phone under the tablecloth, grateful for the thought, because the thought is all that's left.
I start stacking the brochures. The shower can wait.
Gisele and her organic balloon shapes can wait.
Tomorrow, apparently, I'm yoga buddies again, and Wednesday there's a cake tasting Tanya scheduled without asking, and somewhere in all of it I'll try to remember what my own life was supposed to be for.
I carry my glass to the kitchen and look out at the city, forty floors down, humming along without caring.
Don't get so wrapped up you forget, I think at him, wherever he is in traffic, flash drive in hand. Please.
I think it very carefully, in the tone of a prayer I don't quite have faith in anymore.
Then I wash the glass, and go to bed, and leave a note on his pillow about the six o'clock wake-up, because somebody in this marriage has to remember things.