Chapter 11 – June
JUNE
The Marlowe's main room holds sixty and I've seated forty-two, which leaves enough space between the tables for Tanya's cousins to avoid each other without anyone noticing that's the design.
I'm here at nine for a party that starts at one. The main room's only free Saturday in October was the fourth, which Tanya took as a sign, and which Gisele took as a Saturday.
Gisele meets me at the door with a clipboard and a coffee she remembered I take black, and we walk the room together: the balloon installation along the north wall in three shades of rose, none of them dusty, because at the last tasting Tanya decided dusty read "sad"; the linen on the long table, ironed twice; the cake in the kitchen, four tiers, and the top tier polystyrene under fondant, per Tanya's request that it "photograph tall. "
Forty-two place cards in my handwriting because the calligrapher Tanya wanted quoted eleven dollars a card and I decided I could write a name.
"The mother's table," Gisele says, tapping the clipboard. "You have her facing the windows."
"She'll want the light behind her for the photos."
"Then she'll be squinting."
"She'll want to be squinting with the light behind her. Trust me."
Gisele writes it down. In five months of phone calls this woman hasn't asked why I'm the one doing this, and I've decided that's the reason I like her.
Priya arrives at noon with Diane, both of them in dresses they've told me they resent, carrying a gift I know for a fact Diane bought at the airport on her way back from her daughter's campus visit.
I put them at table six, near the bar, far from Rob's mother, who is coming, engagement or no engagement, because the baby is still her grandchild and she has, in Tanya's words, "opinions about the beige. "
"You're dressed as staff," Diane says, kissing my cheek.
"I am the staff."
"Where's the billionaire?"
"Picking up the mother."
Priya's eyebrows go up a quarter inch and stay there. "He's driving her here."
"Her car's in the shop. Her sister isn't in until Thursday. She's thirty-six weeks and she's not supposed to take cabs, per her doctor, per her, per Matt." I straighten a fork that doesn't need it. "It's fine."
"Every time you say that word I want to take a drink," Diane says, and does, from a flask she's brought to a baby shower, which I choose not to see.
They arrive at one-fifteen. Matt holds the door.
Tanya comes through it in white, floor-length, with one hand under her belly and her hair down, and forty-two people turn and put their hands up and make the sound.
She stops on the threshold and lets them.
Then she finds me by the cake and crosses the whole floor with her arms already out.
"June. Oh my God. June. Look at it."
She hugs me. Her belly presses into my hip. She smells of the perfume she's worn since 2009 and of Matt's car.
"You did this," she says into my hair, loud enough for the near tables. "She did all of this. Everyone, this is June, she did every single thing, I just showed up and got fat."
Laughter. Applause for me, brief and warm. I take it.
Matt comes up behind her and kisses my cheek and says, "Incredible," and, "You're incredible," and his hand rests on the small of my back for the four seconds before Rob's mother arrives and needs seating, and then the hand is gone and so is he.
The party runs. I run it. I move Rob's mother two seats further from the bar after her first champagne and I get the cousins photographed separately and I signal Gisele for the cake when Tanya's color drops at two-forty, which I can see from across the room, because I've spent years learning Tanya Curtis's face.
Priya catches my elbow on one of my passes.
"Sit."
"In a minute."
"June. You've been standing since nine. I watched you not eat a sandwich. Sit."
I sit, at table six, for six minutes. Diane pushes a plate at me.
Across the room Matt is crouched by Tanya's chair with his hand on her knee, looking up at her while she talks, and a woman at the next table is filming it on her phone, and I know how it will look in the video. It looks tender. It is tender.
The toasts start at three.
Tanya's cousin, the one who is speaking to her, goes first and cries.
Rob's mother goes second and doesn't mention Rob, which is either grace or a legal strategy.
Then Tanya stands, one hand on the table, the other on her belly, and Matt gets up to help her and she waves him off and then holds his wrist anyway.
"I'm not going to cry," she says, and forty-two people laugh, because she's already crying.
"Okay. I'm going to cry. This year." She stops.
Breathes. "You all know what this year was.
I'm not going to say his name in this room, in front of my daughter.
" Her hand moves on her belly. "But I want to say the names of the people who showed up when he left. "
She looks at me. The room follows her look.
"June Tierney planned this party. June answered my texts at midnight. June talked to Rob's mother about balloons." Laughter, and Rob's mother lifts her glass. "June, I don't have the words. I'm going to find them, but I don't have them today."
I nod. I smile. I feel Priya's hand flat on my back.
"And Matty." She turns. She's still holding his wrist and now she takes his hand.
"Matthew Tierney has known me since I was seven years old and he has never left me on my own.
Not once. Not when we were stupid kids and not this year.
" Her voice breaks and she lets it. "So I want to say this in front of everyone, because I want everyone to know.
Matty's going to be in the room when she's born.
He's going to be the first person she sees who isn't a doctor.
And he's going to be her godfather." She lifts their joined hands.
"He said yes this morning. In the car. So it's official, and I have forty witnesses. "
The room stands up.
I stand up too. I don't decide to. My legs do it because forty other pairs of legs are doing it, and I'm holding a champagne flute I don't remember picking up, and I raise it because everyone is raising theirs, and across the room my husband is smiling with his whole face at his best friend with tears running into his collar, and he's beautiful when he's being good to someone.
He doesn't look at me. That's the part I file.
Not the announcement. Not the godfather, not the room, not the car.
He made a promise this morning that covers the day of a birth and the years after it, and he made it on the drive over, and standing in the applause he doesn't look across the room to find my face, because it doesn't occur to him there's anything over here to check.
Diane leans in. "Drink that."
I drink it.
"All of it."
I drink all of it.
Gisele and I strike the room at six. Matt has driven Tanya home, because of the doctor, the cabs, the sister, and he texts that he'll be back for me by seven and he's back at seven-twenty, which for him is early.
I'm on the curb with a box of leftover place cards and two centerpieces Tanya didn't want.
"Hey." He takes the box. He's still smiling. He puts the box in the trunk and opens my door and kisses me before I get in and says, "That was the best party I've been to in ten years. She cried three times in the car. Three. She said you should do this for a living."
"I did do it for a living. It was called teaching and Tanya’s cousins were considerably easier to wrangle.”
He laughs and shuts my door.
We're on Ninth before I say it. I've been holding it since three o'clock, and I know that if I bring it home I won't say it, because I've brought sixteen years of sentences home and not said them, so I say it in the car, with the place cards in the trunk and the traffic ahead of us on the avenue.
"You said yes to the delivery room."
"I did." Easy. He checks the mirror, changes lanes. "She asked me this morning. Her sister can't get here until Thursday and the baby could come any day, and she doesn't want to do it alone. Nobody should do that alone, June."
"Her sister's coming Thursday."
"And if the baby comes Wednesday?"
"Then her sister gets on an earlier flight. Or her mother does. Or a doula does. There are people you can pay for this, Matt. That's an actual job that exists."
"She doesn't want a stranger."
"She'll have a whole hospital of them."
He glances over. Not angry. Puzzled. "Where's this coming from?"
I look at the windshield. "You didn't ask me."
"Ask you what?"
"Any of it. The godfather. The room. You said yes in a car at noon and I found out at three with a champagne flute in my hand and forty people watching to see how I'd take it. I took it well, in case you were wondering. I've had practice."
"June." He puts his blinker on. He's going to pull over.
He does. He puts the car in park on Twenty-Third with the hazards going and turns in his seat to face me, and I know this move too, the full attention, the hands off the wheel.
"Baby. I didn't think I needed to ask. It's Tanya.
You planned her shower. You've been more of a friend to her this year than anyone alive. I thought you'd be happy I said yes."
"You thought I'd be happy."
"I thought you'd be proud of me, honestly."
A bus goes past and the car rocks. I put my hand flat on the dashboard.
"Here's what I'm going to do," I say, "because Diane told me to do it months ago, and I didn't listen, because I thought you'd hear it without me having to. I'm going to say it with words. Plain ones. Are you listening?"
"I'm listening."
"I don't want you in the delivery room."
He opens his mouth.
"Let me finish. A birth is not a ride to the airport.
It's not a sink. It's the most private thing a woman does, and the person in that room is the father, or her mother, or her sister, or her person, and if you walk in there you're telling everyone in that building, and Tanya, and me, that you're her person.
Maybe you are. But I'm your wife, and I'm telling you I don't want to be married to her person. You can be mine or hers, but you can’t be both.”
“June—”
“Her sister lands Thursday. Book her an earlier flight. Pay for it. Pay for a doula, pay for a nurse to stay late, pay for whatever you want. Not you."
He's quiet. His hand is on the gearshift, not moving it.
"The godfather thing," I say, "I'll live with. It's a party and a cake. Fine. But I want you to hear that I'll be living with it, not enjoying it. There's a difference and you keep missing it."
"Okay," he says, slowly.
"And there's one more thing, and I'm saying it now because I've decided I'm done testing you.
I'm not proud of the testing. It's beneath both of us and I did it anyway.
So here's the last one, and it's not a test, it's a request. October twenty-second.
Our anniversary. Seventeen years. I want the day. "
"You have the day."
"I don't want a reservation from Denise.
I don't want a bracelet. I want you in the apartment at six o'clock with your phone off, and I want to eat dinner with you, and I want the phone to stay off until morning.
If Tanya goes into labor on October twenty-second, her sister will be in the city by then, and you will send flowers the next day.
That's what I want. I've told you. I'll never mention it again. "
He looks at me with the hazards ticking.
"Yes," he says. "To all of it. Yes."
"Say it back."
"Not the room. Her sister, a doula, an earlier flight.
The twenty-second, six o'clock, phone off.
" He reaches over and takes my hand off the dashboard and holds it.
"June. I'm sorry. I should have asked. I said yes too fast, she was crying in the car, I said yes to make her stop crying, and I didn't think past the next ten seconds.
That's what I do. I know that's what I do. "
"I know it too."
"I'll tell her tomorrow."
"Tell her tonight. Text her. Before she tells anyone else."
He takes his phone out. He looks at it. He puts it back in his pocket.
"Tomorrow," he says. "In person. She deserves that much. She's thirty-six weeks and she cried three times in my car. I'm not doing this by text."
I take my hand back and put it in my lap.
"Okay," I say. "Tomorrow."
He pulls back into traffic. He turns the radio on, low, and hums, and by the time we're in the garage he's telling me about a supplier in Portugal, and I'm nodding, and the place cards ride home in the trunk with the centerpieces nobody wanted, and I think: I said it.
With words. Whatever happens next, I said it, and he heard me, and he said yes.
I think about that for forty floors.