Chapter 12 – June
JUNE
At thirty-seven weeks Tanya has moved us to the prenatal class, which meets in the small studio at the back, and the instructor, who has a shaved head and a low, slow voice, calls me "the support person" and hands me a bolster.
There are nine pregnant women on the floor and me. Priya has a department meeting. Diane has a thing with her thing. They've both had Tuesday conflicts since the shower, and neither of them has bothered to invent a good one, and I love them for the laziness of it.
"Matty's coming to the birthing class Thursday," Tanya tells the woman on her left, who did not ask.
She's on her side on two bolsters with her eyes closed and her hand on her stomach, and she talks through every pose in a murmur pitched to carry.
"The hospital one. They make you practice the breathing with your partner and Rob was supposed to, obviously, so Matty's my partner for it. He moved a whole call with Milan."
The woman on her left says that's sweet.
"He's the sweetest man alive. I'm serious. I've known him since I was seven." Eyes still closed. "June, tell her."
"He's very sweet," I say, on my back, looking at the ceiling. The ceiling has a water stain.
"Did he come by Sunday?" I ask, after the instructor has cued us to breathe into our hips, which I do not have to do, and do anyway. "He said he was going to come by Sunday."
"With bagels. We talked for three hours.
He's so worried about me, June, honestly, you'd think he was the one having her.
" She laughs, and the woman on her left laughs, and I lie on the studio floor and count.
Sunday. Three hours. Bagels. And on Tuesday she's telling strangers he'll be in the room, in the class, in the hospital, first face she sees.
He didn't tell her. Or he told her and she didn't hear it. With Tanya those are the same outcome and I've never been able to prove which one it was.
After class she wants smoothies. I say I have a call.
I don't have a call. I walk twenty blocks in the wrong direction and buy a scarf I don't need at a store I don't like, and by the time I get home I've decided I'm not going to ask him.
I said it once. Diane's method. I'm not going to say it twice, because saying it twice makes me feel pathetic. Either he listens or he doesn’t.
He comes home at eight with takeout and a look on his face I recognize, the one he wears when he's decided to say it before I can.
“About the hospital,” he says, putting the bags on the counter.
“You told her, right?” I ask, even though I know he hasn’t. “Sunday?"
"Well. I started to Sunday. Her lawyer called in the middle of it about Rob's lease, the second apartment, there's a whole thing about whether he can be made to pay out the term, and she cried for an hour, and I couldn't do it to her on top of that.
" He unpacks containers. "So I'm doing it Thursday. After the class."
"After the class."
"The class is a class, June. It's breathing.
It's in a conference room with a projector.
It's not the room." He turns around and puts both hands up.
"I'm not leaving her in a room full of couples alone to practice breathing.
I'll go, I'll count to four with her, and after, in the car, I'll tell her.
Her sister's plane lands at six. It works. "
I take plates down from the cabinet.
"Okay," I say.
"That's it?"
"You said you'd tell her. You've told me when. I'm not going to stand here and say the same sentence I said in the car." I set the plates on the counter. "What's in the bag?"
He looks at me for a second longer, and I can see him not trusting the calm, and I can see him deciding to.
"The lamb thing," he says. "And the eggplant you like."
"I like the eggplant," I agree, and we eat it.
Priya calls Wednesday while I'm reading a contract for a florist I've already paid.
"Marisol's going out early," she says, without hello.
"Bed rest, doctor's orders, from Monday.
She was supposed to go out at Thanksgiving and now it's Monday, and Harold's got ninth-grade English uncovered through June.
Three sections. Of Mice and Men, then the Miller, then whatever she'd planned for spring, which she says is in a binder. "
"Priya."
"He asked me if I knew anyone. I said I knew a woman with a master's, nine years in a classroom, a lapsed certificate that doesn't matter because we're private, and a penthouse. He laughed. Then he stopped laughing and said, is she serious."
I put the florist's contract down.
"I haven't stood in front of a room in eleven years."
"It's fourteen-year-olds and George shoots Lennie at the end. It hasn't changed."
"They'd have to interview me."
"He wants to see you Friday. He's got a two o'clock." A pause, and her voice drops out of the brisk register she uses for logistics. "June. You don't have to say yes. But he needs an answer by Monday, and I told him I'd ask, and I'm asking. Do you want to come look at the room?"
I look across the dining table at the folder with the tabs. Forty-two place cards, used. Two centerpieces on the sideboard, dying.
"Friday at two," I say.
I don't tell Matt. I tell myself it's because there's nothing to tell yet, a conversation with a principal about a maternity leave, and then Thursday goes by and he's at the class, and Friday I take a cab to Priya's school on Eighty-Ninth and walk up three flights to a classroom with twenty-six desks and a radiator that knocks, and Harold, who is sixty and wears a cardigan with a hole in the elbow and runs the school on a budget he reads to me off a sheet with visible pleasure at how small it is, asks me what I'd do with a kid who refuses to read the book.
"Read it to him," I say. "Out loud. Every day. Slowly with bad impressions. Until he takes it away from me and reads it himself to make me stop."
Harold writes that down.
"Marisol's kids are good," he says. "Two of them will make you cry. One of them will make you want to quit in March. I'd want you Monday, seven-thirty, and I'd want you through the last day in June, and I can pay you what I'd pay Marisol, which I'm guessing you'll find funny."
"I won't find it funny."
"You'll find it funny. Everyone finds it funny." He holds out his hand. "Think about it over the weekend. Priya says you're a person who thinks."
I shake his hand. On the stairs down, the bell goes, and the halls fill up with kids in the school's terrible plaid, shouting, and a girl with purple hair runs into me and says sorry without looking and keeps going, and I stand against the wall while they push past me and I put my hand flat on the painted cinderblock and feel the cold of it through my palm.
I take the books down that night. The teaching texts, from the study shelves where I filed them the day we moved in.
Of Mice and Men with my notes in the margins from 2011.
The Crucible. My binder of lesson plans, which I open on the floor of the study with a glass of wine and read for two hours, and by the second hour I'm crossing things out with a pen.
Matt gets home at nine-thirty. He puts his head around the study door and sees me on the floor with the books and says, "Reorganizing?"
"Reading."
"Cute." He kisses the top of my head. "I told her."
I look up.
"In the car, after the class. Her sister was already texting from the taxi.
I told her I wasn't going to be in the room, that Carla would be, and that I'd be right outside.
" He leans on the doorframe. "She cried.
She said she understood. She said she'd rather have me but she gets it, and honestly, June, with Carla here, it was easier than I thought. Done."
I freeze. “Right outside what?”
"In the waiting room. Where the fathers used to sit. She's not going to be alone in a hospital with nobody in the building who loves her. That's the compromise."
I look back down at my binder. Compromise. He's found a word that lets him keep the promise he made me and the promise he made her, and it involves a chair in a hallway, and he's pleased with it, and I can hear that he thinks I should be too.
"Okay," I say.
"You're doing that again."
"Doing what?"
"Okay. That flat okay." He comes in and crouches beside me, on the floor, in his suit. "Talk to me. Is it enough? You said not the room. I'm not in the room."
I close the binder.
"It's what you said you'd do," I say. "Mostly. You told her. That's what I asked."
He watches my face for a second longer, and then he nods and stands, and his knees crack, and he says he's going to shower, and at the door he stops.
"What are the books for?"
"A friend of Priya's is going on leave. Harold, at the school, asked if I'd consider covering. Through June."
"Teaching?" He turns fully around. "Teaching teaching? In a school?"
"That's usually where it happens."
"June." He's smiling. He comes back and pulls me up off the floor by both hands and holds them.
"That's great. That's really great. You'd be incredible.
You were incredible, I remember you at that table grading until midnight.
" He squeezes. "Do it. I mean it. Whatever you need, if there's tuition or a certification thing or you need Denise to sort the paperwork, just say. "
"I don't need Denise."
"You don't need Denise. Okay." He kisses me. He's still smiling. "Do it anyway."
He goes to shower. I stand in the study with the binder against my hip.
He's happy for me. He was happy about Tanya and me shopping, happy about the shower, happy about yoga buddies, and this is that, the wide clean uncomplicated happiness he has whenever his wife has found a thing to do.
It hasn't crossed his mind to ask why I went to look at a classroom on a Friday without mentioning it.
It hasn't crossed his mind that his wife might have started a life he isn't in.
I put the binder on the desk, and Monday at seven-fifteen I'm on Eighty-Ninth Street in a coat and flat shoes with a bag of books, and Harold hands me a key.
Denise calls the following Wednesday. I know it's Denise before I answer, because the only two people who call my phone in the middle of a school day are Tanya and my husband's assistant, and Tanya texts.
"Mrs. Tierney." She's never called me June, in ten years. "I'm calling about the twenty-second."
I'm in the teachers' lounge with a yogurt and twenty-six essays on whether George had a choice. "Did he ask you to call?"
"No." A pause I can hear her deciding about.
"He told me to stay out of it. He told me that in the tone he uses for the Milan people, which he's never used on me, so I'm taking it seriously.
I'm calling anyway because I've worked for him for ten years and I know what happens when he's left in charge of his own calendar. "
"Denise."
"I could have a table at that place on Hudson on hold under my name. He wouldn't have to know. You'd just have to walk in."
I put the yogurt down.
"I appreciate it," I say. "I do. Stay out of it."
"Mrs. Tierney, I've watched him forget your birthday twice."
"So have I. Stay out of it, Denise. If he can't do it without you, I need to know that. I'd rather know."
She's quiet. Then she sighs. "Understood."
"Thank you."
"For what it's worth," she says, "he's had it in his own handwriting on a sticky note on his monitor since the fifth. I didn't put it there."
She hangs up before I can answer, which is a thing she does, and I sit in the lounge with my yogurt and the radiator knocking, and I let myself have it. A sticky note. His handwriting. Since the fifth, the day after the shower, the day after the car.
I finish the yogurt. The bell goes. Third period is the section with the boy who won't read, and I've got a copy of the book in my bag with the pages soft from 2011, and I go up the stairs to read it to him.