16. Baby Lessons
Baby Lessons
SAM
“Okay one more time,” Conrad said. “Big money!”
Archie pressed his dad’s watch. “Go!”
I shook out the handle, then flipped the toggle. I would have gotten the thing done in under seven seconds if something didn’t catch at the bottom.
“Damn it!” I exclaimed.
“You’re running out of time!” Archie yelled.
I bent over and released the bottom of the stroller, but it took me several tries, costing me precious seconds.
“You got it!” Conrad yelled. Finally I got it loose and the thing snapped back into place.
“Yeah, baby!” Archie exclaimed.
“Time!” I yelled, holding my hands in the air.
Archie pulled his dad’s wrist over and winced. “Oooh. Thirty-seven seconds.”
“Damn!” I exclaimed. Then I realized I’d been swearing in front of Conrad’s kid this whole time. “I mean, shoot galore.”
“Shoot ga-what?” Archie screwed up his face.
Conrad snorted.
“I don’t know any non-swears,” I confessed.
Archie folded his arms, looking more like the teenager he was growing into. “First of all, everyone swears at school. But when we can’t, there’s crap, dang, shucks, darn, fudge, fudge nuggets, fudge your mothe—”
“O-kay,” Conrad said. “Let’s take a break.”
Now I was the one laughing.
It was a couple of weeks after the park date.
I hadn’t seen Ellie much since then, since she’d started working on another big job, and was busy with some friend things on the weekend.
The silver lining to this though was we started texting after Henry’s bedtime.
It began with her sending photos of Henry to me at the end of the day—just our baby doing Henry things like eating blocks and grinning with his face covered in mushy bananas.
Then I’d tell her a funny story about something that happened at work, like Brett’s dad falling asleep in the middle of a presentation delivered by a muffler manufacturer.
“It should be studied, honestly,” I told her. “It was quite literally the loudest presentation we’ve ever had.”
She’d sent laughing emojis to that and it felt so good I started giving her a daily update of the strangely hilarious things that went on at AutoScore.
Then we started talking about friend things, like what books we were reading or shows we’d been into lately.
Things we’d talked about that first weekend but were catching up on now, like our conversation that night had never stopped, save the sexy stuff, which I had to fight myself not to think about.
Ellie was so easy to talk to that sometimes it felt like being friends could be possible.
She asked for opinions on the full menu plan she’d written out for the next month, asking if I thought it looked balanced enough for Henry.
I told her I trusted her judgement, but she said she wanted a ‘professional opinion’ on it.
It took me a minute to realize she meant me: I told her I’d worked in a kitchen every summer as a teen. It was so cute and thoughtful of her.
Then the next night she’d stuck a skull emoji on a joke I made, and said something so funny back I’d laughed out loud, and suddenly I was worse off than I was before.
Since Ellie hadn’t had time to hang out, I’d taken Henry out on my own a few times, usually picking him up from Mrs. Oxford’s place to give her a break too.
But reading could only teach you so much about parenting, and I still didn’t know how to handle any curveballs. Each time I took Henry out in the stroller I said ten different prayers he wouldn’t need something I couldn’t handle.
Which is why, after Henry’s and my third solo walk, I decided to do something about it.
After dropping Henry off a few days ago, I’d knocked on Conrad’s door, asking if he might possibly be interested in giving me some dad lessons.
Which is why I was here this afternoon. Archie had a professional development day at school so he was home and had been helping out too.
In exchange, I ordered pizza for the two of them, arranging for it to arrive later tonight, after I was gone.
I thought it would be too weird for Ellie to come home to find me eating with her neighbors.
I’d offered Mrs. Oxford a pie too—she’d let us use the stroller for this, but she declined.
At least she didn’t look at me like she wanted to call the cops on me anymore though. She just looked tired.
“Okay, well I think I’ve got this one well enough,” I said now. “What’s next on the agenda?”
Conrad consulted the list he’d made. “Diapers.”
Archie made a grossed-out face. “I’m gonna skip that. My game’s callin’ my name.” He jogged up the back deck.
Archie cracked me up.
I was glad I’d reached out to Conrad—he was a good dad. If I could have a relationship with Henry like he had with his son, I’d be golden. Though Archie’s mom didn’t appear to be anywhere in the picture, I wanted Ellie in mine.
“Should we take a break first?” Conrad asked.
“Hell yes,” I said. “That stroller nearly broke me.”
We dropped into two of the four Adirondack chairs positioned around the steel fire pit in Conrad’s backyard.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” my new friend said, reaching for a couple of cans of bubbly water from the cooler next to him.
“I don’t know,” I said, scowling at the stroller as I caught the can Conrad tossed at me. “I swear that thing was designed by the dark lord.”
“Hey, thirty seconds isn’t bad at all. Don’t tell Arch, but I had to throw the first one we ever got in the trash because I wrecked it trying to close it.”
“How’d you do that?”
Conrad grimaced as he cracked open his can. “I jumped on it. Under-slept new dad. You know how it is.”
I didn’t really. Conrad seemed to realize it at the same time. He lowered his drink from his mouth before taking a sip. “Shit. I’m sorry, man.”
“Don’t be. I wish I did know though. I’m not getting the whole experience.” It already made my chest hurt that I missed out on the pregnancy part. The watching my son come into the world part.
Then I thought about the reason why I’d missed it. I’d been thinking about that a lot in the past few days. Ever since Ellie had almost asked me.
There were people who knew parts of the story. Cora. My parents. The cops. The hospital. But nobody who knew all of it, all put together. I’d barely sketched it all out for myself. I wanted to do right by her. But fuck, the thought of looking at it head-on like that made me sick.
I pressed a hand onto my pocket, feeling the little bump there. Then I grabbed my water, guzzling the stuff down to clear my head.
It was a hot day, the beginning of the last month of the school year for the kids. I peered over the fence. From here, I could see Ellie’s back deck, and the dark glass of her two patio doors.
“So… how’s it going between you two?” Conrad had caught me looking.
“Oh. Yeah. Fine.”
Conrad arched a brow. “You sure?”
I shrugged. “It’s a little weird. But we’ve been doing better. And I don’t think there’s any way around it being like that.”
“I can’t imagine,” Conrad said. He hesitated for a minute, then asked, “Is there anything going on between you two?”
“Why do you ask?” That came out a little too sharp.
“Oh, I dunno, because we’re doing baby lessons.”
“I need to learn how to be a dad.”
“Not many dads voluntarily study how to do it.”
“So I want to be a good dad.”
“Also, you keep looking over there.”
I swallowed the drink in my mouth a little too fast. “Nothing’s going on.
” I thought about our last few interactions, how Ellie and I had kept things high level, not drifting close to anything personal like we had at the park.
I knew it was to keep things safely distant between us, but I didn’t like it.
At Conrad’s curious look, I said, “Neither of us are in a place for anything like that. Plus, it’d be too messy.”
“Right. In case you guys hooked up and then it didn’t go well.”
My esophagus burned. I couldn’t picture that happening. Then again, even the first part of that wasn’t happening. So it didn’t matter.
I grunted. Hopefully it sounded like agreement. And like I didn’t want to talk about this. Which I didn’t. It just made me depressed.
But Conrad wasn’t done. “I guess you guys have to think of everything like custody and legal arrangements. It’s kind of like a divorce. Or maybe a reverse divorce. Except without the romance. What are you going to do about all that?”
I swallowed, everything feeling a little tight. “I don’t know.” I rubbed my chest.
“Hey, I just—”
“No, you’re right.” I set my drink down a little too hard, then pressed the heels of my palms onto my eyes before dropping my hands into my lap.
“The thing is, I don’t know anything. Things are fine, but they’re not fine.
They’re good, all things considered, but…
” I trailed off. What was I going to say?
That I had a crush on the mother of my child? That felt immature. And disingenuous.
I hardly knew Conrad, but I appreciated that he didn’t beat around the bush.
And somehow, I felt like I could trust him.
Probably because he was a SAR volunteer.
And a dad too, one nice enough to help me out with this.
I sighed. “I had the best time with her the night we conceived Henry. And the day after. We talked the whole time. As well as other stuff obviously. But I thought I’d never see her again. Now, things are more complicated.”
“Which part?”
“The stuff you were talking about. Kids. Me. Her history. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We decided being friends is easiest.”
Conrad examined me, his brow knitted. “Is that what you want?”
I thought of my dad, when I told him I was dropping out of college, and therefore baseball. Is that what you really want Sam? I don’t think it is.
“It doesn’t matter what I want. I’ll respect her decision no matter what.”
“Goes without saying,” Conrad said. “But it doesn’t mean you don’t get to think about what you want.”