Chapter Two
EVAN IS AT THE KITCHEN table when I bring it up on a Monday night, which is a mistake.
The kitchen table is where we’re good. It’s where we eat takeout Thai and argue about whether Dave deserves a second treat (he always does, Evan loses this argument weekly).
Bringing the hardest conversation of our marriage to the table where we’re happy is strategic, and the strategy backfires immediately.
“I want to talk about adoption again,” I say.
Evan sets down his fork. He doesn’t sigh or look annoyed. What he looks is patient, which is worse, because patience implies he’s humoring me and not hearing me. “I know you do.”
“Then talk to me about it.”
“I want us to be us for a while.” His voice is measured, reasonable, and designed to end the conversation without appearing to end it. “We’ve been married a year, Pen. There’s no rush. I want more of this before we change everything.”
I stare at him across the pad thai and try to find the version of this argument that reaches him. He isn’t cruel, and he isn’t dismissive. He believes every word, and his sincerity makes it impossible to fight. The problem is that he’s being sincere about the wrong thing.
“There is a rush,” I say. “My dad is eighty-one. My mother is gone. I’m the only one left, Evan. If we wait until you’re ready, my father might not be here to hold a grandchild.”
He hears the words without hearing what they mean. He reaches across the table and takes my hand. “I hear you. Really. Just give me a little more time. We’ll figure it out together. I promise.”
The promise is warm. It’s the same promise he made four months ago, and four months before that.
He’s not stalling out of cruelty. Before we married, he told me the medical facts of osteosarcoma at eleven, the chemotherapy, and the likely permanent infertility that came after.
He recited it all without telling me what surviving it had done to him.
I accepted it, because I loved him, and there were other ways to build a family.
I accepted adopting. I never accepted never.
“I’ll think about timing,” Evan says, and he squeezes my hand.
“What does ‘a little more time’ actually mean?” I ask. “Six months? A year? Would you be willing to meet with an adoption counselor? Not to commit. Just to learn what the process looks like.”
He pulls his hand back, not sharply, but just enough. “I’m not ready for that conversation yet.”
“That’s what you said four months ago.”
“Pen—”
“What exactly are you waiting for? Because I’ve been ready since before we got married, and every time I bring this up, you tell me we have time. Then we have the same conversation again three months later, and nothing has changed.”
He picks up his fork. Puts it down. “I’m not saying no. I’m saying not yet.”
“‘Not yet’ sounds identical to ‘no’ when you’ve been hearing it for a year.”
He gets up to clear the plates. I stay at the table looking at the spot where his hand was.
Dave appears under the table and rests his chin on my knee.
I DRIVE TO DAD’S ON Thursday. The house is a thirty-five-minute drive from Bethesda to Annapolis.
I’ve made it so many times I could navigate it blindfolded, past the Bay Bridge turnoff, down Route 2, into the neighborhood where the houses are older, the trees are taller, and the lawns look like professors live there because they do.
Dad’s house is the one with the books visible through every window.
Two stories of brick, a porch that needs painting, and Jean O’Hara’s garden going slightly wild in the side yard because Dad waters it but doesn’t have her touch.
He’s been watering her garden for three years like a promise he made to my mom.
Oscar meets me at the door. Oscar is a mutt that most favors a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel with the temperament of a tiny general who believes the household exists to serve his needs. He weighs fourteen pounds and rules the house with the authority of a man twenty times his size.
Dave ambles in behind me and collapses on the rug by the fireplace. Oscar stands over him for a moment, registers his total indifference, and trots away satisfied that dominance has been established.
Dave doesn’t care. Dave has never cared about power structures. If Dave were human, he’d be a Grateful Dead fan perpetually surrounded by a cloud of marijuana smoke. He’s a chill dude.
“Penelope.” Dad appears from the study in a cardigan with a pen behind each ear. His reading glasses are on top of his head, which means there’s a second pair somewhere in the study he’s been looking for. “I need your opinion on something.”
“If it’s the Chessman footnote, Amy already found it.”
“It’s not the Chessman footnote. It’s the chapter order. I’m arguing with myself about whether the Appomattox chapter should precede or follow the discussion of Napoleon at Fontainebleau, and I’d like a civilian perspective.”
I chuckle. “I’m not a civilian, Dad. I grew up in this house. You’ve been talking about military surrenders at the dinner table since I was nine.”
“Oh, much longer than that. Nine is just when you first noticed. At least you’re qualified.
” He gestures toward the study, where the desk is buried under six inches of paper, three reference books with sticky notes bristling from the pages, and Oscar’s favorite blanket, which Oscar has dragged from the couch onto the keyboard.
“Your mother would have had insights about this chapter.”
He says it naturally, without grief but it’s still there.
Mom is present in this house the same as the furniture.
She’s in the garden, in the kitchen layout she designed, and in the reading chair by the window that no one sits in besides Oscar, who used to sit there with her, because it’s still hers.
Dad doesn’t make a production of it. He just hasn’t moved past her, and he probably never will.
The honesty of that is one of the things I love most about him.
“How was your date with Dolores?” I ask, settling into the armchair across from his desk.
“Dolores is a lovely woman. She talked about her cats for ninety minutes. She has twelve.” He straightens a stack of papers. “I have concerns.”
“About the cats?”
“About the volume. Twelve... I’m a reasonable man. I can accommodate a reasonable number of cats. Twelve is a philosophy.”
I laugh, and the laugh relaxes me in a way I haven’t felt since Monday. Dad looks at me over his glasses. “Amy tells me you want to talk about something,” he says, gently, in the voice he saves for subjects he knows are hard.
“Amy talks too much.”
“Amy talks exactly the right amount. She’s the only person in this house with any sense, including me.
You should listen to her more.” He takes off his glasses and folds them.
“Your mother wanted you badly, Penelope. She was forty-seven when you were born. Every doctor told us we were crazy. She told them to mind their own business, and she was right, because here you are. You were worth every minute of it.” He puts the glasses on the desk.
“Whatever you need, I’m here. You know that. ”
I nod. I don’t tell him what I need, because Dad can’t make Evan hear me. What he gives me is the comfort of sitting across from my father in the house where I grew up, knowing I’m not alone.
We work on the chapter order for an hour.
Dad argues for Napoleon first because the comparison clarifies Grant’s terms at Appomattox.
I argue for chronological structure because his readers aren’t all military historians.
Oscar sleeps on the office couch, and Dave sleeps half on Oscar despite the size disparity
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Dad says, casual in a tone that signals something entirely un-casual, “I found someone for Amy.”
I freeze. “Dad, you need to stop trying to set up Amy.”
“He’s a very distinguished young man. Published in three journals. Former student of mine with excellent research instincts.”
Amy appears in the doorway holding sandwiches and the Chessman footnote. “Sam, does this promising young man know you’re auctioning me off, or is this a surprise for both of us?”
Dad looks offended. “I’m not auctioning anyone. I’m merely facilitating an introduction between two intellectually compatible adults.”
“He’s fifty-four, Sam.”
“Age is a number.”
“It’s a big number.” Amy sets the sandwiches down. She has had this conversation before. She catches my eye and mouths “You okay?” I nod.
I drive home at dusk. I stop at a red light on Route 2, and a woman crosses the street pushing a stroller. The baby is asleep. She looks wrecked and completely alive, with unwashed hair and a spit-up stain on the shoulder. I watch her until the light changes.
I’m four days late.
I count the days again. I’m regular and always have been. Now I’m four days late, and my husband is a cancer survivor whose doctors told his parents he’d never father a child.
I BUY THE TEST AT A CVS in Bowie because I don’t want anyone recognizing me, which is paranoid, but paranoia is what happens when hope and terror show up at the same time. I buy two tests, a bottle of water, and a granola bar I don’t eat. The cashier is seventeen and doesn’t look at me twice.
Positive. I sit on the bathroom floor and watch the little window.
It doesn’t change, so I take the second test. Positive.
I consider driving back to Bowie for a third, then decide against it on the grounds that the bathroom floor is uncomfortable and two positives should be enough for a rational person.
I don’t tell Evan. The doctor comes first. I need to hear someone with a medical degree say this is real before I carry it into my marriage and watch what happens.
THE DOCTOR CONFIRMS it on Thursday. They do a blood draw with results by the next afternoon. I’m six weeks pregnant.
My OB, Dr. Rourke, knows Evan’s medical history because I told her during our family planning discussion a year ago.
She’s careful. “A childhood prognosis of likely infertility isn’t proof of current infertility,” she says.
“The treatments your husband had at eleven carry a real risk, but outcomes vary depending on the drugs, the doses, and the individual. A semen analysis would tell us whether he’s producing viable sperm now.
It wouldn’t tell us when fertility recovered, only whether it’s present. ”
“I’m pregnant, so he’s obviously viable,” I say dryly. She smiles. “Yrs. An S/A isn’t really necessary.”
I’m stunned, happy, and worried about his reaction. “How is it possible?”
“Treatment at eleven, told he’d never have children, and twenty-five years later, his body has recovered.
It’s more than possible. There are several documented cases of childhood cancer patients regaining fertility.
I can’t tell you exactly when his fertility recovered, only that the history doesn’t make conception impossible. ”
I go home long enough to collect Dave, then drive without choosing a direction.
Through neighborhoods I don’t live in, past playgrounds with wood-chip surfaces, and past a daycare with tiny bikes lined up outside a fence.
Dave hangs his head out the window. He has no idea why we’re driving in circles.
I cry because joy and fear have nowhere else to go. At a red light I wipe my face. Then I keep driving.
I rehearse telling Evan, imagining his face going from confusion to shock to the joy I’ve been afraid to hope for.
Maybe he lifts me up. Maybe we call my father together, and Dad makes the sound he made when I told him I was getting married, pure delight from a father who usually saves his enthusiasm for footnotes.
I picture Glynnis’s reaction, the nursery we’ll build, and the onesie with ducks folded in a drawer.
I imagine every good version of the next five minutes. I don’t let myself imagine the other one, where his lack of preparedness to adopt extends to an unexpected pregnancy.
I go home. Evan is there, on the couch, Dave’s spot reclaimed temporarily. I make dinner. We eat. I wash the dishes while he dries. The kitchen is warm.
I’m carrying a secret that could rebuild everything between us or shatter it, depending on which version of my husband answers when I tell him. After dinner, I sit on the couch next to him. Dave is at our feet.
“I need to tell you something.”