Chapter 5 #2
It was the second time in three months that someone had asked her that. The first time she had been holding a fork at a wedding and had not been able to answer it.
“I got married,” Celia said, “and I made a series of extremely reasonable decisions.”
Isaac nodded slowly, and, to his enormous credit, let it go entirely.
* * *
She got back to the apartment at four and the light was already going, and she stood in the middle of the room with her coat still on and the notebook in her hand and felt so good that it frightened her.
She wanted to tell him.
That was the shape it took — not a thought, a reflex, entirely physical, her hand actually going to her pocket. Law, I found something. The whole sentence was there. She could hear the way he would say her name when he picked up.
She stood in a rented room with her hand in her pocket and waited for it to pass.
Nine years of that. Nine years of driving home from a site with a thing to tell him and getting through the door and finding him on a call, and putting it away, and putting it away, and putting it away — and here she was, out, gone, with a lease and a lawyer and the first drawing she’d made since 2019, and the reflex had not gotten the message.
She made tea. She did not call anybody.
Then she sat down at the table and opened the notebook and worked until nine, and at some point in there she stopped noticing the ache in it, and that turned out to be how it went: not that the wanting stopped, but that other things got louder than it.
* * *
Later that week she bought two more sweaters a size up, in a shop in Beacon where nobody knew her face, and the woman at the register said, “When are you due?” as easily as if she were saying the weather.
“June,” Celia said.
It was the first time she had said it out loud to a human being.
She walked back to the car and sat in it for a minute and thought: there. That’s the first one. It didn’t kill anybody.
* * *
Her mother called on Sunday, as she had every Sunday since November, at four o’clock, which was a thing Roberta had instituted without ever announcing it.
“Your father’s put a new door on the shed.”
“Did he need a new door on the shed?”
“He did not.” A pause with a smile in it. “How’s the work?”
Celia had told them about the mill in three sentences the week before and had been asked nine questions about it, which was more than anyone had asked her about a building in nine years.
“It’s good. It’s actually good. I was out there Thursday and I was cold for six hours and I didn’t notice.”
“Mm,” said Roberta, in the voice of a woman being handed something she had waited a long time for and was not going to make a fuss about.
They talked about the shed. They talked about a cousin. Her father came on for ninety seconds and asked, with enormous seriousness, about the condition of the floor slab, and Celia explained it, and he said, “Well. That’s a proper problem,” and gave the phone back.
And then Roberta said, “Are you eating?”
“Yes.”
“Are you eating actual meals, Celia, or are you eating out of a pot standing up.”
“Both.”
“Mm.”
And there it was again — the whole thing, right at the top of her throat.
Mom. I’m four and a half months pregnant.
Her mother would go quiet for about six seconds and then ask exactly two questions, and they would be the correct two questions, and Celia would not have to carry a single thing by herself ever again.
She looked out the window at the street.
The trouble was what would come with it.
Not disapproval — Roberta had never disapproved of anything in her life except a badly hung door.
What would come with it was other people’s arithmetic.
Her mother would do the sum in her head, and be careful, and say nothing, and Celia would still hear it: does he know, and when will he, and what does it change.
Those were her questions. She had not finished asking them herself. She was not ready to have them asked at her in somebody else’s voice, even a kind one, even her mother’s — especially her mother’s.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“You keep saying that word.”
“It keeps being available.”
Her mother laughed — a short, dry one, the same laugh Celia had — and let her go.
* * *
The contract came on Monday.
Celia read all fourteen pages twice at the table by the window with the good windows and a cup of tea going cold, and then she got a pen.
ARCHITECT: and then a blank line.
She sat there.
For nine years everything she had signed had been a joint account or a household form or a card at the bottom of somebody’s flowers, and every one of them had gone out under a name she had taken and had never once regretted taking and which had, somewhere along the way, quietly stopped being a name and become an address.
She wrote Celia Keswick.
Then, underneath, in the small box that said FIRM, she stopped again — because there wasn’t one, there hadn’t been one since 2019, and she was thirty-eight years old and sixteen weeks pregnant and living over a hardware store.
She wrote Keswick. Just that.
Then she put the pen down and sat back and put one hand flat on her stomach, which she had not done, not deliberately, in four months.
“Okay,” she said, out loud, to the room and to nobody and possibly not to nobody. “Okay. Here we go.”
Outside, the shutter came down, and the man downstairs whistled his two notes, and the truck started up.