5. Allison
ALLISON
The apartment over the retail house has one bedroom, one bathroom, and a kitchen that thinks two feet of counter is plenty for a grown woman.
My parents lived up here the first few years they had the business, back when the greenhouses were half the size and my dad slept with one ear open for the boiler.
After that it was an office, then storage, then the place we put plant reps who swore they didn’t need a hotel and changed their minds around midnight.
Now it’s where I live. Sort of.
My clothes barely fill the closet. I’ve got a row of ugly terracotta pots on the bedroom sill and the coffee maker from the penthouse, because it was mine before the marriage and because I refuse to add instant coffee to the list of things I’m suffering through.
Everything else is still in Manhattan. The dress is probably still on the bedroom floor, unless the housekeeper found it and hung it up and wondered what happened.
Gavin’s called every day. We have the same fight every time. He says London is temporary. He says come visit. He says he can send the plane tomorrow, and I say I have work tomorrow, and he says, “Allison, you own the business,” like that’s a reason I can leave it instead of the reason I can’t.
“I’m trying to see you,” he said yesterday.
“You’re trying to move me.”
“What’s the difference?”
“About three thousand miles.”
Neither of us laughed. I lay awake afterward, too sad and too angry to get comfortable. He said he’d call later, and he didn’t. None of it changes the fact that I asked him not to go, and he went.
This morning the coffee maker betrays me.
I’ve had that machine since my first apartment in White Plains.
It’s survived two moves, a marriage and a penthouse kitchen that made it look like a lawn ornament.
I fill it and turn it on like I do every day, and the smell reaches me before I’ve even found a mug.
My stomach rolls over once, slow and greasy, and I barely make it to the sink.
There isn’t much in me to lose. Some water and most of my dignity.
I stand there with the tap running and my forehead on the cold edge of the cabinet and blame the week.
I haven’t been sleeping, I’ve been eating crackers for dinner out of the sleeve, and I cried in the truck yesterday because the radio played a song from our wedding. Anybody’s stomach would give up.
I pour the coffee down the drain and go to work.
Downstairs the retail house is full of Easter lilies, because it’s April and people want them for their mothers and their churches and their dining room tables.
Somebody’s put a whole rolling rack of them by the register.
I walk through the door and the smell hits me like a hand over my mouth, heavy and sweet and everywhere, and I turn right around and throw up in the gravel behind the shipping office.
Luis finds me there. He looks at me, then at the lilies through the glass, and then back at me for a while.
“You want me to move those?” he asks.
“They’re selling.”
“They can sell outside.”
“Luis.”
He’s already rolling the rack out the side door. Luis has worked here since I was in middle school, and he doesn’t say what he’s thinking. He just hands me a ginger candy from his shirt pocket and goes back to the rack. Somehow that’s worse.
I stand in the gravel with the candy in my mouth, and I start counting backward on my fingers the way my mother taught me to figure planting dates.
I stop about halfway through. I don’t need to finish.
I already know I’m late, because I’ve been late before, a lot of times, and every one of those times I bought the three-pack and took it before sunrise with my whole heart in my throat.
Then Gavin started traveling more, and we stopped talking about timing.
We never decided to stop trying. We just quit putting hope on the calendar.
I drive to the pharmacy on my lunch break and buy every brand of pregnancy test they carry. It’s excessive, and I know it. The woman at the register rings them up and bags them without a word, and I hope good things happen to her for the rest of her life.
I don’t even make it upstairs. I use the employee restroom next to the shipping office, with the fan rattling overhead and the whole room smelling like wet cardboard and lemon cleaner.
The first test shows two pink lines. The second one just says PREGNANT in big black letters.
That feels a little rude, honestly. It could’ve warmed up to it.
My knees give out and I sit down hard on the closed lid with a test in each hand.
I’m pregnant. I open the calendar on my phone with my fingers shaking and do the math twice. It happened before that night on the desk. The baby was already here while Gavin was eating cold salmon with his shirt off and telling me the asparagus had it coming.
I laugh, and then I’m crying so fast the laugh is still stuck in my throat.
For a while I let myself be happy, so giddy it goes all the way out to my fingertips.
I sit on that restroom floor with my back against the wall and picture him here.
He’d read the instructions even though the word PREGNANT is hard to misunderstand.
His hands would shake. He’d get down on the floor with me in his suit pants and put both palms flat on my stomach, scared out of his mind and thrilled and already planning the next year before I could stand up.
He’d want to paint something. He’d research cribs half the night and email me a spreadsheet.
He’d come home.
That’s the thought that stops me cold.
I asked him not to get on that plane. I stood in our kitchen in the dress from our third date and asked him plainly, and he went anyway. And now the first thing I think, sitting here with the proof in my hands, is that a baby would get him on a plane when I couldn’t.
I hate myself for thinking it, and then I hate him for making it true, and the giddiness drains right out of me.
I don’t want to be the wife who finally got her husband home because she had something he wanted more than London.
I wanted to be enough on my own. Apparently I still do, even sitting on a toilet lid next to a mop bucket.
But he doesn’t know there’s a baby. Whatever Gavin’s done, right now I’m the only one keeping anything from anybody.
I get up and wash my face in the little sink.
I put one test in my coat pocket and carry the other one to the glass office in both hands.
It’s evening in London. I call his private number, because this is exactly what that number is for.
I hardly ever use it, and every time I have, he’s picked up on the first ring.
“Gavin Callahan’s phone.”
It’s Rebecca. For a moment I can’t make a sound, and my whole scalp goes cold.
“Why do you have my husband’s phone?”
“Allison.” She doesn’t pretend she doesn’t know my voice, and I’ll give her that much. “He’s in with a client.”
“Put him on.”
“I can’t pull him out of this.”
“You can. You’re choosing not to.”
There’s noise behind her, a door and men laughing, glasses clinking, and then Gavin’s voice, farther away than I want it. “Who is it?”
“Tell him,” I say.
She doesn’t. She answers him instead, clear as anything. “Nothing urgent.”
He says a few words I can’t make out. Then Rebecca’s back, and she’s perfectly polite. “He’ll call you when they’re finished.”
“You just lied to him.”
“You haven’t told me it’s an emergency.”
“It’s private.”
“Then I’d suggest leaving a message.”
I hang up on her. My hand’s shaking so hard I nearly drop the phone on the desk, and I’m so angry my face goes hot all the way to my ears. She heard me ask for my husband and decided for him that he didn’t need me. Again.
Right behind the anger comes shame, because I let her, and it makes my arms and legs go heavy. I could’ve yelled I’m pregnant loud enough to carry across that room. I could call the townhouse, or his assistant, or his pilot. Half of Callahan Air knows how to reach Gavin before a plane door shuts.
I call his private number one more time. It rings and rings, and then his voicemail picks up with his calm, clipped hello, and I hang up without saying a word.
Then I sit at my desk and wait, with my lower back aching and the test getting warm in my palm.
The retail house goes dark below me. Luis locks up and waves at the glass on his way to his truck, and I wave back like a normal woman who isn’t holding a pregnancy test under her desk.
Out by the side door the lilies are still on their rack, white in the security light, and the whole yard smells like them.
When my phone finally lights up with Gavin’s name, the test is still in my hand.
“Allison?” He sounds exhausted. A door shuts behind him and the noise disappears. “Rebecca said you called. You never call that number. Is there anything I need to know?”