10. Allison
ALLISON
“It’s a boy,” the technician says, and my mother claps her hands once, so loud the technician nearly drops the wand.
I laugh, and then I’m crying, and both of those happen before she’s done telling us his heart has all four chambers where they belong. My son is stubborn about showing his spine and seems personally offended by the wand. Every time she tries to measure his face, he turns away from it.
“He gets that from his father,” I say.
Mom looks over from the chair beside the table. “Gavin doesn’t turn away from a camera.”
“He turns away from instructions.”
The technician hides a smile and keeps going.
My shirt’s shoved up, my waistband’s folded down under my belly, and cold gel is sliding toward my side, so there’s nothing dignified about any of it.
On the screen there’s a round head, a bent leg, and one open hand.
Then he kicks, and I see it on the screen a second before I feel it, and Mom grabs my hand and doesn’t let go for the rest of the scan.
The doctor looks everything over and says what the technician said. He’s right on time and healthy as far as anyone can see. Mom asks for extra pictures, the printer gives us a few, and she looks ready to negotiate with it.
“You already have one in your wallet,” I tell her.
“That was when he looked like a bean.”
“He was a very good bean.”
She tucks two of the new ones in her purse before I can argue.
Out in the parking lot the July heat comes up off the asphalt in waves. Mom unlocks the car, turns around, and sees my face. “Oh, honey.”
I shake my head, because if she’s gentle with me I’ll lose it. That lasts until I get my hand on the door handle, and the metal’s so hot it stings, and then I’m crying next to a silver sedan that isn’t ours while another pregnant woman pretends not to watch.
“He wanted a girl,” I say.
Mom waits. She knows exactly who I mean.
“Gavin said he wanted a daughter who looked like me.” It was a couple of years ago in our kitchen.
One of his cousins had sent a birth announcement, a baby in a pink blanket, and Gavin said our daughter would have my eyes and his ability to sleep through thunderstorms. I told him his ability was called snoring.
He pulled me into his lap and said we should run a proper experiment, and we did, on the kitchen counter, and I’ve never been able to look at that counter the same way since.
Now I’m carrying his son, and he has no idea either one of us is standing in this parking lot. The guilt comes up so hard my knees go loose, and I lean against the car until they hold.
A few weeks ago I saw the story about Rebecca moving in and read his text saying it wasn’t true, and I believed him, and it didn’t help.
That same night he texted me again. I’m still your husband.
I read it over and over in bed that night and never answered.
Then he flew home for a couple of days in July on London business, to sign an American company that sends its people back and forth to London, and he spent both days in meetings in Manhattan.
He offered to buy me breakfast at dawn on the last morning, before his flight back.
I said no. I said no because at twenty weeks there’s no hiding a baby across a breakfast table, and because breakfast squeezed in before a plane is the exact marriage I walked out of.
That’s what I told myself, anyway. The real reason has changed since spring.
In April I was waiting for him to come home for me.
Now he’s missed half of this pregnancy, and every week I wait makes it worse.
I can picture his face when he does the math, and how quiet and cold he’ll get, and I’m scared of that more than I’m scared of anything else.
“Do you want to go home?” Mom asks.
“I want to go back to work.”
“Of course you do.”
“That sounded judgmental.”
“It was maternal.”
“Same accent.”
She drives me to the greenhouse, and I don’t last long before I leave again.
There’s a children’s shop next to the pharmacy, and I go in because I need vitamins and the pharmacy is right next door.
It’s the kind of logic that only has to convince me.
They’ve got tiny cashmere sweaters and wooden toys priced like furniture, and I ignore all of it.
On a low table there’s a plain blue-gray sleeper with a zipper and covered feet and no little bear ears on the hood, because it doesn’t have a hood.
I buy it. At the register I check my phone for a message from Gavin, and there isn’t one. Disappointment lands low and heavy in my stomach. It’s ridiculous, since I’m the one who never answered him.
A month later the sleeper’s folded in the top drawer of a white dresser my mother found secondhand and made Luis carry up the stairs, into the narrow room with the sloped ceiling that’s going to be the nursery.
I’m twenty-four weeks, and my stomach isn’t a secret anymore unless everyone at Barrett has lost the ability to recognize shapes. Nobody asks about the father. I’m not sure if that’s kindness or fear of my mother, and I’ll take either.
One hot afternoon I’m on the loading pad with a clipboard when a pickup with GALLAGHER LANDSCAPING on the door backs in for a big order of late-summer annuals. The driver climbs down, and I know him before he takes his sunglasses off.
“Scott Gallagher.”
He grins. “Allison Barrett. You still say both names when you’re surprised.”
Scott grew up three houses down from me.
When we were kids he put a baseball through my parents’ kitchen window, denied it while still holding the bat, and mowed our lawn for a month to pay for the glass.
The last time I really looked at him he was a skinny teenager with a sunburn.
He’s not skinny now. He’s broad through the shoulders, his sleeves are pushed up over forearms that are tan and roped from real work, and he’s got a little gray coming in at his temples that suits him more than it has any right to.
It all hits me at once, low in my belly, warm and interested and completely uninvited.
Then guilt floods in right behind it, hot in my face, and my thumb goes to my wedding ring and turns it around my finger.
My doctor told me the second trimester can do wild things to a woman’s hormones.
I’ve decided to blame the second trimester for everything.
“You own Gallagher now?” I ask.
“Dad retired. I made the mistake of answering the phone after he left.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks for your sympathy.”
He glances at my stomach once, and then looks straight back up at my face and stays there. We go through his order, and he knows every plant without checking the list. When I bend to pick up a flat of begonias, he lifts it out of my hands so easily I’m left holding air.
“I can carry plants,” I tell him.
“I know. It’s my order, and you’ve got a clipboard.” He sets the flat in the truck bed and comes back for the next one without another word about it.
I’ve heard about the last couple of years for him.
Claire was sick for a long time before she died, and then his father retired, and everybody in the business knows Gallagher’s been hanging on by its fingernails.
So when I write up his invoice, I give him three months to pay instead of the usual one.
He reads it, and the friendly look goes right off his face. “What’s this?”
“More time to pay.”
“I didn’t ask for more time.”
“I know you didn’t. I’m offering.”
“I don’t need charity, Allison.” He hands the clipboard back without signing. “A month is fine. You’ll get your money on time, same as everybody else.”
He finishes loading, climbs in the truck, and leaves, and I stand on the loading pad feeling two inches tall and also like I’d like to throw a begonia at his windshield.
He’s back the next week for a courtyard job, and this time there’s a little girl in his passenger seat with two dark braids and his same serious eyebrows. He gets out, shoves his hands in his pockets, and comes straight over.
“I was a jerk about the invoice,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“You were kind of a jerk.”
“Claire’s insurance paid a lot less than they promised, and then Dad retired, and I’ve been holding the company together with duct tape and stubbornness.” He rubs the back of his neck. “People keep offering to help me in a certain voice. You didn’t even use the voice. I heard it anyway.”
“I want you buying from me for the rest of your career,” I tell him. “That’s not charity. That’s me being greedy.”
He huffs out a laugh. “Two months?”
“Two.”
The girl rolls down the truck window. “Dad says you have a baby room.”
Scott closes his eyes for a second. “I said Allison’s making a nursery.”
“That’s a baby room.”
“It is,” I agree. “Hi, Molly.”
“Can I see it?” She’s staring at my stomach with open scientific interest. “I have paint.”
“Her aunt gave her washable sample pots,” Scott says. “Our shed’s become a color emergency.”
The sensible thing is to say no, and instead I take them upstairs.
The nursery’s worse than I warned them. Boxes crowd one wall, the folding crib is still strapped shut, and the dresser is the only thing in there that looks ready for a baby.
Molly spreads newspaper and opens her little pots, and we settle on green leaves along the bottom of the wall, after I veto a purple dinosaur and Scott vetoes what he calls an aggressive sun.
Molly’s leaves look a lot like green potatoes, and I love every one of them.
While she paints, Scott carries boxes into my bedroom, wipes wet paint off the baseboard before it dries, and tightens the closet knob that’s been falling off in my hand for weeks.
When he opens the top dresser drawer to make room, he sees the blue-gray sleeper, and he looks at it for a second and closes the drawer without a word.
I like watching him fix my closet more than I should. I stand in the doorway with my hand on my stomach, and guilt prickles hot across my chest all over again.
Mom calls up the stairs that she’s got cookies, and Molly’s gone in a flash of braids to wash the brushes in the kitchen. Scott stops in the nursery doorway on his way out. He glances at my left hand, where my ring’s getting tight on my swollen finger.
“Gavin’s the father,” I say.
He nods. He doesn’t ask why my husband isn’t here painting potatoes on the wall, or why I’m living over a greenhouse instead of with him. He looks at the crib still strapped shut, and then back at me.
“Does his father know?” he asks quietly.
My face goes hot, then cold.
I open my mouth, and nothing comes out.