11. Allison
ALLISON
Rebecca Kendall sees my stomach before she sees my face.
Her eyes stop on it for a second. I once watched a client threaten to take his business somewhere else right in front of her, and all she did was reach for her water glass. This gets more out of her than that did, and it still only gets a second.
I’m behind the counter in the retail house with a stack of delivery slips under my hand.
At twenty-eight weeks there isn’t a work shirt big enough to hide my belly, and I’ve stopped trying.
My wedding ring doesn’t fit my swollen finger anymore, so it hangs on a thin silver chain under my shirt, and it slides against my skin when I breathe.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
She looks up at my face. She’s in gray trousers and a white blouse, with rain from a September shower darkening the shoulders of her coat, and she’s wearing the calm expression she wears in rooms full of people who own their own planes.
“I was at Teterboro this morning.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
She sets a few stapled pages on the counter. “Callahan Air is canceling the landscaping order for the new Teterboro terminal. The building’s running late, and the money’s going to London.”
It’s a big order. We were going to plant the whole front walk and the courtyard where the passengers wait for their cars, and losing it stings. It’s also not the kind of thing a chief operating officer drives an hour north in the rain to cancel in person.
“You have people for this,” I say.
“So do you.” Her eyes drop again, and my son picks that exact moment to kick me hard under the ribs. I want to put my hand on him. I don’t.
“How far along are you?” she asks.
“The cancellation terms are on page two.”
“Does Gavin know?”
Fear runs cold down both my arms to my fingertips. Luis is helping a customer a few rows over and two cashiers are unpacking planters by the front doors. Nobody’s listening, but it’s still too public, so I pick up the pages.
“My office.”
She follows me through the retail house into the glass office, and I shut the door. My desk is buried in fall invoices. The ultrasound envelope is locked in the bottom drawer, and the heartbeat recording is on my phone in my drafts, where it’s been since spring.
“How far?” she asks again.
“Why?”
“Because Gavin left in April.”
So that’s where she goes first, straight past congratulations to the math. I can practically watch her count backward.
“Twenty-eight weeks,” I say, and then, before she can ask, “It’s his.”
It sounds like I’m defending myself in my own office, and my cheeks burn.
“I assumed,” she says.
“You should be careful what you assume.”
“So should you.” She unbuttons her coat but doesn’t take it off. “Does he know?”
“No.”
I wait for her to judge me. She doesn’t. She sits down in the chair across from my desk, crosses her legs and looks at me for a long moment. Dread settles low in my stomach, heavy and sour, and it has nothing to do with the baby.
“I’m going to tell you what happens if you call him tonight,” she says. “You won’t like it.”
“I don’t like any of this.”
“He’ll come.” She says it flatly, like she’s reading me a flight time. “That’s the thing about Gavin that nobody believes until they’ve seen it. If you tell him, he’ll be on a plane that night. He’ll walk out on London with the opening right around the corner.”
Hope goes through me so fast and warm that my eyes sting. He’d come.
Then she keeps going.
“There are pilots over there who sold their houses in Ohio and Texas to take this job. There are mechanics who put their kids in London schools in August. The clients signed because Gavin promised them he’d be standing in that hangar on opening night.
If he leaves now, the clients leave, the base closes before it ever opens, and all of those people are out of work in a country that isn’t theirs.
” She tips her head. “And a year from now he’ll be sitting on your couch holding the baby, and he’ll look at the two of you and see what it cost. Maybe not every day. Often enough.”
Heat floods my face. “You don’t know that.”
“I was engaged to him,” she says. “I know what he looks like when he’s given something up for somebody. He’s very gracious about it. He never says a word. You just watch it sit on him.”
It lands right where she aimed it, and it hurts.
The worst part is that some of it’s true.
Rebecca doesn’t have to make anything up.
She only has to say out loud the thing I’m already scared of.
I asked him to stay once, in April, and he got on the plane anyway.
Ever since, I’ve been scared that the only way I’ll ever get him home is to hand him a reason he can’t say no to.
Now I’ve got one, and she’s telling me he’ll hate me for using it.
“You want him in London,” I say.
“The company needs him in London.”
“You always make what you want sound like company policy.”
She doesn’t have an answer ready. It’s the first crack I’ve seen in her all afternoon.
My son shifts under my palm like he’s objecting to all of it, and good for him. He’s got great instincts.
“And what do you get?” I ask. “If he stays.”
“I get the opening I’ve worked on for a year.” She looks at the little bump the ring makes under my shirt. “And I get to stand next to him when it happens. I’ve earned that.”
She says it plainly, without a flicker of shame, and the cold comes back down my arms. She isn’t even bothering to hide it.
I pick up my phone. “Maybe I should call him while you’re sitting here.”
She doesn’t reach for it. “You should tell him.”
That stops me, because it’s the last thing I expected her to say.
“Are you going to tell him?” I ask.
“What you tell your husband is your decision.” She stands and buttons her coat. “I’m flying back tonight.”
It sounds noble. It’s also the same smooth voice I heard in the background back in April, telling Gavin my call was nothing urgent.
“Get out of my greenhouse,” I say.
Her eyebrows go up a little, like I’ve been rude at a dinner party. “Allison.”
“Out. You can leave the papers. I’ll find page two all by myself.”
She goes. She walks back through the retail house past the mums, and Luis stops watering to watch her the whole way to the door. I stay behind my desk with my hands shaking so hard I have to press them against the edge of it.
Mom comes in before Rebecca’s even reached her car. She’s got potting soil up to her wrists, and she must have been watching from the stockroom door, because she doesn’t ask who that was.
“What did she want?”
I tell her. It comes out fast and ugly: the pilots and their kids in London schools, the clients, Gavin on my couch a year from now looking at us like a bill he paid. Mom listens with dirt on her hands and doesn’t interrupt me. That’s how I know it’s bad.
“I get why you’re scared, honey,” she says when I’m done. “I do. That woman knew exactly where to hit you. But being scared explains why you haven’t told him. It doesn’t make it your call to keep his son from him.”
“If I tell him now, he walks out on all those people, and then he blames me for it for the rest of our lives.”
“Or he doesn’t. You’re not a fortune teller, Allison. You’re a woman with a greenhouse.”
That’s fair, and I don’t like it.
So I say my plan out loud, because I’ve been carrying it since Rebecca sat down and it’s heavier than the baby.
The opening is in early November, and he’s coming home after.
I’ll tell him then, when the party’s over and the base is up and running and the clients have signed, so nobody loses a job because of my son and Gavin can never look at him and see a hangar full of people he let down.
He can have his London and his baby, in that order, and nobody will have to pay for either one.
Mom looks at me for a long moment. “Your due date’s in December.”
“I know when my due date is.”
“Babies don’t read calendars.”
“This one’s going to,” I say.
She makes the face she makes at aphids. Then she kisses the top of my head, leaves a smudge of dirt in my hair and goes back to the stockroom without another word.
What I didn’t tell her is the part that keeps me up at night.
It isn’t really about Gavin anymore, or even about how cold he’ll go when he does the math.
In April I was a wife whose husband missed her call.
Now I’m a woman who’s hidden a baby from her husband for seven months, who’s lied to him on the phone and let his ex-fiancée find out first. I don’t know when I turned into her, and I’m ashamed of her, and telling him means he’ll see her too.
I turn to the glass. Out in the loading yard, Rebecca’s standing next to her rental car with her phone to her ear and rain beading on her shoulders.
She finishes the call and gets in, and she sits there a while with the wipers going.
Then her headlights swing around, and her car turns out of the yard onto the road.
I never asked her to keep it quiet. I didn’t think I’d have to.