20. Gavin
GAVIN
The first diaper I change after my wife files for divorce leaks down the front of a shirt that was made by hand in Italy. This feels fair.
“You have to pull the ruffles out,” Allison says from the other side of the changing mat.
“Which ruffles?”
“The ones around his legs.”
“Those do something?”
“Most parts of a diaper do something, Gavin.”
“The ducks don’t.”
“Congratulations. You found the one exception.”
I’d honestly thought I was done. I’d gotten the sleeper off, cleaned him up, and fastened the new one without dropping him or calling a pediatrician, and I was feeling pretty good about myself right up until the warm spread across my ribs.
Henry watches me the whole time with his serious dark eyes, kicking both legs, extremely pleased with his work. Allison hands me a towel.
“The ruffles,” she says.
“I understand their position now.”
“Good. It only cost you a shirt.”
On Christmas Eve I lose a fight with a stroller in front of a seven-year-old.
Barrett closes early, but plants still need water on a holiday, so Allison has watering checks, and Scott brings Molly along when he picks up the last of a town order.
Henry needs air and a nap, the retail aisles are warm, and Allison tells me to unfold the stroller.
I’ve signed off on aircraft interiors with fewer moving parts.
I pull the handle and nothing happens. I press the two gray buttons and nothing happens.
I scan the code on the frame and watch the manufacturer’s video, where a smiling woman opens the stroller with one hand, and then I watch it again, and then again.
Molly’s sitting on an upside-down bucket, watching me the way you’d watch a dog try to open a door. “You’re skipping the green latch.”
“There’s no green latch.”
She points. There’s a green latch, directly under my hand. I press it, and the stroller opens.
“Good job,” Molly says, in exactly the voice Allison uses on Henry after a burp. “My dad only had to watch the video once.”
“Nobody needed that information.”
She grins. Scott carries a stack of empty trays past us and very carefully doesn’t grin, and I can tell it’s costing him.
Later, back in the office, Henry takes a whole bottle from me without screaming about it. Allison writes the amount on the feeding log and says, “You’re getting better at this.”
I look up, and her mouth goes tight.
“I hate that,” she says. “I needed you bad at this when he was born. I wanted you putting the crib together wrong and fighting me about names and reading the instructions after I told you you’d skipped a step. I wanted to watch you be bad at it.”
“You should’ve had that.”
“I know I should’ve.”
It stings, and I let it. I don’t tell her I’m here now. I showed up after I’d missed the part she needed me for, and she gets to decide whether now counts for anything.
A few days later she catches me typing notes into my phone next to the bassinet. Left fist, rooting, hungry. Forehead wrinkle, pause. I’ve got a long list of them, and a safe-sleep checklist saved underneath, and the hospital’s infant CPR class on my calendar for the morning.
“Put it away,” Allison says.
“Do you need it quiet?”
“I need that phone away from him.” Her voice shakes, and she’s angry that it does. “Every time that thing lit up while I was pregnant, you were somewhere else. I can’t watch it sit next to his head while you take notes on being here.”
My first answer is practical. The notes sync. I could send them to his doctor. I don’t say any of it. I put the phone in my coat pocket and hang the coat by the door.
The next morning I buy a black spiral notebook at a pharmacy.
It has a bent corner and paper so thin you can read the page underneath.
I take it to the CPR class and practice on a plastic baby until the instructor tells me to stop watching my hands and watch the chest. The fear of ever needing it has me sweating through my shirt by the end.
At the greenhouse I leave my phone in the car. I write the class date and the emergency number on the inside cover of the notebook while Henry sleeps, and Allison reads it over my shoulder.
“You know nine-one-one’s probably going to stay nine-one-one.”
“I like to have it confirmed.”
“Must be nice. Nothing’s been confirmed around here in a year.”
She doesn’t thank me for the notebook, and I don’t need her to.
Over the next few visits it fills up with the things he teaches me.
He’ll take a whole bottle one afternoon and refuse the same bottle the next morning.
He makes a wet little click right before the milk comes back up.
The second time I hear it, the burp cloth’s under his chin before anything happens, and Allison says, “That was fast.”
“Page nine.”
She reads it. Small swallow. Two hard blinks. Spit-up. “He’s going to hate this notebook when he’s sixteen.”
“He’s not driving until I understand his feeding cues.”
She laughs. It’s one laugh and it’s gone fast, but I heard it, and my whole chest goes light.
On New Year’s Day snow piles up white against the bottom panes of the glass, and the office heater clicks and does almost nothing.
Henry wakes up furious from a short nap, and he’s dry, and he doesn’t want the bottle.
Allison’s at the file cabinet with her back to us.
I put him on my shoulder and do the slow bounce I wrote down on page six.
Up, down, a pause. His cry climbs anyway, and Allison shuts the drawer and starts toward us, and I keep the same easy rhythm going.
He goes quiet against my neck before she gets there.
My mother still lives in the house I grew up in, and it still smells like lemon polish and cold rooms nobody sits in.
I drive out on a Sunday in early January, after my visit with Henry.
There’s spit-up on my shoulder that I decide not to deal with.
The housekeeper lets me in and looks at the stain and doesn’t say anything, and she takes me back to the sunroom, where my mother is having tea at a glass table with the newspaper folded into a perfect square beside her cup.
“You didn’t call,” she says.
“I’ve been doing a lot of calling first lately. I thought I’d take a day off.”
She doesn’t smile. She pours me a cup I didn’t ask for and pushes it across the glass. “How is London?”
“Shaky.” I don’t sit. “I’m running it by phone. Crews are already asking to come home.”
I don’t tell her the rest. Deb Kowalski, who runs the base day to day, calls me every night.
She’s still digging up things Rebecca kept in her own head, and every call ends the same way, with Deb asking me to let her take the meetings with our biggest client, a family company, because the old man who runs it won’t talk to anybody but me. Every night I tell her soon.
“Then go back and fix it.”
“I’m not getting on a plane right now, Mom.”
“Your father would have been there within the day.”
“My father never changed a diaper in his life.”
She sets the teapot down a little harder than she needs to. “Is that what you drove out here to tell me?”
“No.” I stay by the window with my coat on, because if I sit down in this room I’ll turn back into a boy who got called in to explain a report card. “I came to tell you some things plainly, so you can’t say later that you didn’t understand them.”
She folds her hands on the table and waits, the way she waits at the end of a dinner party for the last guest to take the hint.
“Stop calling him the heir. His name is Henry. You can call him Henry or you can call him your grandson. Nothing else.”
“It’s a word, Gavin.”
“It’s the first word you said in his mother’s hospital room. Before you asked how much he weighed. Janet told me.” I watch it land. “She’d just given birth and she was trying to feed him, and you walked in and gave him a job.”
My mother’s face changes, just barely. For a second she looks older than I’ve ever seen her. “I was upset. Nobody had told me anything.”
“So was Allison. She was upset and bleeding.”
She looks down at her tea.
“Second thing. Stop calling Janet.”
“I’ve called her once or twice.”
“You’ve called her enough times that she keeps a list on her fridge now, next to the pediatrician’s number. She’s helping with my son so Allison can work, and you’re calling her to ask whether my wife has a lawyer and whether the landscaper sleeps over.”
“Does he?”
“No. And that’s the last time you ask.”
She lifts her chin. “And the third thing? I assume there’s a third thing. You always did like your lists.”
“You don’t go to Barrett unless Allison invites you. You don’t send a nurse, and you don’t send presents with cards in them that say for the next Callahan. If she wants you there, she’ll say so, and you’ll come when she says and leave when she says, and you’ll be glad of it.”
“She’s turned you into an errand boy.”
“She’s turned me into a man who calls before he shows up at a house with a newborn in it. I should have learned that on my own.”
My mother stands. She’s small, and she’s never needed to be tall.
She comes around the table and stops in front of me and fixes my collar, the way she used to before school pictures.
Her fingers are cold. She brushes once at the spit-up on my shoulder and then takes her hand back like she’s touched a stove.
“Your father built everything you have,” she says quietly. “He never asked anybody’s permission. He never went up to anybody’s door with his hat in his hand. The Callahans don’t beg, Gavin.”
“I know,” I say. “I’ve started.”
She studies my face. I don’t know what she’s looking for. Maybe my father. Maybe the boy who used to hold his chin up and not fidget while she fixed his collar. Whatever it is, I don’t think she finds it.
She goes back to her chair and sits down and picks up her tea, and her hand is perfectly steady.
“You’ll regret this,” she says.
I button my coat. There’s still a faint smell of baby shampoo on my collar where she touched it.
“I already regret plenty. This isn’t on the list.”