22. Allison
ALLISON
Last night Henry slept a whole long stretch without waking up. My mother calls this progress. I call it a suspicious gap in supervision, and I checked on him so many times that I got less sleep than I would have if he’d just screamed like normal.
He’s ten weeks old today, fed, warm, and deeply offended by the knit hat I put on him to go downstairs. He screams about it until I give up and take it off. For the first time since the hospital I can breathe all the way down, and I feel like an actual person.
Scott backs his truck into the loading yard in the middle of the afternoon with Molly in the passenger seat and a stack of empty nursery trays strapped in the bed.
He picked this hour on purpose. The wholesale desk has just closed, the retail rush hasn’t started, and Henry won’t want his bottle for a while yet.
I mentioned all of that in passing last week, standing on the dock with a clipboard, and today he’s built his whole afternoon around it.
That shouldn’t make my face go warm. It’s scheduling. That’s how low the bar is right now.
Molly jumps down from the truck with a rolled-up sheet of paper under her arm. “I made Henry a picture.”
“If it has glitter, it lives outside.”
“It doesn’t have glitter.”
Scott shuts his door. “That answer took too long.”
She ignores him and unrolls it across an empty cart.
It’s the greenhouse, with the roof leaning hard to the left like it’s had a few drinks.
I’m inside it, taller than everybody, wearing a tiara.
Molly’s next to me, and Henry’s a big circle in a stroller.
Way off at the edge of the paper there’s a very small Scott holding a shovel.
“Why’s your dad so tiny?” I ask.
“He’s farther away.”
“That’s a great use of perspective.”
Scott leans over to look. “I’m working. Very accurate.”
“You don’t have any feet,” I point out.
“Occupational hazard.”
Scott carries the trays over to the stack by the loading wall, leaves the stroller to me, and points at the two rolled plans on the bench.
“Those are yours. Library courtyard and the town hall beds. I changed the west side, because your crew has to stop pretending hostas like full afternoon sun.”
“They like it fine when I’m the one selling the replacements.”
“I knew it.”
We spread the plans out on the worktable and argue about irrigation, road salt along the walks, and how people will always step straight into a flower bed when there’s a perfectly good stone path right next to it.
He wants tougher, lower plantings along the sidewalk.
I show him the drainage report. He reads the whole thing, then says, “Okay, you’re right, that corner’s a swamp,” and changes it.
When Henry starts to fuss, Scott rolls the plans away from the bottle I’ve got open. “We can finish another day.”
“He has to eat.”
“Babies are pretty committed to that.”
“All day long. Terrible way to run a business.”
Molly pushes the stroller to the stairs, and Scott follows us up with the plans and leaves his boots on the mat without being asked.
Molly sits on my kitchen floor while I feed Henry and tells him all about a boy in her class who thinks whales are fish because they live in the water. Henry listens with his whole forehead.
Scott makes tea. He knows where the mugs are, because he carried boxes up here before Henry was born, and he still asks before he opens the cabinet.
Henry finishes, burps against my shoulder, and fills his diaper so loudly that it stops Molly in the middle of her whale speech.
She looks impressed. I change him in the nursery while she finds him a clean sleeper, and when I come back out, Scott has washed his mug and left mine next to the kettle, because I only drank half.
Molly asks if she can take her drawing down to show my mom in the retail house. I tell her to stay inside, and she says “I know” in the voice of a woman who has known things for years.
Scott waits until the door shuts behind her. Then he sits down across from me at my little kitchen table, with the rolled plans between us, and for the first time all afternoon he looks nervous. It’s catching. My palms go damp against my mug.
“Can I ask you a question?”
I glance at the monitor. Henry’s asleep. “You can ask.”
He rubs his thumb along the edge of the paper. “Your divorce is going ahead.”
“Yes.” The word still feels strange in my mouth.
“When it’s final, would you let me take you to dinner?”
I look at him while my ears go hot, and then I say the stupidest thing available. “Is this because Molly likes Henry?”
His eyebrows go up. “Molly mixes every cereal in the house into one bowl. I don’t let her pick who I date.”
“That’s probably smart.”
“It keeps the grocery bill ugly.” Then his face goes serious, and he folds his hands on the table. “Molly has a mother. Claire died. That doesn’t mean the job’s open, and I’m not looking for somebody to fill it. This part’s just about me.”
I nod. I’m glad he says her name out loud.
“I’ve been Molly’s dad and the guy with the shovel for years now,” he says.
“I’m good at both of those. I’m also tired of that being all I am.
I want somebody to come home to at night.
Somebody I can complain to about the town council, who’ll tell me when I’m being an idiot about money, which I am, you’ve seen it.
” One corner of his mouth goes up. “I’d like it to be you.
I liked you before any of this. I waited because you were pregnant and scared and married. Two of those are still true.”
“I’m a lot less pregnant.”
“Significantly.”
“And less scared, on the good days.”
“Good.”
That leaves the last one sitting on the table between us. My ring’s on its chain under my sweater, warm from my skin, and Scott can’t see it, but he knows it’s there.
I let myself really look at him for once.
He’s handsome in a quiet way. His brown hair needs cutting, and grief and raising a kid alone have put lines around his eyes.
His big hands rest on his side of the table and stay there.
He’s a real man offering me one real evening, and I can’t pretend it’s nothing.
I can see exactly how ordinary it could be: Molly’s boots next to mine by the door, Scott complaining about public flower beds, dinner that starts when we said it would, and a phone that only rings because somebody’s truck has a flat.
It would still be work. There would still be grief and bad nights and people running late.
Scott isn’t magic. He’s just here. And it hurts to look at, because that’s the life I wanted with my husband, and I’m still married to him, and I still love him, and he’s the one who wasn’t here.
My throat closes up, and I open my mouth and nothing comes out.
He watches me not answer. He doesn’t push.
“You don’t have to say anything today,” he says.
“I know.”
“I mean it. I’d rather wait for a real answer than get a polite one.”
He smiles, just a little, and leaves it there.
Molly comes back up the stairs carrying her drawing and a packet of sunflower seeds my mother apparently thinks a seven-year-old needs in January. “Ms. Janet says these are going to be taller than Dad.”
Scott stands and picks up the plans. “She only says that because she’s never seen me stand next to a sunflower.”
“She said you’d cheat and stand on a brick.”
“Your faith in me is really touching.”
I watch the truck pull out of the yard from my kitchen window. I keep thinking about his question after he’s gone. I don’t feel flattered. I feel sick, because Gavin’s ring is on a chain under my sweater and a tired part of me wanted to say yes anyway. That’s exactly why I have to tell Gavin.
He comes up the stairs that evening with snow melting on one shoulder of his black coat. He’s got the door shut behind him and one shoe halfway off when I say it.
“Scott asked if I’d go to dinner with him after the divorce is final.”
Gavin stops with the shoe in his hand. The color goes right out of his face, and mine burns, because I did that.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing yet.”
His fingers close hard around the shoe. Then they loosen, and he sets it down very neatly next to the other one.
“Did he pressure you?”
“No. He said after the divorce, and he told me to take my time.”
He nods once. I wait for the rest of it, the jaw, the reasonable voice, the questions about Scott’s business and Scott’s intentions. None of it comes. He’s keeping all of it to himself, and I can tell from his shoulders how hard that is.
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because I’m not building another secret while we’re still married.”
He looks at me until I want to look away. “Thank you.”
I hate the thank-you. It makes my eyes sting, because I know he means it.
Henry starts crying in the nursery. Gavin hangs his coat on the kitchen chair, washes his hands, and goes to get him, and for the rest of the visit he doesn’t bring up Scott again.
He feeds Henry and writes in his black notebook and asks where I keep the clean burp cloths, like it’s any other night.
Halfway through the bottle, Henry pulls off, looks up at his father, and smiles. It isn’t gas, and he isn’t asleep. It’s a real, sudden smile that takes over his whole small face.
Gavin forgets to breathe. “Did you see that?”
“I saw.” I have to put my mug down, because my hands have started shaking with how badly I wanted him here for this.
Henry does it again. Gavin’s eyes fill, and he bends his head down close and tells our son, very quietly, that he has excellent timing. Then he finishes the bottle.
When the visit’s over, he lays Henry down asleep in the crib and picks up his coat.
“Next time Scott’s here, I’d like to thank him.”
“He comes by for pickups most weeks.”
Gavin looks back at the nursery door before he answers. “He was there when Henry was born, and I wasn’t. I never thanked him for that.”
He goes down the stairs without asking me anything else. I hear his car start in the yard, and then the headlights sweep across my ceiling and they’re gone.
I rinse the bottle and the two mugs and dry them and put them away. I wipe the table where Scott’s plans sat. Then I stand at the nursery door and listen to Henry breathe, with my hand on the ring under my sweater, pressing it flat against my chest.
Scott deserves a real answer, said to his face. I knew what it was the second Gavin’s face went white over a shoe.