24. Gavin
GAVIN
Scott Gallagher is loading bags of topsoil into his truck when I pull into the yard at Barrett, and the topsoil is frozen solid, because the storage shed isn’t heated and it’s January. I’m early, because I sat at the end of the road and rehearsed a thank-you.
He sees me and sets the last bag against the tailgate. His face says he knows exactly why a man in a cashmere coat is crossing a loading yard toward him, and he doesn’t look smug about it. Smug would honestly be easier. We nod at each other.
Through the glass behind him, Allison crosses from the office to the retail counter with Henry on her shoulder. Scott glances that way once and then looks back at me.
“I wanted to thank you,” I say. “For driving her to the hospital. For staying with her.”
Scott wipes one palm on his jeans. “I wasn’t doing you a favor.”
“I know. I’m thanking you anyway.”
“She was scared,” he says. “In the truck. She kept apologizing about my seats.”
“She asked me to come.”
He doesn’t say it to cut me. He doesn’t have to.
Scott was there, and I wasn’t. He was holding her hand in a truck, and I was in a hangar in England with a glass of champagne in one hand and my phone in my pocket.
My face goes hot in the freezing air, the way it does every time I remember that room.
I could ask whether he meant it about dinner. He’d tell me the truth, and then I’d have to stand in this yard and hear it.
He shuts the tailgate and gives me a long, level look. “She told me no.”
It takes me a second to understand him. “No to dinner.”
“No to all of it. She drove out to the Hadley orchard and told me to my face. Said she’s still in love with you.” He says it plainly, the way he’d tell me a tree was dead. “Didn’t say she was staying married to you. I want to be clear she didn’t say that part.”
My chest goes tight and hot, and I have to put a hand on the side of his truck.
She went to him first. Of course she did.
She told me about the dinner before I’d gotten my shoe off, and then she drove out to a frozen orchard and gave him the answer to his face, because that’s who she is.
She always tells people the truth to their faces, and I was married to her for years without noticing.
“Why are you telling me?” I ask.
“Because you were going to spend the next month wondering, and you’d have been weird to her about it.
” He pulls his gloves out of his back pocket.
“And because I drove her to that hospital. I held her hand while she was scared out of her mind. So I’m going to say this once.
” He looks right at me. “Don’t make me sorry I drove her. ”
“I won’t.”
“Yeah, well. You said that to her once, probably.” He climbs into the truck and rolls the window down. “Your boy’s doing good.”
“He is.”
“Good.”
He rolls out through the gate, and it’s deeply inconvenient, but I like him.
Allison’s waiting in the office doorway with Henry when I come in. “What did he say to you?”
“That you told him no.”
Her face goes pink. “I was going to tell you myself. Tonight. I had a whole plan.”
“I know you did.”
She looks at my face for a second. Then she hands me Henry, and I feed him while she tears into a supplier about cracked clay pots. For years I wanted her to come sit near my work. It never occurred to me to come sit near hers.
When the supplier’s gone, she says, without looking up from her invoices, “Take him Saturday. The whole day, at your place. I’ll pack his bag.”
I haven’t had him for longer than a visit, and I haven’t asked. I look down at Henry, who’s asleep with milk on his chin, and I have to clear my throat twice before I can say “Okay.”
I don’t do anything about Scott Gallagher, and it would have been easy. One phone call and every family in Westchester that flies with us would find a new landscaper by spring. I think about Scott holding my wife’s hand in the delivery room, and I leave my phone in my pocket.
The next week, Henry throws up most of a bottle down his mother’s shirt.
It’s an evening visit, and we’re upstairs in the apartment because the glass office gets too cold after dark. Janet sits at the end of the kitchen table with a paperback she hasn’t turned a page of since I walked in, watching me feed Henry like she’s going to grade it.
Allison is in the chair next to mine, steering Henry’s hand off the bottle. He’s discovered grabbing, and like every Callahan man before him, he grabs first and makes a plan later. She gives him my finger instead. He wraps his whole fist around it and keeps drinking, his eyes drifting shut.
“He’s asleep,” I say.
“He’s eating. Your eyes close in meetings too, and you still say you’re working.”
Janet turns a page she hasn’t read.
Allison’s knee is against mine under the table. She hasn’t moved it, and neither have I. My whole body has relocated to my left knee. I know exactly what the side of her neck tastes like. I look at our son very hard.
Henry pulls off the bottle, looks mildly surprised, and brings a lot of it back up over Allison’s shoulder and straight down the front of her shirt.
She freezes. Henry makes a pleased little noise.
Janet sets down her book. “Well. That seems personal.”
“It went in my bra,” Allison says. “Mom. It’s in my bra.”
Janet gets up and holds out her arms. “Give him here. I’ll walk him around the propagation house till he’s out.” She settles Henry on her shoulder and looks at me over the top of his head. “Get her a dry shirt before she catches cold.”
We listen to her feet on the stairs and the outside door shutting. Then it’s just the refrigerator humming and the two of us.
“There are clean tops in the laundry basket in my room,” Allison says, peeling the wet cotton off her skin. “The black one’s near the top.”
The black shirt is third from the top, because nothing in my life is going to be easy again. When I turn around, she’s in the doorway in black leggings and a nursing bra with the wet shirt balled up in her hand.
Her body isn’t the one I left in April. Her breasts are fuller, and her stomach is softer, with pale silvery lines low across it and a faint dark line below her navel that hasn’t finished fading.
This body carried my son while I lived in another country, and it did the whole hard, bloody work of getting him here without me.
Grief hits first, hard enough to close my throat. Then want comes up under it so hard I have to grip the shirt.
She watches me look, and her chin comes up. “Don’t you dare look sorry.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I am sorry,” I say, and my voice has gone low without my permission. “That’s not what I’m looking at.”
“Then what are you looking at?”
I should hand her the shirt and walk out. Instead I say, “You’re beautiful.”
Her mouth goes tight. “Beautiful is what you say to clients’ wives.”
“I want you.”
She stops breathing for a second, the wet shirt balled in her fist.
“I wanted you in that hospital bed, which I’m aware makes me a terrible person,” I tell her. “I want you right now with spit-up drying on your shoulder.”
She walks up to me and takes the black shirt, and her fingers stay on mine. She looks at my mouth.
“Tell me,” I say. I’m only going to ask once. “Tell me yes, or tell me to go.”
“Yes,” she says, and drops the shirt, and drags my head down.
My back hits the bedroom door and it clicks shut. Then I turn us so she’s the one against it, and she makes a sound into my mouth I haven’t heard since April. Her hands are in my hair, pulling hard, and she bites my lower lip like she’s still angry with me. I let her. She is, and she’s allowed.
“Careful,” she says against my mouth when my hand slides up her ribs. “They’re sore.”
“Tell me where, then.”
“Not there. Here.” She pulls my hand down over her stomach, over the soft skin and the lines she was just daring me to pity, all the way to the waistband of her leggings. “Here, Gavin.”
I slide my hand inside. She’s soaking wet, and when I find her clit, her head drops back against the door with a thump.
“Janet,” I say.
“Is in a different building. Don’t stop.”
I rub slow circles, the way she always liked, and her hips start rocking into my hand. I push two fingers into her. She’s so hot and tight around them that I have to put my forehead against the door beside her head and just breathe.
“Look at you,” I tell her. “You’re dripping all over my hand.”
“Don’t talk,” she says, and then, “No. Keep talking.”
“I thought about this every night in London. I’d lie in that stupid bed and think about your face when you come.”
“Then watch it,” she says. She grabs my wrist, holds my hand right where she wants it, and comes with her mouth open against my neck, shaking, trying to be quiet and failing completely. She clenches around my fingers, and I keep going until she pushes my hand away.
I get down on my knees and peel her leggings and underwear down her legs. She steps out of one side and hooks her leg over my shoulder like she’s been waiting months to do exactly that.
“Gavin,” she says, a warning, and then she threads her fingers into my hair and hangs on.
I put my mouth on her. She tastes the same, and I groan into her, and her heel digs into my back. I lick her slow and flat, then quick over her clit, then slow again when her thigh starts to tremble, because I remember how much she loves it when I make her wait.
“There,” she keeps saying. “Right there. Don’t move. There.”
The downstairs door rattles, and we both go rigid. Then the wind shoves at it again and it’s only the wind. She laughs, breathless and a little unhinged, and pulls my face right back where it was.
She comes against my tongue with her thigh clamped over my ear. When I slide my fingers back into her and suck on her clit, she comes again, and after that I lose track of everything. She stops trying to be quiet, and I stop caring about anything else in the world.
When she finally tugs me up, she’s flushed pink all the way down her chest and her eyes are wet. She kisses me, tastes herself on my mouth, and her hand goes straight for my belt.
I’m so hard it hurts. She gets the buckle open, slides her hand into my pants, and wraps it around my cock. I have to brace my forearm on the door above her head.
Then her hand stops moving.
“Wait,” she says. “Stop. I can’t.”
I stop. I take my arm off the door and step back so she has room, and I wait with my belt hanging open like an idiot, because the answer is the answer no matter what my body thinks about it.
“Okay,” I say.
“It’s not that I don’t…”
“I know.”
Under the want there’s a cold flicker of fear that I’ve just wrecked the best hour we’ve had since April. I bend down, pick the black shirt up off the floor, and hand it to her, and she laughs again, shakier this time.
“Third from the top,” she says.
“I noticed.”
I go out to the kitchen, buckle my belt, and wash Henry’s bottle again with shaking hands.
Janet comes back up with Henry asleep on her shoulder.
She looks at my hands in the sink, then at the closed bedroom door, and then at me, and she doesn’t say a single word.
She lays Henry in his crib and sits back down with her paperback, and this time when she turns the page, I think she’s actually reading it.
Allison comes out in the black top with her hair a mess and her face still flushed, and she sits down at the table across from her mother like nothing happened at all. My visit ended a while ago. I reach for my coat.
“Gavin,” she says.
I stop with one arm in the sleeve.
“Wanting me was never the problem,” she says. “Staying was.”