30. Allison
ALLISON
Luis’s wife shows up with the sun, carrying a foil pan of scrambled eggs and potatoes with a stack of tortillas wrapped in a dish towel on top.
She takes one look at all of us crammed into my glass office, gray-faced and soaked and smelling like wet dirt, and tells Luis he looks like something the cat left on the porch.
Then she kisses him on the forehead and hands out forks.
They’re the best eggs I’ve ever had in my life. I eat them standing up at the potting bench, right out of the pan with everybody else, because nobody has the strength to find plates.
Gavin eats standing too, in my dad’s boots, with perlite still in his hair. His good pants are soaked to the knee and his coat has a long smear of potting mix down the front. Danny keeps looking at the picture on his phone and laughing into his tortilla. Gavin lets him.
“You’re staring,” Gavin says to me.
“You have dirt in your ear.”
“I’ve got dirt everywhere. I’m keeping it.”
The office is warm again. The boiler Luis saved is ticking away downstairs, and through the glass I can watch the sun burn the frost off the outside of the houses in long wet streaks.
His phone buzzes in his pocket so often I’ve stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing the trucks. He hasn’t taken it out since dawn.
Carla goes down to open the retail house. She’s back before I’ve finished my coffee.
“Allison.” She’s holding the door with one hand. “There are news vans at the front gate. And a lady with a camera on the stone wall.”
My phone buzzes on the bench. It’s my mother.
You two are on the news. I’m bringing Henry back anyway. Nobody’s keeping me out of your driveway.
I show it to Gavin. He reads it and nods.
“The old man’s people talked to a reporter in London this morning,” he says.
“Somebody at Teterboro must have talked too. A plane sat fueled all night and I never showed up.” He rubs his forehead with the back of his wrist and leaves a streak.
“So everybody knows the base is closing, and that I didn’t get on the plane. ”
Carla clears her throat. “They’re asking about the baby, too. The one on the wall asked me if it’s true he didn’t know about his own son till the night he was born.”
The office goes quiet. Luis’s wife starts collecting forks.
I don’t know who told them. Maybe Rebecca finally made her phone call, or maybe somebody in London remembered a man running out of a hangar on opening night with his phone to his ear. It doesn’t matter much this morning.
“I’ll go down,” Gavin says. “You don’t have to. I can tell them to get off your wall and answer whatever they want to ask me. You can stay up here.”
It’s an offer. He isn’t telling me to do it.
I think about the last year. I think about the photographs of Gavin and Rebecca that strangers told me about before he did, and the news van parked across the road from my greenhouse after Henry was born, waiting to see if I’d run.
I’ve made myself small in a lot of rooms because a Callahan was in the news.
I made myself small in my own marriage for years.
And I think about Rebecca in my yard this winter, telling me she’d sell my secret to a reporter, and me telling her I’d say it myself first.
“It’s my gate,” I say. “And that’s my part of the story. I’m the one who tells it.”
He looks at me for a second. “Then we’re both going.”
We walk down the drive together, past the propagation house with its glass still fogged and the frost cloth hung over the fence to dry in long white sheets. My legs are shaking. Gavin walks beside me in my dad’s boots. They squeak.
There are more of them than Carla said, vans with their antennas up and a handful of people with cameras, and the lady on my stone wall, who climbs down when she sees us coming.
Luis walks behind us with his arms folded.
Gavin’s driver, who spent the night asleep in the car in my yard, gets out and stands at the gate like he’s done it before.
The questions hit us all at once.
“Mr. Callahan, did you skip your London flight?”
“Is it true the London base is closing?”
“Is it true you missed your son’s birth for a party?”
“Mrs. Callahan, did you keep the baby a secret from him?”
Gavin opens his mouth. I put my hand on his arm, and he closes it.
“Yes,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
“I found out I was pregnant right after he left for London, and I didn’t tell him.
I kept it from him the whole time I was pregnant.
He found out the night our son was born.
That was wrong, and it was mine. Nobody made me do it, and it isn’t his fault. ”
The cameras stay on me. My face is burning in the cold, but I’ve said it, and now nobody can sell it.
“Were you having an affair with Rebecca Kendall?” somebody calls at Gavin.
The word stings, and heat floods my face in front of all those lenses. Gavin doesn’t even blink.
“There was never an affair. She hid things from me, and I trusted her over my wife when I shouldn’t have.
” He looks straight into the nearest camera.
“You asked about the party. Yes. My wife went into labor with our son in a storm, and she called me and asked me to come. I stayed in London for the opening party instead. I’d been choosing London over my marriage for months before that.
I missed my son being born. Three days after she gave birth, I showed up at her door with security and a nurse she’d never met, like she was the one who’d done something wrong. ”
The road goes so quiet I can hear the frost dripping off the gutters behind us.
“Last night my wife called and told me the heat was out and she needed help,” he says.
“So I came here, and I carried flats and held a pilot light for her crew until the sun came up. That’s where I was.
The London base is closing because I never let anybody else run it, and the people over there are losing their jobs because of how I ran it.
That part’s on me. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. ”
I’ve waited all year to hear him say any of that out loud. I used to lie awake picturing it, and in the picture I felt like I’d won. Right now my throat’s so tight I can’t swallow, and all I can think is that he’s saying it in front of everybody, where he can never take it back.
“So are you two back together?” somebody calls.
“We’re separated. What happens with our marriage is up to her.” He could stop there. He doesn’t. “My wife didn’t cost me anything. I cost her a marriage.”
The questions start again, all at once, and then every camera swings toward the road.
My mother’s car comes up the hill and stops at the gate with its blinker still going. She rolls her window down and looks at the reporters the way she looks at aphids.
“I’d like to get into my daughter’s driveway,” she says, “and I’m not asking twice.”
Gavin steps in front of the back door of her car before anybody else can get close. “Don’t photograph my son,” he says, not loud, and they lower the cameras. Some of them.
I open the back door. Henry’s awake in his car seat in his bear hat, with Molly’s cardboard leaf clutched in his fist and yarn in his mouth.
He sees me and kicks both feet so hard the seat rocks.
My whole chest goes warm and soft. I unbuckle him and lift him out, and he smells like my mother’s laundry soap and milk, and he grabs a fistful of my hair and hangs on.
“I heard you had a night,” my mother says through the window.
“We had a night.”
She looks past me at Gavin, at the boots and the dirt and the perlite, and she raises her eyebrows. “Those are your father’s boots.”
“They were in the shed,” I say.
“They look terrible on him.” She puts the car in gear. “I’ll go around the back.”
She drives through the gate, and Luis swings it shut behind her.
I look at the long stretch of gravel between the gate and the retail house, with the cameras lined up along the wall. My legs are still shaking inside my jeans. Then I look at Gavin.
“Walk with us.”
He doesn’t move for a second, and then he does.
He walks beside me up the drive without saying a word, with his body between Henry and the road and his hands at his sides where I can see them.
The cameras follow us along the wall. Henry pats my face with a wet hand and tells Gavin something long and serious that has no words in it.
At the retail house, Gavin reaches past me and holds the door. Then he steps back, out of my way, and waits in the cold in my dad’s boots until Henry and I are inside.
Through the glass, I watch him stand there with his phone going off in his pocket, over and over, while London falls apart on the other end. He isn’t looking at it. He’s looking at the frost cloth drying on the fence, white in the sun, and the houses behind it, still standing.