32. Allison
ALLISON
Gavin’s still holding a wet soup bowl when he opens the door, and he looks at me like I’m a package he doesn’t remember ordering. Then he looks at the dirt on my jeans.
“Is Henry all right?”
“He’s with my mother.”
He steps back to let me in. It’s the apartment he took after Henry was born, smaller than the penthouse and much less like a hotel, and I stayed the night here a few weeks ago. Tonight I keep my coat on, because I didn’t drive down here to be seduced by a nice kitchen.
I didn’t plan this. After he left tonight I read what he’d written in the notebook, and then I knelt on the wet floor of propagation three pretending to check peppers until my knee was soaked.
He stood at my gate in front of every camera and told the whole world what he did to me.
I asked him for help once, plainly, and he turned the car around.
Tonight he sat at my table and didn’t ask me one single thing about any of it, even though I could see how badly he wanted to.
I’ve known what I want since he climbed out of that car in the frozen loading yard in his good shoes and asked me what to carry first. So I called my mother, and I got in the car.
“I’m calling my lawyer in the morning,” I say. “I’m telling her to stop the divorce.”
His hand closes around the edge of the door. It’s the only part of him that moves.
“Allison.”
“Don’t thank me.”
He shuts the door. “I wasn’t going to. I was going to ask what it means.”
“It means I’m choosing the marriage.”
He looks down, and he presses his lips together, and when he looks up his eyes are wet. He doesn’t make me take care of it. He just lets them be wet, and my own eyes start to burn.
“It doesn’t mean everything’s fixed,” I say. “I’m still angry about the night Henry was born. I might still be angry about it when he’s thirty.”
“Then you’ll be angry when he’s thirty.”
“That was suspiciously easy.”
“I didn’t say I’d enjoy it.”
My mouth wants to smile, and I let it. Then I make myself say the part I practiced in the car.
“The freeze and London and that speech at the gate didn’t buy this by themselves.
But they counted. All of it counted. You sent the security guys back to the cars.
You learned how to take care of him yourself instead of hiring people to do it.
You left when your visits were over. You signed those papers and handed me a way out.
You told the truth, even when it made us both look terrible.
” My voice shakes on the last part. “Last week was the last piece. It wasn’t the whole reason. ”
“I understand.”
“And I’ve got some things I need you to hear.”
“Tell me.”
So I tell him. I tell him I’m not moving back to the city, and he says he figured.
I tell him Barrett stays mine and separate, that he keeps his office somewhere that isn’t my greenhouse, and my people don’t turn into his staff.
He says Luis would quit on the spot if anybody tried.
I tell him nobody books a trip until we’ve talked about it, and that goes for me too, and he looks almost startled that I said the last part.
“Henry stays Henry Barrett,” I say.
“Always.”
“No company pictures, no press, and no asking again later because your mother’s been nice for four days in a row.”
“She’s never managed four days in a row. But yes.”
“My ring stays on the chain for now.” His eyes drop to the shape of it under my sweater, and he nods.
“All right.”
“And one more.” This is the one I’m scared of, and my knees feel unreliable, so I say it fast. “I need you to live in my life, Gavin. I don’t want you visiting it between meetings.”
He finally puts the soup bowl down on the table by the door. “What are you asking me?”
“The apartment over Barrett has one bathroom and thin walls, and the delivery trucks start backing into the yard before it’s light out.”
“I remember.”
“Move in.”
The breath goes out of him like I’ve pushed him.
“Not tonight,” I say quickly. “I’m not taking you home because you gave a good speech in front of cameras. After I talk to my lawyer, and after we figure out a schedule together.”
“Whatever schedule you want.”
“Don’t do that.”
He frowns. “Do what?”
“Turn into a guest who’s too polite to have an opinion. I want a husband who tells me what he wants. I just need him to be able to hear me say no without packing a bag.”
He takes that in for a second. “Then I want Sunday mornings with Henry while you sleep,” he says. “I want one shelf in that bathroom. And I want to complain about the delivery trucks once, just once, before I admit they’re louder than airplanes.”
“One complaint.”
“Can I get that in writing?”
“I’ll put it on the fridge next to Luis’s boiler checklist.”
We both laugh at that, really laugh, and it doesn’t erase anything. It just makes the rest of it easier to stand.
“Can I hold you?”
“Yes.”
He comes over slowly, and I put my arms around him first. He holds me without steering me anywhere, with his face in my hair, and his shoulders shake once.
I let him have that. I let myself have it too.
He smells like his own soap tonight instead of boiler soot and wet soil, and I laugh into his collar, because I’d gotten used to the soot.
I call my lawyer from the glass office the next morning, with Henry asleep in the portable crib by the file cabinet and Luis outside arguing with a driver about petunias. She asks me one last time whether anybody pressured me.
“Lots of people have pressured me about lots of things this year,” I tell her. “Not this.”
She says she’ll take care of it, and by the end of the week the divorce is stopped.
Gavin texts me once. Got it. I’ll follow your timing.
I tell him Saturday, and send him the schedule, and he writes back one word. Yes.
On Saturday afternoon he carries one black suitcase up the narrow stairs over Barrett Greenhouses. Henry’s asleep in the crib, and I show Gavin the feeding chart on the fridge and the bottles on the second shelf and the floorboard outside the nursery that squeaks louder than the baby.
He puts his toothbrush next to mine in the tiny bathroom, and his shaving kit takes over the entire sink. It makes me absurdly happy.
“That’s aggressive,” I tell him.
He moves the shaving kit to the floor and leaves the toothbrush right where it is.