Epilogue — Allison
Before the trucks start, I put a positive pregnancy test on Gavin’s chest.
He wakes up like a man hearing a smoke alarm. One eye opens, and then the other, and then he looks down at the white plastic stick sitting on his T-shirt and stops breathing.
“Allison.”
“You’ve got ten seconds to panic before I need coffee.”
He sits up so fast the test tumbles into his lap. “Are you okay? Does anything hurt? How long have you known?”
“I’m fine, nothing hurts, and I’ve known for about as long as it takes to walk from the bathroom to the bed.”
He picks the test up with both hands, like it’s heavy, and stares at the two lines. “This is positive.”
“Great work. Really top-notch analysis.”
His eyes fill. Gavin Callahan still doesn’t cry beautifully.
His face goes red and blotchy and his mouth wobbles, and he makes one rough, embarrassing sound and puts his hand over his eyes.
I take the test away from him before he snaps it in half, and I climb into his lap, and he holds on to me very carefully, like I’ve changed shape since he fell asleep.
“A baby,” he says into my hair.
“That’s the usual reading of it, yes.”
“You told me.”
He says it quietly, and it still hurts a little, just not the way it used to. I put my hands on his face so he has to look at me.
“I told you first.”
He closes his eyes. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me for doing the bare minimum of being married.”
“I’m going to anyway.”
“You’ve got three seconds of panic left.”
“I need more time.”
“Denied.”
He laughs while he’s still crying, and it isn’t dignified at all, and it’s so much better than dignified.
From the next room, Henry calls out one furious syllable. He’s a year and a half old now. He sleeps through the night except on the nights I’ve bragged about it.
Gavin wipes his face on the bottom of his shirt and gets up. “Coffee,” he says. “Decaf.”
“I’m allowed one regular cup.”
“We’ll ask the doctor.”
“We’ll ask the doctor after I’ve had my one regular cup.”
He stops in the bedroom doorway. “The first appointment.”
“You’re coming,” I say. It isn’t a question.
“Yes,” he says, and neither is that.
In the kitchen he starts the coffee with one hand and opens the vitamin cabinet with the other, and I tell him not to open a private prenatal clinic before sunrise. He says he was only checking that I still had folic acid.
“I started taking it when we decided to try,” I say, and his face goes red and wobbly again, and he has to turn around and look very hard at the coffee maker.
This one wasn’t an accident. We talked about it for months.
We talked to my OB. We talked about work and money and who’d take which nights, and about how two kids were going to need storage this apartment does not have and never will.
Planning it didn’t make the two lines any less of a shock this morning.
Henry shows up at the baby gate in striped pajamas with his hair standing straight up on one side.
“Mama,” he says. Then he spots Gavin. “Da.”
He knows plenty of other words. He uses those two because they get him the fastest service.
Gavin lifts him into the high chair and cuts up a banana, and I stand at the counter with the test in my hand and think about the last time.
The last time, I was downstairs in the employee restroom beside the shipping office, because I couldn’t wait long enough to climb the stairs.
I sat on the restroom floor with my back against the wall and the fan rattling over my head and two positive tests in my hands, and I let myself be happy for a while and pictured him on the floor with his hands on me.
Then I carried one of them across to the glass office and called his phone, and Rebecca answered, and I didn’t tell him for months.
Remembering it still turns my hands cold.
This one’s lying next to the coffee maker where anybody could see it.
The fear comes up out of nowhere, a cold, fluttery feeling low in my belly, right where the baby is.
“I’m scared,” I say.
Gavin stops cutting the banana. “Of what?”
“All of it. Him coming early again. Being pregnant during spring orders. Needing you and finding out some part of me still expects you to leave.”
He sets the knife down. “Tell me when that part shows up.”
“It’s showing up right now.”
He comes around the counter and stands right in front of me. “Then I’m here right now.”
The cold spot in my belly warms a little.
Henry throws a piece of banana on the floor. The moment ends, because he would like a different fruit, please.
At the first appointment, I get to the obstetrician’s office early, and Gavin is still earlier. He’s already in the waiting room with coffee for both of us, a bottle of water and every possible route saved on his phone.
“The office is just down the road,” I tell him.
“There’s construction on the parkway.”
“Did you look into chartering a plane?”
“The roof access here is terrible.”
I sit down next to him, and he hands me the coffee with my name on it. It’s half-caf. Compromise has officially entered the beverage side of our marriage.
He puts his phone in his pocket, and it stays there. He doesn’t run Callahan Air anymore. Somebody else has that job now, and Gavin goes in a few days a week to do the part he always loved best, the planes and the pilots and the people who fly them.
When the nurse calls my name, he stands up with me. In the exam room he doesn’t try to take charge of anything. He holds my hand and listens while the doctor goes over dates and how I’ve been feeling, and when the screen shows a tiny shape in exactly the right place, his fingers tighten on mine.
It’s early. There’s a flicker. The doctor says the word heartbeat, and the sound of it fills the little room, fast and sure. The hair on my arms stands up.
Gavin cries again. His technique hasn’t improved at all.
The last time, the heartbeat was a recording I saved in my drafts under his name and didn’t send. This time he’s hearing it with me, in the same room, at the same second I am.
The doctor prints one picture and hands it to me. Gavin looks at the little gray smudge without reaching for it.
“Who do you want to tell?” he asks. He doesn’t ask who needs to know, or when the company has to be told. He asks who I want.
“Our mothers tonight. The staff after twelve weeks. Nobody else until we both say so.”
He nods, and I hand him the picture.
That afternoon, Henry walks through propagation three in red rubber boots and denim overalls. Walking might be generous. He moves forward very fast and trusts the rest of us to handle balance. Luis calls it management training.
Henry heads straight for a stack of empty trays. “No,” I tell him. He considers my position, and then he keeps going.
Evelyn catches him before the trays go over. She lifts him once and sets him back on his feet, because I’ve asked her not to carry him off when he’s trying to walk, and she remembers.
“Henry Barrett,” she tells him, “your judgment is terrible.”
He pats her knee.
“It might be hereditary,” she says, looking over his head at me, and that’s as close as Evelyn’s ever come to making a joke about her own family.
She’s earned a couple of visits a month and a seat at some Sunday dinners, and she earned them slowly.
She calls him Henry, every time, by his whole name.
She asks before she takes a picture, and the pictures don’t go to her friends at the club or anywhere else.
The first time she said my grandson without the Callahan heir tacked on after it, my mother nearly took her temperature.
She comes in low shoes now, and she hasn’t tried to bring a baby nurse since.
“How are you feeling?” she asks me.
“Tired.”
“Do you need anything?”
“No.”
She nods and accepts that answer and doesn’t try to fix it. It might be her greatest personal achievement.
The side door opens, and Gavin comes in from the city in a dark suit with no tie. It’s one of his office days, and it’s ending on time. He sets his work phone down on the potting bench on his way past. After all this, the warm jolt still hits me when he walks in.
Henry sees him and changes direction too fast, and his boots cross, and Gavin gets there before his face meets the concrete.
“Got you,” he says.
Henry objects to being rescued and squirms to get down, and Gavin lets him go. He kisses my cheek and asks how I am, and I tell him I’m still pregnant, and he says good, and I tell him that was the plan.
Henry makes a break for the spring display, and Gavin pulls off his suit jacket and goes after him. The jacket lands on the same bench he stacked flats on in his ruined shoes the night the boilers died. It probably cost more than the irrigation controller, and I don’t mention it.
Henry reaches the pansies stacked by the door and drops to his knees and grabs the edge of a tray.
Gavin sits right down on the greenhouse floor before the whole thing can tip, in his expensive trousers, and gets one arm around Henry’s middle.
When I step up next to them, his other hand closes around my ankle.
He looks up at me from the concrete with dirt on one knee. Our son is trying to eat a plant tag. Our second baby isn’t a secret from anybody who matters. I’m so happy my face hurts.
On the potting bench, Gavin’s work phone starts to ring. He doesn’t look up. It rings for a while and goes quiet, because back in the city somebody else answered it.