Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Adam
Ray offers me the regional position in the first week of December, although offers is a generous word for how the conversation begins.
“If this is going to be permanent,” he says, “we need to stop pretending you’re available for the travel role.”
I’m sitting across from him with a printed account summary on my knee. Helen has kept Tulsa. The client likes her. She is taking the expansion into the new year, and I am helping with the transition instead of running it.
“I agree,” I say.
Ray leans back. “Do you?”
“Yes. I wanted to talk about the regional desk.”
“It isn’t a temporary arrangement.”
“I understand.”
“Fewer major accounts. No travel commission. Different bonus structure. You’d still have demanding periods, Adam. It isn’t a nine-to-five holiday.”
“I haven’t asked for a holiday.”
He studies me for a moment. We used to talk easily. Lately every conversation feels as if I’m arriving late to an argument he has already had with somebody else.
“I’ll have the compensation details sent over,” he says. “Think carefully.”
I take the papers home that evening and put them beside Natalie’s laptop after the children are asleep.
“Is that the transfer?” she asks.
“The terms. I haven’t accepted.”
She closes the laptop. I appreciate that she does it, and then feel ashamed that I appreciate something I so rarely did for her.
We sit at the kitchen table. I show her the proposed salary and the likely annual total using last year’s figures, not the optimistic version based on business that hasn’t happened yet.
“About a third less overall,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And the benefits?”
“The same. I’ve asked them to confirm that in writing.”
“Travel?”
“Mostly local clients. There could be occasional trips, but not every week. I’d have to arrange coverage when I’m unavailable. Same as anyone else.”
She reads the page again. “Do you want the work?”
I hesitate. “I want to be here.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
I look toward the window. The reflection shows us seated at opposite ends of the table, a baby monitor between the papers. Upstairs, Benji shifts in his crib and settles again.
“Parts of it will be less interesting,” I admit. “Smaller deals. More existing clients. I’ll miss some of the work I do now.”
“Then say that.”
“I don’t want you thinking...”
“That you’ll resent me?” She sets the paper down. “I already worry about that. Pretending you don’t care about your job won’t help.”
I rub a hand over my jaw. “I care about it. I like being good at it. I like that people call me when something goes wrong.”
“And?”
“And I let that decide far too much.”
She nods but doesn’t soften the answer for me.
We open the budget from the night of her presentation.
Mortgage, insurance, utilities, groceries.
Childcare. The ordinary figures are less frightening when we put them beside the guaranteed salary instead of guessing around them.
There will be less left over. We will have to decide which spending matters and which has happened because neither of us paid much attention.
“I can bring in more work after this catalog,” Natalie says.
“I don’t want you taking jobs you don’t want to cover my decision.”
“Our decision, if we agree on it. And I want work.”
“I know. I just don’t want...”
“You don’t get to protect me out of having a career.”
I stop. She watches me, calm and very firm.
“Right,” I say. “Sorry.”
She pulls a pad toward her and makes a note. “But we budget without assuming my next job exists. If I get it, good. If I don’t, we still need to be able to pay the bills.”
We work for almost an hour. She finds subscriptions I’ve forgotten. I find that we’ve continued making an automatic transfer into a vacation account for a trip we never booked. Neither discovery solves everything. Together they make the new figures less alarming.
“We can keep the house,” she says eventually.
“Yes.”
“No second place by the water.”
“We don’t have one.”
“You have brochures.”
I laugh despite myself. “Fair.”
She turns the pad toward me. “I would rather have this. The smaller amount, if it means the days actually change. But I need you to understand that this doesn’t decide whether you move home.”
“I do.”
“You’ll still need this schedule if we don’t stay together.”
The sentence hurts. I look at it instead of trying to make it disappear.
“Yes,” I say. “I will.”
She reaches for her cold tea. “Then I think it’s a sensible choice.”
I want to ask whether she thinks it’s a hopeful one. I leave that alone. I also don’t point out the money we’d save if I wasn’t in the hotel, I don’t think she’s ready to talk about that elephant in the room quite yet. Soon, I think, but not yet.
The next morning, I ask Ray for the transfer. He doesn’t congratulate me. He gives me a date for the change, tells me which clients need handover notes, and warns that I cannot drift back into the old compensation arrangement if I dislike the new one.
“I understand.”
“All right.” He signs the internal form and slides it across the desk. “Make sure Helen has everything before you move.”
I do. It takes the better part of two days, and one evening I work from the hotel until midnight. I am tired and irritable and briefly furious that nobody seems to appreciate how hard I am trying.
Then Natalie calls to ask whether I can bring the baby medicine from the pharmacy in the morning because the bottle at home is nearly empty. She has already spoken to the pediatrician about his cold. She is simply asking me to collect what they need.
I say yes and write it down. It is a relief to have something useful to do that doesn’t require anybody to admire me.
At our fourth counseling appointment, Dr. Williams asks how the practical arrangements are going. Natalie tells her about the presentation. I tell her about the transfer. We discuss what happens when either of us is tired and the agreed plan becomes inconvenient.
Then she asks us why we chose each other in the first place.
Natalie smiles reluctantly. “He carried a box upstairs for me.”
“You were trying to carry three.”
“I had parked illegally.”
“You told me you lived on the second floor.”
“The landlord called it the second floor.”
“It was four flights.”
Dr. Williams smiles but lets us keep talking. I remember the stairwell smelling of bread from the bakery below, Natalie pushing her hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, a green coat held closed by a safety pin because the zipper had broken.
“You kept telling me you could manage,” I say.
“I could.”
“You dropped a box of books on my foot.”
“You dropped your end first.”
We look at each other. Seventeen years have passed, and she still remembers the argument about the box.
“I thought you were going to ask for my number so I could pay for your medical treatment,” she says.
“I considered it.”
“You asked me to dinner instead.”
“You had the safety pin on your coat. I remember wondering whether you’d stab me if I asked badly.”
Her smile changes. “You remember that?”
“It was silver. Bent, because you kept forcing it through that thick fabric.”
She looks down at her hands.
“I hated that coat.”
“I liked it.”
“You liked the red one I bought afterward.”
“I liked the green one. You were wearing it when I met you.”
There is a long pause. Dr. Williams asks Natalie what she is thinking, and for once I wish there were no one else in the room.
“That he remembers,” she says.
“Of course I remember.”
She looks up. “It hasn’t felt like it.”
I nod slowly. “I know.”
We don’t turn it into a larger lesson. There are fifteen minutes left, and we spend most of them talking about a winter when we had no money, the bakery downstairs, and the way she used to wait up when I worked late.
Dr. Williams asks what we would like to bring into the life we have now, and Natalie says she would like us to enjoy each other without needing a special occasion.
Afterward, we walk to the cars together. A light rain has started. I hold my coat over her head while she finds her keys, and she laughs at how little good it does.
“You’re getting soaked.”
“So are you.”
“We could stand under the awning.”
We move three feet to the left. For a moment we are laughing like idiots beside a pharmacy, and I want to put my hands on her waist and pull her against me.
She looks up at me. The laughter fades, but she doesn’t step back.
“Nat.”
Her phone rings. We both look down. It’s my mother, asking which drawer holds the baby socks. Natalie answers while I step out of the way of a woman with a shopping bag.
By the time the call ends, the moment has changed. I walk her to the car and hold the door.
That evening, I find the photograph from Benji’s bath again.
Natalie’s arm at the edge, the children laughing, none of her face in the frame.
I scroll through more photographs until I find one I took years ago of her asleep on the couch with a book open across her stomach.
She complained when she saw it because her mouth was open. I had kept it anyway.
I don’t send it to her with a speech about what it means. At the house the next afternoon, while she is sitting at the dining table explaining her catalog to Lucy, I ask if I can take a photograph.
“Of what?” she says.
“You two.”
“My hair’s awful.”
“Mine too,” Lucy says, delighted to have a reason not to brush it.
Natalie rolls her eyes and keeps talking. I take the picture while she points to the page, her face turned toward our daughter. Later I send it to her.
Her reply comes while I’m making dinner.
I like this one.
I save it in a folder where I can find it again, then put the phone down because the onions are starting to catch.
The regional desk is beside a window overlooking a loading dock. My old office had a view of the river. On my first morning there, I spend several minutes being annoyed about the difference, then unpack the framed school pictures from my bag.
I add the new photograph of Natalie and Lucy. There is room for all of them.
That afternoon I leave in time for Lucy’s indoor soccer practice. The winter sessions are held in the school gym, which smells of rubber soles and floor polish. I arrive with Benji in the carrier and a bag containing everything I checked before leaving the house.
A man beside the bleachers looks at me, then at Lucy waving from the court.
“Her uncle?” he asks.
“Her dad.”
“Oh. Nice to meet you. I’m Maddie’s father.”
He offers his hand without embarrassment. There is no reason for him to be embarrassed. He has spent a season beside my wife and has never met me.
We talk about the coach and the parking. He tells me Lucy has a good left foot. I watch her run toward the ball and realize I wouldn’t have known which foot she preferred.
Halfway through practice, Benji begins to fuss. I take him into the hall, change him on the mat from the bag, and spend a few minutes walking beneath a display of school photographs. From inside the gym I hear a cheer. I have missed something.
When we go back in, Lucy runs toward the sideline.
“Did you see?”
“No, sweetheart. I had to change Benji.”
“I scored.”
“Tell me how.”
She demonstrates with a foot, nearly kicking my shin. I listen, then ask where the goalie was. She shows me, excited enough to forget that I missed it.
At the end, she wants to know whether I can come next time.
“Yes. It’s in my calendar.”
“All right.” She pauses. “Mom brings snacks.”
“I have snacks.”
“What kind?”
“The kind you put in the bag this morning.”
She grins and takes the bag from me. We walk to the car with Benji watching her from over my shoulder. I missed the goal, but I know about it now. At dinner, when she tells Natalie, I can ask her to show us again.