The Burning Side(19)
One evening, I’m cooking a stir-fry when Billy gets home from work. He holds a bouquet of flowers out to me, and I frown.
He shrugs. “Today’s the day we got married.”
I blink. I hadn’t realized. It’s been two years—we didn’t acknowledge it whatsoever at the one-year mark. But here he is, handing me begonias. I don’t recall telling him they’re my favorite.
“Oh.” I hold them to my nose and breathe in slowly. “Thank you.”
April patters into the kitchen and points excitedly, saying, “Bitty trees!” She watches me put them in water and set them on the table, smiling.
* * *
When she is almost three years old, I pass by the bathroom one night while Billy demonstrates how to brush teeth without neglecting the gums. His patience with April makes me pause, not because it’s unusual but because it’s usual. Because I’ve come to take it for granted. Even though we fight about April’s sleep and how much money should be spent on toddler gear, this man has not wavered in his commitment to our daughter.
I take a step backward into the darkness of the hall, a domestic spy peeking at my husband in a sliver of the bathroom mirror. A private moment with a child is when you can tell the most about someone. I know so little of Billy, yet so much. I know which foods give him indigestion, how meticulously he opens envelopes, the brand of socks he wears, how high he likes the ankle. And for all the time I’ve spent fighting him, I realize I’ve come to trust him.
April grips her little Elmo toothbrush. “Like this, Dada?”
Billy says her technique is exquisite, and he gives her a high five.
She beams. “I’m just like you!”
He musses her hair, and she hugs his leg, both of them smiling, proud of the other.
I back away from my hidden post, and a weighty, swirling feeling settles in my stomach.
Later that night, when April is asleep, Billy and I tidy the kitchen. We don’t typically talk during evening chores. But with a skillet in one hand and a dishrag in the other, I look at my husband for a long minute. And then I say to him, “So, I love you.”
He’s putting a mug into the cabinet and very nearly drops it. A smile comes over his face that hearkens back to when we met, when he held me from behind as we swayed to “California Dreamin’?” before we were thrown into a future that seemed to have such little space for dreams.
He stares at me now, his relief so apparent it almost hurts.
And he says it with no hesitation. “I love you too.”
I set the dishrag down on the counter, and I lead him to the bedroom. We have not been together since before April was born.
Life can turn in any direction, that’s one thing it has going for it.
After that night, I can’t get enough. I push the limits on how early I can get April down, and I explore every inch of my husband’s landscape, making up for lost time. I have seen Billy’s loyalty, his work ethic, his persisting goodness toward our family, and somewhere along the way, I have fallen in love. Before long, he suggests we go whole hog with the family thing, and I smile wide in agreement.
Josie, and later Cameron, are born to very different parents than their sister was, and we won’t forget the miracle of that. By this time, Billy has a burgeoning dental practice, and I have an inheritance sitting in a high-yield savings account. I only bought my dad a handful of years, it turns out. One bleak morning, he was simply and quietly gone. Most days I choose to believe it was accidental, that he just needed a little pain relief and took too much without realizing. This was before April came along. In fact, he came straight to mind when I got pregnant: how many starts and stops of life are accidents. It was a complicated experience to lose him—I miss him sharply, but he had been so sad for so long. I could never do enough for him. At his service, he looked like he was relieved to have “Amazing Grace” sung over him at last.
So the inheritance was unexpected, and it has been earning interest. Combined with Billy’s now-steady income, we have enough money for the house on Lexington Avenue. A lawn mower. Contact paper and life insurance. Soon, I am pushing a department-store stroller through an upscale neighborhood, marveling over the way lives of misery or jubilee can appear identical from the front yard.
I knock on doors with casseroles and cornbread, driven by a nosy determination that if there are people who are lonely like my father was—like I was—then I will find them.
And there are. And I do. And I learn what a profound generosity it can be to share lonelinesses. Our house on Lexington Avenue becomes a hub of life, and April will hopefully never remember her mother curling up tearfully beside her in a toddler bed in our former box of an apartment.
As our family grows, Billy works long hours, his gloved hands navigating people’s mouths so they can—as he likes to say—smile without shame. Whenever I need a companion, April is still the first person I turn to, because she is there.
And that matters as much as anything in life, the person who is there.
APRIL
Two Days After the Fire
I DRIVE DOWN 407 IN my mother’s car. My knuckles are white on the steering wheel as I turn onto our long gravel driveway, a turn taken countless times over the past nine years. With my new groom, then with our new baby, then with our second baby.
Leo is lugging stuff to a long green dumpster I had no idea he rented.